Sony’s E3 2011 Keynote Recap

We’ve seen what Microsoft had (or didn’t have, depending on how disappointed you were) to offer from this year’s E3. Did Sony do any better? The short of it: It was similarly predictable, though it did have a few more interesting surprises — the price and date of the PSP2, otherwise known as the NGP, now officially known as the PS Vita have been set, and Sony matched Nintendo’s flailing 3DS in price with a $249 price tag on the non-3G PS Vita model and a $299 price tag on the 3G-enabled model. An honestly stunning move, considering the Vita’s tech is far more powerful than the tech inside the 3DS and must be much more expensive to produce. They also announced a 24-inch PlayStation brand 3D television and 3D glasses bundle for the (again) honestly low price of $499. As for games, everything we already knew about: Uncharted 3 looked great, the previously-mentioned God of War PSP games bundle is indeed coming to the PS3, BioShock Infinite will include Move functionality and come with a free copy of BioShock, the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus HD remake bundle got dated for September, and there was a bunch of PS Vita news, as well as a few new games and added Move support. Jack Tretton also gave a sincere, though kind of awkward, apology regarding the recent PlayStation Network hack mess.

Are you ready to dive into Sony’s presser?

Games

• Uncharted 3 kicked off the presser, after the aforementioned PSN apology, with a lengthy demo, which you can watch here. For anyone who has played the Uncharted games, the demo looked like more of the same, but with better set pieces, in this case, a big, swaying boat with water busting in through every corridor as the boat sinks. Seems pretty standard for Nate. What a life. The demo seems to show that Nate has more intricate melee moves, including one where he seems to steal the gun off a boat-villain and replace it with a grenade. For fans of the series, another trailer played at the keynote showed all of our favorite heroes: Sully, Elena and Chloe. Yep, it’s entirely possible we’re going to have another game full of butt-compliments.
• Resistance 3 was up next, and how could one have guessed? The demo was shown in 3D. On September 6, Sony will offer a Resistance 3 “Sharpshooter” bundle, which includes the game, a Move kit, and a gun peripheral to plug the Move into, for $150. Currently at GameStop, “Move Ultimate Controller Bundle,” which contains the SharpShooter, the Move controller and the Navigation controller, sells for $119.97, add Resistance 3 onto that for the usual $59.99 and add in the PS Eye, and the bundle is actually saving you a decent amount of money — if you wanted Resistance 3 and a Move bundle, that is.
• The Ico and Shadow of the Colossus PS3 HD remake collection is slated for a September release stateside. Both of which are some of the best games from last generation, one of which difficult to find (Ico) and the other was basically too awesome for its own good — the PS2 wasn’t powerful enough to smoothly run Shadow’s amazing engine, causing a frequent slowdown. The HD should remedy both aforementioned issues with the games, and should include trophy support and pretty HD visuals. The collection will also have full 3D support.
• Both God of War are also being packaged and sent to PS3 land in the form of God of War Origins Collection, so if one missed out on the stellar Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta due to not having a PSP, now they can pick up the games for the PS3. The collection will be 3D-enabled, and ready to roll out to masses in September.
• Kobe Bryant (really) came out and played an NBA 2k12 demo with the Move, due to release October 4. The demo, not Kobe.
• New Move title called Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest. Cartoonish action game, not to be mistaken with the classic MediEval, a cartoonish action game. Available this fall.
• inFamous 2 showed up in trailer form even though it literally releases today.
• LittleBigPlanet 2 will be getting a bunch of Move support starting in September. Players will be able to make levels using Move, as well as make Move-specific levels.
• Trailer for Starhawk, the sequel-type thing to one of the early PS3 titles, Warhawk. The is similar to Warhawk, and features a kind of “point and drop a whole building out of the sky” kind of base construction.
• A new sly cooper game was teased, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, for some reason featured a lizard named Dmitri instead of Sly. Slated for 2012 release.
• Probably the most interesting game to show up, CCP’s Dust 514, the Eve Online tie-in that is a space-themed shooter, but also connected directly to the aforementioned PC MMO. Turns out it is a PlayStation exclusive. Huh. It connects directly to Eve Online, has Move support, will have a dedicated PlayStation Home space, and is even being extended to the PS Vita (which we will get to) in some way. Beta expected at the end of this year, release in 2012.
• BioShock Infinite showed up, said to have Move support. Some kind of BioShock PS Vita game was mentioned. The Blu-ray of BioShock Infinite will come with a free copy of the first BioShock.
• Trailer for J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek game.
• PS3 is getting EA exclusives for certain games: SSX will get a PS3 exclusive map, Need for Speed: The Run will get exclusive cars, and Battlefield 3 will come with a free copy of Battlefield 1943 on the disc.

PS Vita

• PS Vita is now the official name for the PSP2, which was codenamed the NGP for a while.
• $250 for the WiFi model, matching Nintendo’s 3DS. Didn’t see that coming at all. $299 for the 3G model.
• Sony will be partnering with AT&T as the exclusive carrier for the PS Vita in the US. The audience literally laughed at that announcement. Three cheers for never getting a signal?
• Players will have live voice chat over headsets, “no matter where they are or what game they’re playing.”
• The Vita Uncharted: Golden Abyss makes an appearance with a demo. Seems to look and feel like a regular Uncharted game. That’s a good thing.
• New game Ruin (working title). Isometric dungeon crawler. The game has a social networking feature so players can have rivals. Demo showed the player romping through a rival’s lair, ruining (eh? eh?) things. Players can save their progress to the could and continue playing in the PS3.
• ModNation Racers makes a Vita appearance, developed specifically for Vita’s feature set. Players can use the Vita’s touchscreen and rear touch panel to edit tracks. Vita incarnation has access to the PS3 ModNation user-created content.
• LittleBigPlanet coming to the Vita as well, bet you never could’ve guessed. Touchscreen controls, tilt controls, rear touchscreen controls, and the game is promised to have even more creation tools than previous incarnations.
• The Street Fighter and Tekken crossover, Street Fighter X Tekken, made an appearance, and it was announced that the main character from inFamous, Cole, will appear in the game as a playable character.
• A highlight reel was shown, including previously unmentioned games Wipeout, Little Deviants, Sound Shapes, Hustle Kings, Super Stardust, Reality Fighter (a Virtua Fighter nod?), HotShots Golf, Dynasty Warriors, and more.

Surprises

• Sony showed off a 24-inch PlayStation branded 3D television and glasses bundle. The bundle inclues two PlayStation-branded glasses, but people can buy extra ones separately for $69.99 each. The bundle also includes a six-foot HDMI cable and a copy of Resistance 3. The screen allows a neat split-screen style display where, so long as the glasses are being worn, each player sees their own separate image even though they’re looking at the same single screen, solving the terrible age-old problem of split-screen multiplayer not having enough screen real estate for each player.
• Kobe Bryant?

Non Gaming

• PS3 adding support for Cinema Now.
• Kaz Hirai talked about the PlayStation Suite.
• Ridge Racer jokes.

So, was Sony’s keynote any better than Microsoft’s? There was more information, and they weren’t shoving Move shovelware down our throats like Microsoft was with Kinect. Microsoft had the big Minecraft surprise, but Sony managed to snag Dust 514 as an exclusive. Microsoft announced the Halo HD remake, and Sony countered with the God of War PSP and Ico and Shadow of the Colossus HD remake bundles. Sony did drop the affordable PlayStation 3D television bundle bomb, though. There was a lot of new PS Vita news, and the price tag was certainly a big deal, but not counting the Vita, overall, Sony’s keynote seems on par with Microsoft’s: Sequels to games we like, no gigantic secret reveal. What’d we miss most this year? A Kevin Butler speech, of course.

(via Joystiq)

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James Plafke