This week’s episode is full of industry news in the wake of The Game Awards. There wasn’t many news items but there was plenty to talk about with the Awards, especially with this week’s Gaming Flashback, Unlimited Adventures.
This week’s news items include:
Let us know what you think.
This week we’re talking about some gaming news, TV and media, flashing back to Marble Madness and looking at the historical development career of one Mark Cerny. Here are this weeks news links:
Not only do we hate Halloween, but we’re asking another question of the week: what game are you looking forward to for the holidays?
This weeks gaming podcast covers a bunch of hot topics along with a bit of gaming history. We take a flashback look at Tapper, a great arcade classic and we’ll hit up some popular news articles:
This weeks history covers the Havok physics engine and we stand upon our soap box and talk about the rumor Starcraft 2 will arrive after Diablo 3 hits the store shelves.
We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.
The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.
I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.
They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.
Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).
By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.
Well done Sony.
