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It was a fairly interesting (if a little drawn out) afternoon yesterday as I sat through both Sony and Microsoft’s Consumer Electronics Show press events streamed live from the Hilton in Las Vegas to my computer in Auckland City. Not only did I watch the Ustream feed for Sony’s presentation and the Silverlight feed for Microsoft’s, but I had browser tabs open following live blogging from Kotaku and Joystiq, and another to examine feedback from the Twitterverse. It was a sensory overload, but it made the whole ordeal more entertaining and, in some ways, more insightful.
First up was Sony’s presser at around 1pm New Zealand time. Sony’s known for glossing over its gaming ventures at CES, and although some PlayStation 3 goodness was promised this time, it was pretty much the same story again. As with the rest of the CES, consumer-grade 3D technology seemed to be the major talking point for Sony (treating attendees to a couple of 3D showcases requiring the use of 3D glasses). It was the perfect opportunity to tease how its upcoming motion-wand technology might integrate with the impending living-room invasion of 3D enabled television sets showcased by a number of vendors at CES, but it was an opportunity missed. In fact, Sony’s gaming coverage pretty much amounted to the fact that the company plans to extend the PlayStation Network to other, non-gaming devices. Kaz Hirai, president of Sony’s Network Products proudly declared that the PlayStation Network currently consists of some 38 million registered users worldwide, and “While it’s imperative that PSN continues to grow and enhance its services, we’re also extending our premium video service to more Sony products. We’ll construct a mechanism to support a single user ID. We’re looking at ways to create a common user experience across all of our product lines.” Oh, Sony did actually mention that PS3s will soon be upgraded to enable 3D Blu-ray playback via a firmware upgrade, which is kinda cool I guess considering that a great number of existing Blu-ray devices won’t support the upcoming format.
Microsoft's upcoming "Game Room" for Xbox 360
Microsoft’s presentation, streamed via Silverlight (N.B.: For best results, use Internet Explorer – the experience isn’t so pleasant in other browsers) began shortly after the scheduled time, only to be delayed by a severe power outage. Some 20 minutes later, Microsoft launched into its presentation, which spent a great deal of time reflecting on the corporation’s achievements in 2009. When it came to Xbox, 2009 was reportedly the best year ever. There are now more than 39 million Xboxes around the world, with over 10 million of those sold in 2009 alone. The Xbox Live service saw peaks of over 2.2 million unique simultaneous users, and the Christmas week was its biggest yet with a new member joining every second.
As for 2010, little was announced that we didn’t already know about. Upcoming releases such as Mass Effect 2, Alan Wake, Fable III and Halo: Reach were discussed briefly. A trailer was shown for Halo: Reach to attendees, but (unbeknownst even to Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, the public face of Xbox Live) it was not shown on the Silverlight feed for “intellectual property” reasons. This sent the Twitterverse into a bit of a frenzy and led to an interesting exchange between several gaming industry types over the service. After all that, it turns out that it was just the trailer that was shown at the 2009 Video Game Awards before Christmas! How embarrassment!
There were a couple of announcements of note, and neither of them particularly well-guarded secrets as both had actually leaked in the morning before the presser. The first: Project Natal – the much discussed motion recognition technology in development for the Xbox 360 – will hit shelves in the US holiday season of this year (so technically any time between late November and New Year’s Day, but we all know it’ll be in time for Christmas). The technology impressed many when it was first unveiled at E3 in 2009, but it also has its fair share of skeptics. The second announcement was the upcoming Xbox Live “Game Room”: a destination for gamers’ avatars to meet up and play classic arcade games, complete with virtual representations of the original cabinets. The games can be purchased for between 240 and 400 MS Points for a full download, or 40 MS Points for a one off turn at an arcade game. Around 30 classic titles will be available, including Centipede, Asteroids Deluxe and Super Cobra. There was also a video for this feature that was omitted from the live feed, but you can now watch this right here.
Oh yeah - there was one other interesting announcement from the Microsoft camp: that the first downloadable content packs for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be coming to the Xbox 360 "exclusively first". Seriously, that's a direct quote of how it was actually announced. It's a little bit of a stretch on the word exclusive, but what we now know for sure is that they'll be available on Xbox Live sometime in the US spring (around March NZ time). No word on when PlayStation 3 gamers can expect them as yet.
It was a little light on gaming content, but Sony’s presentation certainly contained the most interesting announcements overall (even if they were mostly consumer electronics and device reveals), and the Ustream feed ran without a hitch. Microsoft’s presentation, while still heavy on the consumer electronics kick, featured substantially more gaming material. There were a few little tidbits littered throughout; all of them interesting, but not one of them even approaching the monumental proportions as those unveiled at last year’s E3, or even the recent 2009 Video Game Awards for that matter. That, and Microsoft’s presentation was absolutely plagued with technical difficulties.
Today, however, something of interest popped up; smartphone manufacture Palm has asserted itself as a contender in the mobile gaming arena, with an upcoming Plugin Developer Kit (PDK) to be released at the Game Developers Conference in March. There’s already publisher support from the likes of EA, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar. It’ll be interesting to see how Palm manages to duke it with the iPhone and iPod Touch in this space!
NOW PLAYING
"Boy, I sure hope we don't run into any guys with knives!"
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – So I’ve finished my final playthrough of Mass Effect in preparation for the sequel due in two weeks’ time, but I just don’t have the gusto (or the free time) right now to get stuck into another lengthy single-player campaign of a different game before it drops. So any spare time I get for gaming at the moment is being spent on achieving my short-term gaming goal before I get my hands on ME2: regaining a kill/death ratio of 1.0 in Modern Warfare 2. I dropped as low as 0.86 as I warmed into the multiplayer component, and now that I have more of a feel for it and I’m typically registering more kills than deaths with each game now, I’ve managed to claw my way back to 0.95. Although occasionally I’ll undo all my hard work by stumbling into matches with superhuman soldiers who are able to run around at lightning pace, seemingly indefinitely, while either evading my bullets or absorbing an entire clip before still managing to kill me with a knife (don’t get me started on how wrong that is in a game called Modern Warfare). Anyway, such occasional matches tend to leave me with around three kills and about 17 deaths and unfairly skew my ratio, but watch this space…
