Monday, June 4, 2012

E3 2012: Sony


Just the Facts

         Sony gave a pretty straightforward conference today without all the needless gimmicks and lame jokes. The show started off with Quantum Dream's new game, Beyond: Two Souls starring Ellen Page. This game seemed to focus on the themes of death and what lies beyond the realm of the living. The preview also showed glimpses of an invisible force that Ellen Page's character interacts with. It looks like it could make as big of an impact as Quantum Dream's own Heavy Rain did back in 2010.


        The next game that was shown was Sony's answer to Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. This preview showed off famous PlayStation characters fighting each other in a similar manner to Smash Bros. It was interesting to see each character's unique super attacks. At the end of the demo, they announced that Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series and the Big Daddy from Bioshock would be playable characters and that it featured cross-platform functionality between the PS3 and PSVita 

        After this preview, a bunch of neat-o additions to the PlayStation Vita and Playstation Plus were announced. The first announcement was that subscribers to PlayStation Plus would be able to download a revolving group of games for free like LittleBigPlanet 2 and Saint's Row 2. The next announcement was that PS1 classics along with YouTube, Hulu Plus, and Crackle would be made available to the PSVita.

        A couple of spin-off games were then announced for the Vita. The first one was Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified which was only an announcement and nothing else. The next was Assassain's Creed III: Liberation which features a female assassin in the same setting as Assassin's Creed III. Another demo of Assassin's Creed III was then shown which featured a really cool cannon battle at sea. The next demo was of Far Cry 3's newly announced four player co-op mode.

       The next game (if you can call it that) shown was Wonderbook which looked like an interactive pop-up book that used the augmented reality of the PlayStation Eye to create scenes from the specially written stories right onto the book. It was also announced that HTC smartphones would gain the new PlayStation Mobile feature. The last two games shown were God of War: Ascension and Naughty Dog's The Last of Us. These two demos were nice, long looks at the games' stories.


        Sony's press conference was enjoyable and straight to the point. There weren't a whole lot of new games announced aside from Beyond, and it seems like Sony has almost forgotten about PlayStation Move as there was hardly any talk about it. The most notable previews of the show were Beyond, PlayStation All-Stars, Assassin's Creed III, God of War: Ascension, and The Last of Us. Sony's press conference probably wasn't as exciting as their conference was last year, but they showed us what we wanted to see.        


No comments:

Post a Comment