After Nintendo’s emphasis on 3D gaming without the glasses it was somewhat unfortunate to see Sony start off their press conference with such a 3D-heavy stance, running through a list of their upcoming 3D titles and asking the audience to don 3D glasses for a gameplay demo of Killzone 3, although it must be said that at very least graphically Killzone 3 was looking very polished indeed. A little was said about the continued success of the Playstation 2 and then it was straight onto their presentation of the Playstation Move.
There was a fair bit of talk over “the potential” of the Playstation Move before they actually showed any games but eventually the screens of the Sony stage lit up with Sorcery, a somewhat Harry Potter-like tech demo for the Playstation Move. This was then followed up by a demo of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 using the Playstation Move. While it was encouraging to see Sony were accommodating more than just a casual market with Move, something the Kinect didn’t seem to have been doing, I felt myself becoming a little down in the mouth as I feared that much like Microsoft’s press conference Sony’s conference was destined to turn into one big motion control demo but they proved my doubts unfounded.
Things didn’t make an immediate turn around though; they showed a trailer for Heroes on the Move, a title featuring various characters from large Playstation IPs, however I never felt that the mascots of Playstation ever resonated with me anywhere near as much as those of Nintendo or even Sega did.
After a short speech about a Coca Cola tie-in deal it was then time for something many had speculated over, the live appearance of Kevin Butler at E3. Despite some doubts of his ability to perform live the fictional businessman brought all of his on-screen humour to the stage and even ended his bit with an anti-fanboyism message. Despite the fact I know that those words came from a soulless corporation it was genuinely warming to hear a representative of Sony say something like that. The unveiling of a new and somewhat amusing PSP ad campaign was entertaining but as Jack Tretton began to rattle off the list of PSP titles I began to lose interest. Invizimals was a game that sounded conceptually strong and there were some titles which sparked a certain amount of interest in me but I still feel like the PSP is greatly out-classed by the DS and I still don’t want to buy a PSP.
Sony came back strong though with one of the very best games I saw at the show, Little Big Planet 2. The tools that the original Little Big Planet provided to users and the user-generated content which came out of that game looked amazing. However Little Big Planet 2 looks like something far beyond even the first game. While Sony brought a good on-stage presentation to E3 I think some of the best things said about the game actually came from off-stage interactions with the developers. The logic systems Little Big Planet 2 allows users to set up in levels are amazing and the fact that you can create shooters or mini-games within what is essentially a platform game level editor is phenomenal. Bravo to the creators of Little Big Planet 2.
Talk then turned to Playstation Plus, a new subscription-based service offering exclusive content to subscribers over the Playstation Network. It wasn’t all that surprising that Sony brought something like this in seeing that they have been offering all online content for the PS3 entirely free up to this point and it seems like a reasonable deal. More was then spoken about Medal of Honor (that game really got around this year) and another Dead Space 2 live demo took place, looking just as good as it did the first time.
What came next was undoubtedly the biggest surprise of E3 2010 for me. I’d completely forgotten about any possibility of a Valve presence at E3 and when the stage went dark and voice of GLaDOS came blaring over the speakers I flipped out like I haven’t done in a long while. It was also very shocking to see Gabe Newell take to the stage and announce his confidence in the Playstation 3 given the harsh words that man has had for Sony in the past. The Portal 2 trailer itself was a great sight to behold; it was a relatively simple trailer and yet was the perfect teaser for upcoming game. Judging from the opinions of those that have played the demo the new mechanics work brilliantly and this long-awaited sequel more than delivers with its level design, humour and new set of gameplay mechanics. Now if only there was a sign of the next Half-Life game on the horizon.
The show continued with a suitably pretty trailer for Final Fantasy XIV from Square Enix, news about some Playstation 3-exclusive content for some games and an okay-looking trailer for InFamous 2. The conference ended on a wonderfully bizarre note with a new Twisted Metal game being showcased. As far as online multiplayer games go it looked like a damn fine title.
Conclusions
As I said at the start of this write-up, this year’s E3 was massive fun to follow and I think the large majority of us got something rather brilliant out of it even if everything didn’t go off without a flaw. Microsoft may have failed to bring little but casual titles to the Kinect, a peripheral that seemed to have so much potential but they did bring a great new Xbox 360 model and a look at some exciting new titles for core gamers, Nintendo showed off not only some very promising revivals of retro games but also a fantastic new handheld console with some great developers behind it and Sony showed off some fantastic games like Portal 2 and Little Big Planet 2. I hope you all had an enjoyable time following E3 2010, thank you for reading and that was E3!
-Gamer_152
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