Leggetron: Gaming at CES

A date for Project Natal, a new arcade classic destination for Xbox Live and, er, the extension of the PlayStation Network to other non-gaming devices were among the gaming-related announcements at yesterday’s Consumer Electronics Show presentations.

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 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!