By rights, last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Show in Los Angeles should have belonged to Sony. With 100-million PlayStation 2 owners on tenterhooks for news of the PlayStation 3, the Japanese consumer electronics giant duly released detailed information about the PlayStation’s launch and pricing; but a strangely flat performance from the company and an absence of compelling PS3 games left an underwhelming impression.
The PS3 will launch in the United Kingdom on November 17, in two varieties — a ”core” system with a 20GB hard disk, but with no built-in Wi-Fi, memory card slots or HDMI output for high-end Blu-ray DVD playback. It will cost â,¬499. A full-blown version with those extras and a 60GB hard disk will cost â,¬599. Two million units will be available worldwide on launch day, with four million to follow between then and March.
Sony also surprised attendees by unveiling the PS3’s controller, which looks virtually identical to the PS2’s, but has motion sensing. However, only one game on show, WarHawk, was able to use those motion-sensing abilities — hardly surprising, since even Sony UK admits that their inclusion was a surprise. The most disappointing aspect of the PS3, however, is the weakness of its likely launch games line-up, which lacks blockbusters.
Favourite launch titles
The best-looking titles were Resistance: Fall of Man, a first-person shoot-’em-up set in a 1950s Britain overrun by aliens and featuring good graphics but conventional gameplay, and Heavenly Sword, a slick, super-fast, arena-based sword-fighting effort. Phil Harrison, Sony Computer Entertainment’s head of worldwide development, hinted, however, that Heavenly Sword may not be ready for November 17 by singling out Resistance and Singstar 2 as his favourite launch titles, while adding that Sony will announce the launch line-up in September.
Polyphony Digital’s Kazunori Yamauchi said he would produce a new Gran Turismo game next year, but Sony will need it earlier, rather than later, along with the likes of Metal Gear Solid IV. Privately, many third-party developers complained they had still not received final PS3 development kits, although Sony said they are being sent out. Contrary to expectation, Sony did give show-goers hands-on experience of PS3 games, but the consoles were hidden away. The PS3’s final form has still not been shown publicly.
Microsoft, in contrast, was trying desperately not to come across as overly smug. With the Xbox 360 finally in stores in significant numbers, it had no new hardware to announce apart from an add-on HD-DVD player and Vision, an Eye Toy-style camera. Still, it was able to announce that next year’s Grand Theft Auto IV will be available on Xbox 360 from the day of its release, with exclusive extra content available via Xbox Live, thus breaking Sony’s previous exclusivity contract with publisher Rockstar Games. Microsoft’s Gears of War — a contender for game of the show, graphically superior to anything Sony showed and (a hands-on play confirms) pleasingly innovative to play — will arrive in September. So will Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, another game with the capability to sell consoles.
Peter Moore, Microsoft’s vice-president for interactive entertainment, cheekily alleged that the more expensive PlayStation 3 version would cost roughly the same as an Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii combined (the Wii is likely to be cheap) and many of the show’s best games — including 2K Games’ Bioshock and The Darkness, Eidos’ Just Cause, Activision’s Call of Duty 3, Ubisoft’s Haze, Electronic Arts’ Army of Two and Capcom’s amusing zombie-splatterfest Dead Rising — will be available for the Xbox 360 (although generally not exclusively).
Microsoft also showed an impressive roster of games developed in-house, such as Fable 2, Rare Software’s Viva Pinata (aimed at a young, Nintendo-style audience), Forza Motorsport 2, the action role-playing game Too Human, and Mass Effect, Blue Dragon, and Ninety-Nine Nights, designed to appeal to the Japanese market, where the Xbox 360 has flopped embarrassingly.
Neil Thompson, Microsoft Europe’s senior regional director for home and entertainment division, expounded on a key aspect of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 strategy: despite production problems, six million Xbox 360s have been sold, and Moore stated an intention to sell 10-million before the PS3 launches: ”All of a sudden, every publisher that produces a game has to consider putting that game on to Xbox 360, and it becomes a de facto standard. It becomes very expensive for our competitors if they’re trying to get an exclusive.”
Yet while Microsoft had a good E3, the star of the show was undoubtedly Nintendo. This was surprising, considering it went into the show facing widespread criticism over the Revolution’s name change to ”Wii” (which smacked of the excessive Japan-centricism that used to affect Nintendo) and revelations that it is barely more powerful than the GameCube.
Nintendo’s charismatic executive vice-president of US sales and marketing, Reggie Fils-Aime, delivered the message that the critics would understand the Wii when they got their hands on it. And he was right. The heart of the Wii is its motion-sensing controller, which resembles a TV remote, plus its ”nunchuk” add-on, essentially an extra joystick that attaches to the remote by a cable; they both communicate with a stick-like receiver designed to sit on top of the TV.
Together, they provide a gloriously intuitive means of playing hardcore games such as shoot-’em-ups and action-adventures, providing the control required to negotiate games such as Metroid Prime: Corruption, Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy. As the nunchuk also senses motion, it allows cute touches such as the ability to launch Samus from Metroid Prime’s grapple with a flick of the wrist.
On its own, the remote can be anything from a conductor’s baton (as Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s senior managing director, demonstrated during a conference presentation), to a drumstick or a tennis racquet. The wacky WarioWare: Smooth Moves even encourages you to do things like hold it against your hip while you gyrate, to keep a virtual hula-hoop oscillating. Probably the best Wii title to try before launch, though, is Wii Sports, which includes a tennis game in which you merely need to wield the remote as if it were a tennis racquet. With Metroid, Zelda, WarioWare, Wii Sports and possibly the outrageously surreal Super Mario Galaxy all available, the Wii will have what is indisputably the best launch games lineup of any console in history.
Question marks
A few question marks hover over the Wii. Nintendo has not announced a release date — it will arrive in time for Christmas — or price, although it is unlikely to be much more than $377. Third-party developer and publisher support is minimal, and it remains to be seen whether developers will be able to continue coming up with new forms of gameplay after a few years, and whether it will make your arm ache after sustained use. But it provides some of the most joyous and gleeful gameplay, and will surely achieve Nintendo’s stated aim of bringing non-gamers and lapsed gamers into the fold.
More importantly, it shows that it’s not graphics, but content, that matters. While Sony and Microsoft pour millions into their competing high-defininition formats, Miyamoto is focusing on just what it is that makes a game worth playing. It’s hard not to feel there’s a lesson there. – Guardian Unlimited Â