The ScooterBlog

(I know, I know. Nintendo’s was before this, I’ll get that one up today too. This Sony one will be short.)

With Sony’s big chip already played in the form of a $100 price drop / SKU change, what was left for this news conference was all about software and Playstation Home, their bastard love child of XBox Live and Second Life. The prevailing thought for me throughout everything they announced was “that’s nice.” Certainly not that I disliked what I saw, but nothing there came off as the killer app that will cause me to stop saving for the other gaming stuff I want to get a PS3.

• Home does look very nice, but it better when they’ve stole the best parts of Twitter, Myspace, and Second Life, and a little bit of the Live network to boot! For me, it’s all stuff I don’t need though, so it will be another toy to mess with in the PS3 framework, not the central start of my gaming day.
• All of the software looks good, but per above, the killer app isn’t there yet. Killzone 2 looks impressive, but Halo 3 is going to hit the market and could well drown it before it has a chance to succeed. Their exclusives from the predictable series are nice, but other than Metal Gear Solid 4, the only killer exclusive they have left, I can take or leave all of it. The one game that could be a killer app is Gran Turismo 5. Even though I love Forza 2, a well done Polyphony Studios game could blow it out of the water, and be the game that would put the PS3’s 1080p capabilities on the map. But, knowing the studio, we may not see the finished product until 2009.
• Reduced size and weight PSP? New battery? That’s nice. Mine has the open firmware on it and I can play old PSX games on it and emulators! The new design system may be as much to keep the hackers out as it is to give the PSP a new life. Wake me up when Gran Turismo Mobile gets released, cause it’s been promised for three and a half years now.
• Bagder’s take on the NCSoft announcement is right on, but the assumption that only the Playstation Network can only handle an NCSoft game is ridiculous. While Microsoft’s Live is a more closed platform, they’ve proven with Final Fantasy XI that they will release a game that goes out of the box of a normal Live experience and can be driven as much by the hard drive as it is a DVD disc. If this agreement is in place, it should have been a huge deal for Sony instead of an afterthought annoucement. It makes ya wonder.

So true, I come into the Sony announcement without a PS3, with a PSP that’s more for homebrew than Sony stuff, and they would have needed to just “wow” me to make me save for a PS3 right now, and that didn’t happen. Let’s push together for that $399 price drop a little early, shall we?!