Sony Didn't Spill The Beans

7.30 AM. It feels like I'm hit in the stomach. And it isn't because the PS3 will be the most expensive next-gen console. Sure, by November, it'll cost roughly twice as much as the Xbox 360 but the overall performance will be undoubtedly better. The reason I feel rather sick and tired is because I followed the pre-E3 Sony conference live at GameSpot. And since they it began one hour late, I was in for a pretty long night.

Sony didn't overthrow the public, that's the least that can be said about the conference. Showing of bravely last year with flamboyant 'running demos' (that now obviously turn out to be pre-rendered) of Killzone 3, Motor Storm and Unreal Tournament 2007 (at least that one was live for real), everyone expected Sony to kick even bigger butt this year. After all, they had to stand their ground against the Wii. The latter, getting quite some media-attention the last few weeks because of its unpredictable namechange, makes its appearance at today's pre-E3 conference. Read more on that in the other post.

But it wasn't to be. As I said earlier, Sony made a particular weak impression with a conference that wasn't built up in the right way either. They started with an hour of delay, which made the attendees quite restless, not in the last place because of the suckage communication between the hosts and the guests. Finally, when everyone was seated, the conference could begin. Instead of throwing in something really fantastic as a starter, there's this Kaz-guy that goes bragging over how well Sony's doing at the moment. It's 2.30 AM and we already started yawning. Not a good sign.

The games that had been showed can be divided in a couple of categories. First of all, you had the useless category. In this category, we find techdemos of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, that makes the players battle against each other, using an EyeToy. Sometimes you would be wondering why people should ever want to play a card game that's so much fun, on a console. You don't. It would be cool if devs would implement this technology in their games one way or the other, but just using it to draw out your Blue-Eyed Fire Dragon, no thanks.

Another 'useless' game is Formula One for the PS3. It looks quite nice but apart from that, it's no different from any other F1-game. The only 'cool' (read: dumb half-ass pathetic attempt to show of but terribly not succeeding in it) thing about the game is, you can use your PSP as a mirror to monitor the stuff coming in your back. Pretty lame, pretty useless. We didn't like it and we guess nobody did. The second category of games were the rubbish category. There, Gran Turismo HD (working title) has won the award for fooling Sony in front of like 10,000 + people. The first couple of tracks were like nothing more but a (minor) visual update on Gran Turismo 3 (!!!). No damage, no dust, no nothing, no not even bloody nice. Next!

The other category is the respectable category and there we find a lot of new games. Eight Days, an unnamed project from the guys at Insomniac, the new Getaway, Fatal Inertia, Lair, Heavenly Sword,... They all looked good and they all seemed to play quite alright. Shame they didn't let anyone play it live on the machine. Finally some good news for Sony! And then they announced the controller. Thé controller. The Messiah for Nintendo seems to turn out to be the Nemesis for Sony.

Why? Because they copy-pasted some key-elements of other controllers and wrapped those in the traditional Dual Shock (without the shock nota bene) 2 package. The Triggers from 360, the center button from 360 and the motion sensors from the Wii. The total package. Ken Kutaragi walked the stage, behaving like 'hah, another job well done!' Well, I ain't taking this bullshit! This controller's as fake as the bananoomerang controller was. I mean, NO RUMBLE FEATURES and the Wii rip-off! It's all too accidentally to be healthy in my opninion. I think Sony will surprise gamers on the show with another controller and with a lot of great games that haven't been showed at the conference (Killzone 3, Motor Storm, UT2k7 maybe?).

Why didn't Sony spill the beans at once? Because they are sly and they knew they had to do their conference first. Hence, Ninty and MS could anticipate on the moves Sony made, so they decided not to show of everything they got at the show. I really hope Sony will strike true at the show because the conference wasn't that great (in addition, the Nintendo and MS conferences were a lot better). Guess, we have to keep our hopes up 'till tomorrow and see what Sony is going to do. I hope they respond fiercely. Like a stone to a scissor.