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E3 2008: Live From the Sony Press Conference
July 15th, 2008 News, Summer 08

We’re sitting front and center at the Sony Press Conference, mouth agape at the biggest damned televisions outside of Times Square. Here’s a liveblog of the events, straight from their mouths to your eyes. Hit refresh!

11:30: Jack Tretton comes out to welcome us to The Shrine Auditorium and inadvertently talks smack about Jack Palance being dead. Also, he compares Julia Roberts to Sack Boy from LBP. Yep.

11:35: Reminds us that two years into the PS1 life cycle, few good games were out yet. Good message.

11:40: Touts Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, MGS4 and GTAIV as system sellers. Spends a few minutes talking serious smack about exclusive downloadable content. “What matters is platform exclusives, not downloadable exclusives.”

11:45: Resistance 2 trailer begins. How does it look? Well, there’s a giant monster headed straight for Nathan Hale and all he’s got is a rocket launcher. What’s he do? He shoots dude right in the mouf. Yeah, I said mouf.

11:52: Ted Price from Insomniac (presumably) puts down PS3 controller and gives us a short explanation of the single-player campaign. The monster? That’s a leviathan. Resistance 2 is set two years in the future and the humans are trying to take back over Chicago. He then introduces a new trailer — we’re in Idaho and seeing it through the game engine. The game looks pretty damn impressive, not gonna lie.

11:55: What’s up next? Tretton’s back out and talking about user-generated content. Where could he be going with this? Yeah, totally Little Big Planet. Apparently the guys at Media Molecule, LBP developer, are “Crazy Geniuses.” Instead of just running through the Sony business end of things, he’s using LBP to explain his points. This could really go either way.

Noon(!): Okay, so this is actually a great way to go through the business crap that you’re not interested in. Oh wait, an announcement! Resistance, Motorstorm, Warhawk, CoD3, Fight Night, Need for Speed: Carbon, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Assassin’s Creed, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Ninja Gaiden: Sigma! They’re all coming to the PS3 “Greatest Hits” for $29.99 next year! Also, though you already knew, Little Big Planet’s coming in October. Our hands-on will go up later today, of course.

12:05: “Let’s talk about PS2.” Let’s not. They’re showing us Yakuza 2 and Madden ‘09, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames — all for PS2. They look old.

12:07: Apparently the Buzz shipping for PS3 this Winter will have downloadable quizzes. That sounds good. Sounded good yesterday too, at the Microsoft Press Conference

12:10: Starting this Fall, all PS3’s will have a unified name across all games. Didn’t Xbox Live have this a while ago? However, since 2006, they’ve had 80 million downloaded pieces of content.

12:13: Ratchet and Clank Futre: Quest for Booty is shown for the Playstation Network. The game’s a continuation of the full Ratchet and Clank Future released last year. This is a lot like the dlc for GTAIV, except, you know, we still haven’t seen that.

12:15: “We have the best quality games for download instead of just filling up the network.” It wouldn’t be a press conference without some smack talkin’, right? They show a reel of upcoming PSN games and among them is one named “Fat Princess.” We’re totally sold. Also, Pixel Junk Eden and Flower look completely stunning.

12:17: Do you really really like racing? I really really like racing. Being the only QP’er to actually play and enjoy racing games, Gran Turismo TV is ridiculously exciting. Basically it’s a television network for your PS3 and all they show is racing programming. The only thing they could do better now is actually release the final game. Gran Turismo TV will be available this August.

12:20: We’re finally talking Home. They’re showing off the “Game Spaces” feature, which is basically what we already knew about regarding game lobbies. We actually get to check out Home after the press conference, so we’ll let you know how that goes.

12:26: Jack invites Eric Lempel to show off the new Playstation Store Videos section. Biggest plus? After you download something on your PS3, you can bring it to other media devices (read as: buy a PSP!) Nice feature though, no? When’s the video store going up? Right now! Oh snap! He just pulled a Steve Jobs!

12:31: It’s PSP time. Also, the whole stage is orange. Yep, Tretton’s glowing red because of it. We’re a little worried for our safety. More importantly, there’s a new PSP bundle coming…

$199 gets you: Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters, National Treasure (UMD), a 1 gb chip, and an Echochrome voucher for the PSN. Is that a good deal? I can’t do the math that fast.

12:32: New game revealed! Resistance: Retribution for PSP. These are really good visuals but we remain skeptical towards all PSP first-person shooters.

12:37: During a “sizzle reel” for assorted PSP games coming, Super Stardust “something” is shown for the PSP. We also get some new Patapon 2 gameplay.

12:40: Announcement time! Tretton’s talking “Life with Playstation” which is apparently “…available by the end of the month.” This is basically the News Channel from Wii, but it looks way sharper than the cartoony Wii channel. Kaz talked about this recently in Tokyo.

12:42: Jim Lee from Sony Online Entertainment enters stage left and shows us our first gameplay of DC Universe Online. Let’s go to the videotape! It looks like… an MMO with DC characters. Again, this could go either way really. Me, I’m putting my money against it. But then again, I don’t like them MMO’s.

12:50: 80 gb PS3 coming this Fall for $399 as a standalone. It’s replacing the 40 gb. You know what we need? More SKUs. Mmmm, SKUs! Delicious!

12:51: The speech is closing up and we get a video full of all the upcoming PS3 games (some exclusives, some not so much). If I have to see this footage of Killzone 2 in high definition one more time, I’m gonna go buy a Playstation 3. That’s it.

12:55: God of War 3 gets a trailer! Gameplay? Not so much. Kratos let’s us know, “In the end, there will be only chaos!” Totally running out of story, huh guys?

12:57: inFamous gameplay trailer? You bet! It looks a lot like Prototype and Legendary — sandboxy. It also kinda looks like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

1:00: Andy Beaudoin, Lead Designer at Zipper Interactive comes out to show us… MAG? Massive Action Game is what it stands for and apparently the game’s going to deliver 256 person online play. There’s character advancement and squad-based gameplay — this seems a lot like the idea pioneered by CoD4 with perks. They’re gonna have to work on that name though.

1:03: If MAG delivers on the trailer we just saw, there’ll be a lot of sleepless nights spent playing this game. All over the world.

1:05: Jack’s wrapping up and so are we. Check back in to Quarterplay.com later today and throughout the week for lots of hands-on previews!


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