E3 Day 2 Round-up

Wow, what a day! Everyone has been talking about the Sony press conference hosted by Jack Tretton, President and CEO of SCEA, and with so many announcements, I’ll stop using up space with this introductory paragraph and dive straight in.
The PSPgo was officially unveiled on-stage by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. CEO, Kaz Hirai. It’s 50% smaller and 40% lighter than the PSP-1000 and with 16 GB internal flash memory, it’s designed for those who like their digital media “to go”, as they say over here. It will be released on October 1, 2009.

Complementing this new evolution of PSP is a host of fantastic games coming to both UMD and PlayStation Store. Kazanouri Yamauchi, the mastermind behind Gran Turismo, arrived to show GT PSP, which will feature 800 cars, 35 tracks and will run at 60 FPS. He was followed by another legendary Japanese developer, Hideo Kojima, for the reveal of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a brand new mission for Solid Snake, only on PSP, which takes place during the 1970s.

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Completing the portable line-up were a brand new Resident Evil title; Buzz! Quiz World, which will also be on PLAYSTATION 3; and the news that Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines features interoperability with Assassin’s Creed 2 on PS3. And to make sure we see plenty more stellar titles for PSP in the future, Jack Tretton announced that the price of PSP development tools will be cut by 80%, expanding the opportunity for developers to create content for PSP.

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Moving onto the PS3, Richard Marks of SCE research and development showed us a new motion sensing controller that works with PlayStation Eye to enable 1:1 movement response. The crowd was impressed by tech demos that allowed him to play sports, wield a giant sword and shield, aim guns and even write with astonishing precision. He spoke of “sub-millimetre accuracy,” which I like to think of as a metric shout-out to us Europeans.
There were absolutely loads of PS3 games on show, including a live demo of the opening scenes to God of War III; a gorgeous video of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves gameplay that climaxed with Drake taking on a helicopter; the trailer for Team ICO’s latest creation, The Last Guardian; a look at ModNation, which applies LittleBigPlanet’s mantra of play, create, share to the kart racing genre, allowing players to build playable tracks in a matter of seconds; Agent, a new exclusive title from Rockstar North; the surprise announcement that Final Fantasy XIV is coming next year, exclusively to PS3; and the first trailer for Gran Turismo 5.
The strength of this E3 line-up was best summed up when Tretton proudly announced that 364 games are coming out on PlayStation platforms in the next year. That and the number of semi-colons in the above paragraph.
So there you have it, which bit was best for you? I’m off to see what the rest of the SCEE guys are up to, although the words lying and down were being used quite a bit earlier.