Thanks to Kotaku for the images.
For those who didn’t follow it via LiveBLog last night, Sony dropped a few big announcements in their Japanese conference. I figured I’d save you the time of routing through my bad jokes about Mountain Dew and how late it was and summarize my thoughts and the overall announcement.
The first big announcement from the evening was Playstation Suite. A mobile based gaming platform that puts Playstation software onto the Android Platform. In conjunction with the Suite release they are releasing Playstation Certified, which is their way of controlling and making sure content is ready to work on ALL platforms. I never thought I’d see a gaming company give into Apple, but this in my eyes is total proof. The iPod touch and iPhone has never in my eyes been a “gaming platform” at least on a serious level. Maybe games to kill time while waiting for a class to start, or a bus, but never something that I would consider to be a dedicated gaming experience that I normally seek out. However, I do feel that Sony is smart to put their content on Android. Using cross platform they’ll be able to quickly and easily sell more content, instead of relying on the possibility of their new device being 100% successful. Judging by the release of the PSP GO which failed for multiple reasons they can use the additional income brought through the Suite to keep the content afloat. The PSP Go would have done much better if they would have provided a method for those who already had the physical copy of the game to get a digital copy. Their other huge fail was that the online marketplace did not have enough content to rival even the small library of the existing UMD games. That’s a hard sell to tell a consumer to trade in or give up their huge library of titles, re-buy what they’ve already paid for, and then add the insult of saying, but there’s a good chance a lot of those aren’t available yet. If they want Playstation Suite to succeed they need to make sure that there is a TON of digital content available. Not just piles of garbage, and not just Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, they need a huge amount of solid Playstation Titles running on mobile devices. Resident Evil, DarkStalkers, The Final Fantasy Series. Real solid games that made the Playstation console what it is.
Let’s move onto the big announcement. Code name NGP for Next Generation Portable. Releasing in the Holiday season (for Japan presumably, they weren’t too forward with the international details.) Packing a powerful A9 4 core processor, 2 mics, 2 cameras, 2 analog sticks, teh wifi’s, 3g, blu-tooth, a full touch screen on front, a full touch pad on back for control. It’s an amalgamate of every internet rumor we’ve seen for the past 6 months. Using flash based memory and of course access to the Playstation Suite this system will game with graphics better than the previous PSP of course, and visuals just below the PS3. Judging by the videos posted last night at Kotaku via UStream the visuals do look pretty promising. Here’s a hardware cheat sheet from Kotaku to catch you up on the Specifications of this nifty gadget.
First of all I will predict a United States Price of 299.99. With all the hardware they’re packing there is no way that Sony can match the Nintendo 3DS price of 249.99 and stay profitable matching price would also weaken their claims that this is the best tech on the market when it launches with better hardware than Nintendo’s (which has been their marketing angle in the past). Plus… the amount of hardware that Sony is loading on doesn’t come cheap, $299.99 would still be a subsidized price.
Here is my initial impression of the handheld. It’s a lot of awesome, with a few bad features, and not enough software support out the door. Every game shown last night was either a tech demo of a current PS3 game running on the system, or a port of one that was being developed with “new control style”. That’s what Nintendo did with the Wii and it worked great for mom dad and younger daughter, but their is no way that that same audience will drop $300 on a handheld that ports rated M games from a more mature game system. I’m hoping that actual real software support hits the PSP2 or NGP or whatever they decide to call it by launch. Not just ports but new IP that we can all play, enjoy and sink our teeth into. The second main concern I have with the handheld is the touch pad on the back. Let me reference the Motorola Backflip. This handy phone had a touch pad on the back used to navigate menus when you didn’t feel like utilizing the touch screen. It’s precarious position basically caused you to move the cursor all over the place even when you didn’t want to. Enter the NGP with the same style interface, I’m using their new interface to comment on a friends gaming habits, aaaand my cursor jumps out of the text box. I’m running through an intense battle in Kill Zone, aim and shoot, aim and wait…. why is my guy spinning around… DAMN YOU TOUCH PAD! I really think putting in the touch pad wasn’t the best move.
Finally I think the location based gaming is going to be pretty sweet. Using GPS location and the ability to transmit your gaming information to a central source, will allow others to see what communities and neighborhoods are playing on their NGP. It’ll be huge in Japan, not so sure how well it will work stateside where our gaming audience seems to be more introverted and less interested in what everyone else is playing, and more focused on what they can do to make those guys look bad.
Anywho, I think the future will bring interesting news for us in regards to the NGP, and that Sony is trying something different from a digital release side.
Think I’m wrong? Agree with me? Make yourself heard below.
Here is Sony’s release trailer for the system.