SONY’s E3 2008 Press Conference was important for several reasons, and not least because 2008 is the year the PLAYSTATION3 needs to prove it worth – both to gamers, and publishers.

            The company displayed a range of big titles – although most were expected. Resistance 2, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, MAG, KillZone 2 and LittleBigPlanet were a handful of big names in the line-up, with the wonderful surprise of God of War 3 running in full 1080p glory, anchored by the usual financial statistics rundown. A new PLAYSTATION3 model was announced; effectively a European 40GB unit with a larger Hard-Disk Drive. The unit features no backwards compatibility, but houses an 80GB Hard-Disk Drive, and will retail at the same price as the 40GB unit, come September.

            SONY’s online plans needed to be unveiled, and needed to be good. Their online network software, PLAYSTATION Home, has been hyped for a long time, without surfacing in the public sector. The big news? PLAYSTATION Home is opening it’s Beta program to allow access for a limited amount of public users. However, this won’t happen until the autumn – when the software was previously scheduled to go live.

“We understand that we are asking PS3 and prospective PS3 users to wait a bit longer, but we have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service to ensure a more focused gaming entertainment experience than what it is today,” said Kazuo Hirai, president and group CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “Our overarching objective is to provide users with new gaming experiences that are available only on PLAYSTATION Home. “Spending more time on the development and on the closed Beta testing reaffirms our commitment to bringing a quality service, maintaining the PlayStation tradition.”

So, the wait continues. However, the line-up of games is looking stronger than ever, and with the increasing sell-through rate of PLAYSTATION3 units, things, surely, can only get better.

Kev J.

17/07/08

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Kev J.

14/07/08