Overly Positive

The anchor for this year’s E3 was once again, Sony Computer Entertainment and their offerings from the PS3. I know I personally have a soft spot for the PS3, because even though I own all three consoles, I had a lot of great experiences with the previous Playstation iterations and feel bad for its recent troubles.

But as always, I like to keep my chin up and my sights set on the bright horizon in front of us, so, let’s take a look at just a few of the juicy tidbits from E3 about Sony, courtesy of Gamespot,Kotaku, Sarcastic Gamer, and Destructoid: 

-Sony Joins the Motion Control Arms Race With Precision – Sony, who was quick to point out that they were first with the whole motion control technology, joined the fray in motion control with their entry, an unnamed project that sported precision and functionality. Using one-to-one movements, Sony showed off a tech demo that had the engineer reaching into 3-D space, holding everything from a golf club to a lightsaber whip, and creating a physics experience applicable to FPS, RTS, and adventure games. It was a worthy entry, and one which torched Nintendo’s Wii Motion Plus, ensuring that the motion control king was burned at both sides of the candle. The flexibility was, in a word, amazing.

-PSP Go Announced, Portable Gaming Gets Core Boost – Touted jokingly by Sony execs as “the worst kept secret of E3″ as it was leaked over the weekend, the PSP Go, featuring 16 GB of space, built-in Wi-fi, and a sleek, smaller footprint, was brought onto stage and literally pulled out of Sony’s pocket. All signs point to the unit selling quite a few pieces when it comes out this October, mostly due to a lineup of upcoming hardcore insanity that fits in the palm of your hand, including two blockbusters in the form of Gran Turismo and Hideo Kojima’s compromise for losing MGS exclusivity, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Keeper, which focuses in on Big Boss and the establishment of Outer Heaven. If they can stop the unit from being plagued by piracy as the previous models, itl’l be huge.

-User-generated Content Direction Continues With Mod Nation Racers – Little Big Planet did decently well but not great – but that hasn’t stopped Sony from keeping the movement towards user-generated content going with the introduction of a brand new game, Mod Nation Racers. In this, you create your own cartoony avatars, cars, and tracks, and the live demo literally created a fully functional, featured-filled racetrack from scratch in 5 minutes. PSN is pretty weak compared to XBox Arcade, so we’ll see if this title helps things a little bit. Still, community-generated stuff has been pretty popular lately, so maybe this title will move consoles.

-Sony Caps Presentation With God of War Offerings and Much Slaying – God of War 3 has been much anticipated and the audience got a real treat watching a live demo of actual gameplay for the final part of the story of Kratos. Living up to its ultra-violent, brutal predecessors, we saw everything from centaur guts to blood-covered Chaos Blades to a chimera getting stabbed with its own horn. With games like Uncharted 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2 helping round out the cast, Sony’s hardware is pushed to the limit for all your action-packed, gore-oriented, stabbity desires.

There was so much more from the presentation, including announcing the sequel to FFXI in FFXIV, dropping in a tidbit about Rockstar working on a new exclusive title called Agent, and much more, but the tone of the talk was simply excitable, and also funny (cheering for Hannah Montana = hilarity). While Sony was all positives in terms of numbers (my kind of optimism), it sure seems that with a strong showing so far in 2009 with inFamous and Killzone 2, the hits will just keep on coming for the PS3. Running a distant third in the console sales race, Sony has a lot of catching up to do – but if Kratos has anything to say about it, you’ll probably be shelling out the cash from your piggy bank for what’s coming up. The year of the PS3? Time will tell, but it’ll certainly be a year to remember.