One more for today, last but not least its Sony PlayStation.

I’m expecting first off to see a big apology and then some big sequels with Uncharted 3 and maybe a new God of War.  And a big dose of PSVita

They kick of with an apology to third parties, retailers and consumers.  They claim that PlayStation is the most connected entertainment device today, oh except for the last 6 weeks when it wasn’t working.  They also claim that PS3 is the leading device for watching Netflix with 30%.  In my house the iPhones, iPad and Wii get alot more Netflix usage.

+++Uncharted 3 - This game is probably in the running for top game of e3, its that good.  Seeing the demo on the shifting/sinking ship was pretty cool.  If I have one complaint its that Drake was running a little strange when the demo started but perhaps he was favoring an injury.  They didn’t show too much on the multiplayer but state it will be available at Subway in October…um okay then.

- Resistance 3 – The red headed step child of console exclusive FPS games.  The original game was okay for a first gen, first party, first person shooter.  We took what we could get and we liked it!  The second game was underwhelming though and we have no reason to believe #3 will be any better.  Oh and it features heavy Move gameplay and of course 3d because Sony loves the 3d.  The problem here is if you didn’t tell me what game I was looking at during the demo, well I would not have been able to tell you.  Not a good sign.

+God of War Origins and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus box sets - HD remakes of some classics and PSP games in 3d.  I’m not a fan of the rehash ideas but if it exposes a wider audience to these games then so be it.  Lets just hope they are cheap.

-3d for everyone - Sony believes so much in 3d gaming that they are going to attempt to sell us PlayStation branded 3d TV’s and glasses to make us.  Its a 24 inch 3d HDTV.  One neat feature is that two players playing in 3d will see their own screen on the TV, no split screen.  Thats pretty cool technology.  The TV is going to retail for $499.  So for those of you scoring at home, Sony is making 3d gaming accessible to everyone for $800 ($300 PS3 + $500 TV) and goes up if you want the full experience with move (add $130 or $150 for accessories).  Thats the low, accessible price of $950 to get into 3d gaming…unless you want more then one player, then add another $70 for a second pair of glasses.  And they wonder why I think 3d gaming is a waste of time.

- NBA 2k12 – NBA with Move controls because nobody demanded it.  Its a whole lot of pointing gestures with the move.  Hardly seems intuitive but they say anyone can do it, and with that they call out Kobe Bryant. Oh Kobe gets a big “+” for being funny but he looks like he doesn’t have a clue what he is doing and lets the Heat go on a run before finally mercifully make a shot.  So much for anyone can pick up and play, anyone other then the greatest basketball players on earth.

- Medieval Times: Dedmans Quest – Well that name just rolls of the tongue there doesn’t it?  Is this the Harry Potter-ish Move game from last e3?  I noticed they are playing without the navigation controller, does that mean we are on rails here?  If so I might scream!  This game could really benefit from a license or a name change at a least.  A game box with this name isn’t going to jump out at little Jimmy.  The one developer keeps asking the guy playing the demo “now what are you going to do?” as though he needs to figure out a complex puzzle to advance but commonly its just “shoot the giant green glowing thingy to advance.  When the creator of the game can’t get the name out without screwing it up, you need to change it.

- Infamous 2 - Gets a minus just because I don’t like the idea of hyping a game at an e3 press conference when it comes out tomorrow.  At least Sony is nailing the concept of showing why the Playstation is unique.  Take the hint next year Microsoft.

+ Little Big Plannet 2 - Will be receiving move support in the fall.

- Starhawk – Out of all of the games revealed so far at e3 this might be the blandest.

+ Sly Cooper Thieves in Time – Wow a console exclusive that isn’t a FPS?  Microsoft could learn a thing or two from Sony (and vice versa).  The trailer looks really cool but they don’t show any gameplay so who knows.  Its also coming out in 2012, for the record I don’t think anything is coming out this holiday season.

- Dust 514 - Shooter game that somehow links up with Eve Online on the PC.  Ambitious if they can make it work.  Unfortunately they don’t expound on the idea and it looks alot like Halo.

+Bioshock Infinite - Wow this looks…amazing.  Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  Knowing the Bioshock pedigree, I think this is a winner.  It will support Move in some fashion.  He did say they are just starting to get their heads around the Move support so who knows when this game will make it to market.

+Bioshock for NGP, err PSVita - Quick mention of the game for PSVita.

- Saints Row 3 - Nothing was shown but we were told that a unique play method is only available on the PS3.  Need more details if you want me to care here.

+ Star Trek Move Game – Co-op action adventure in the Star Trek world.   They will be making a move controller that is designed to look like a phaser…NERD ALERT!  It looks a lot like you would expect to see from a Star Trek shooting game, using move, and it doesn’t look to be on rails?  I hope?

- EA Games – Games already shown in the EA conference but this time bragging about exclusive content for PS3.  I hate exclusive content.

+ PlayStation Suite – PlayStation games on certified Android phones and tablets.  Nice step to take a shot at the smartphone gaming world right?  No further details were shown.

+++PS Vita – Name aside, the reveal of the PS Vita was great. Here are some bulletpoints of a bulletpoint:

• Dual touchpads
• Dual Cameras
• Dual Analog sticks
• Sixaxis
• 3g & Wi-fi
• Wait I’ve covered all of this before…
• AT&T will be the exclusive carrier. Crowd kind of groaned on that one.
• Party – voice chat live on headsets or mics.
• Near – Social networking. Social Networking is so 2010Enough, we want games dangit!
• Uncharted: Golden Abyss – It looks amazing, like first gen PS3 games or better. That’s a really nice, really big screen (and at 5 inches the rumored Nintendo touch screen of 6 inches would be huge).  Smooth transition of touchscreen controls but you can also use buttons. Perfect. Shoot, Uncharted alone makes me want a PSVita, I could care less about all the other stuff.
• They call the back touchpad “Rear Touch”. That sounds kinda dirty fella.
• Ruin – Directly compatible with PS3? Action RPG game. Dude this guy is out of breath before he starts. Its a little hard to tell but it looks diablo-ish. Everything is really small, so it doesn’t work to show them playing on the PSV like it did on the previous game. Can we get video out? Events happen in real time? Fighting with other players online. Save Ruin to the cloud on PSV and play on PS3. Same game, well that’s kinda cool.
• You can only get cloud based save games on PlayStation. Well I predicted it for Nintendo so lets see…
• Modnation Racers. Create tracks by drawing on touchscreen. Works pretty smooth. Rear-touch allows you to change geography up. Front-touch (I just coined that) allows you to depress the geography.
• Playstation Vita just rolls off the tongue. I’m already dropping it to PSV.
• I just noticed that Scott Rohde looks a little bit like Showtime (if you changed his nose and jaw a bit)
• Little Big Planet – Pretty much Little Big Planet 2 with touchscreen controls, cameras, motion and on a portable system. Looks very nice although I admit I’ve never had time to get into the Little Big Planet thing myself.
• Street Fighter x Tekken – Crowd just went WHOA! Yoshinori has an awesome shirt on. Looks good but there is a strange white outline around the characters. Dude Yoshinori is not very good at Street Fighter.
• EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, THQ, Activision developing for PSV
• Clip video, no game names given.
• Really like the hybrid of the touchscreen play with traditional controls and the ease of transition between the two. Will be interesting to see if Nintendo’s rumored controller pulls this off…
• Release date – Holiday season this year. Wi Fi Model, 3g model. Wi Fi Model is $249.99. 3G is $299.00. I think that’s the magic price point but imagine if Nintendo whips out their system for the same price tomorrow (oh I know we won’t get a price on the new Nintendo system).
• Rumors had it that the PSVita hardware had to get scaled back from original specs in order to hit that price point. The games looked fine to me.

Following that the show ends.  Hmm, no big 3rd Party games, no Twisted Metal (which we have already see today at e3), no new God of War and no Kevin Butler?!!??  Interesting.

Summary:

I think Sony had the most to lose with their presser (I’ve seen too many Press Conferences today, I’m calling them PRESSERS!!!!) with all the recent negative press on the PSN outage.  Can you imagine how this would have gone if the PSN was still down?  Anyway I think Sony did a great job of answering that question head on with a direct apology.  They also did a great job of showing us what the PlayStation experience is and why you can only get it on PlayStation.  The PSVita continues to impress as well.  There were a few duds overall and a few games I would have thought to be shoe in’s no showed the event but the good stuff (Uncharted and PSVita) was really good.  Sony did about as well as they could have and I give them a B

Join me back here tomorrow for a look at Nintendo’s big reveal.  Will they be able to live up to the hype?

Lets keep moving with Ubisoft.

The theme of Ubisoft’s press conference was “come to our booth” or at least thats what I gathered from hearing it 8,000 times during the presser.  Its either that or the F-word (see Far Cry 3).

+ Rayman Origins - Classic side scrolling platformer with a stunning art style.  Really looks like a playable cartoon.  I don’t like Rayman games and I’m not a big fan of the french attempts at humor during this demo (Ubi or not Ubi) but I thought this looked great.  Kinda strange though when the lead developer of the game is calling one of the characters “the blue thing”.  There was an ode to tetris on one stage, nice mix of swimming and platforming on the next.  Flying stage gives a bit of an old school shooter vibe.  Despite the awkward developer jokes the game looks great.

+ Driver – Licensed cars, car chases through San Francisco.  Looks like a pretty cool reboot of the series.

- Far Cry 3 - Okay moral soapbox time.  I realize that e3 is not for kids but is it really necessary to toss around the F word 20 times during the course of your game demo in a public press conference?  I’m giving it a negative for that, the game itself looks alright, nothing really over the top on one side or the other.

- Brothers in Arms: Furious Four - Sigh, violence for the sake of violence?  I think this one really missed the mark.  You can tell the difference from the natural charm that comes from a game like Overstrike and the forced feeling that came from this one.

-TinTin - This one was kind of just there.  I mean it had Peter Jackson and Spielberg singing its praises but the game itself just looked average and the property is something most Americans aren’t familiar with and won’t have an emotional attachment to.  All I know is the boy, TinTin?, was beating the snot out of and suplexing grown men.

+ Ghost Recon - Back on track here.  Ever get the feeling that every game is a FPS?  Anyway this one looks great and has a unique playstyle from the standard shooting fare.  Heavy squad based gameplay with a thinking mans approach and it looks pretty cool.

+ Ghost Recon Online - Hard to argue about a free online version of Ghost Recon unless it really sucks, no reason to believe that it will for now.

Too much caffeine man keeps talking about a shared experience.  Am I the only one that doesn’t want to share my gaming experience?  Give the the AI man!

+ Raving Rabbids for Kinect - Holy beard Batman!  Looks like an “AR” Rabbids game.  Glorified whack a mole at first.  The impressive part is four players on kinect but again I hope you have a big living room.  Fill the shapes looks like a fun party game…for 10 minutes or so.

+ Random casual games section, Just Dance 3 - looks like more of the same but they want you to know Katy Perry plays it.  Looks a little lame after seeing Dance Central earlier.  Rocksmith - looks like it could be a really cool way to learn how to play the guitar.  Your Shape 2012 - Didn’t really show or tell us anything about it.  You might consider these garbage but they are sellers.

+ Assassins Creed Revelations - I remember when the original Assassins Creed was a fun, but not spectacular new property and now here it is the crown jewel of Ubisoft’s crown.  People like diving into hay bails and popping daggers from their wrists I guess.  Lots of cool prerendered stuff shown before the demo.  Looks a lot like the other AC games.  I don’t know about you but if I see a dude in a black hood with a sword and crossbow walking down the street, well thats not a good dude.  They show some weird smoky heat visiony thingy that basically just hides the pretty graphics.  Oh snap he’s playing on a PlayStation controller!!!  That means Ubisoft prefers Playstation (that was sarcasm).

Summary

A bit of a hit and miss performance from Ubisoft.  I really liked Rayman but I don’t think its going to have broad appeal.  A lot of the “humor” fell very, very flat.  Ghost Recon is cool but when you look at games like Modern Warfare and Battlefield where does it fit in?  For every big hit like Assassins Creed which we knew would be shown more we had misses like the Furious Four trailer.  And what was with the language in the Far Cry 3 trailer?  Pardon my French indeed.  I think Ubisoft was really in the middle and give them a C+

Lets keep it rolling with EA Games.

I pretty much knew what to expect here because EA told us what to expect.  EA Sports, The Old Republic, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, etc…

Let me just start off by randomly inserting “Origin.com” here because heaven knows everyone else in EA’s press conference did when they spoke.

EA is all about the games, no fancy set and no celebrities…remember that second part.

+ Mass Effect 3 - It was very refreshing after the XBOX conference to see them play Mass Effect 3 without worrying about the Kinect controls.  They just played the game and it looked great.  I love how Mass Effect has transitioned from action RPG to full on third person, squad shooter now.

- Need for Speed: The Run - Its “an illicit high stakes race across the country” for some reason the word “illicit” makes it sound dirty.  For the first time ever in a NFS game, action sequences will be held out of the car.  Hmm the guy playing the demo is doing it with a wired controller.  What is this the PS2?  It basically looks like racing with real time action sequences tossed in.  I’m glad the illicit street racer was wearing his seat belt when he stole the police car and crashed it on the train tracks.  How illicit!  Its definitely a NFS game but I wonder if the out of the car experience is any good.  Was anyone asking for action out of the car in a NFS game?

+ The Old Republic - This gets a plus just because BioWare knocks it out of the park with another amazing trailer.  But no game play was shown.  We have no reason to believe that BioWare can’t make this epic experience happen but we have nothing to back it up yet either.

- SSX – Looks good but everything looks good in prerendered trailers.  Tagline of Defy Reality is appropriate here as it looks very unrealistic, yet its a massive open world based on every major mountain range on the planet.  Obviously they took some creative liberties here, I’m pretty sure I saw the Great Wall of China being used for a half pipe in the trailer.  Nothing amazing here, just looks like HD SSX.

+ FIFA 12 - They like to continually say this is the biggest sports game on the planet.  I’m not into soccer games, they just frustrate me but everything here looks good enough.  A new feature is how the players take dramatic falls.  Well if you believe some people soccer is all about flopping so I guess if its in the game its in the game now.  They started the press conference by saying no random celebs and yet here is Lil Wayne and Drake to tell us about how great FIFA is…

+ Madden 12 - I’m giving this a plus based on the presentation of the fake Vince Lombardi and Ray Lewis, Peyton Hillis and Clay Mathews coming out on stage.  So much for no celebrities (again).  Hey wait, are the players allowed to dress in team uni’s during the lockout?  Apparently the lockout doesn’t prevent them from being slathered in baby oil.  There is a new collision system, dynamic player performances, comes out on August 30th…a special date for me.  He said connected experiences, pretty sure that wasn’t “kinect-ed” but I could be wrong.  Lots of buzzwords tossed around without showing us anything.  Why?  Because they don’t have to.  A little disapointed in the game itself.

+ Sims Social - Nice to see EA taking time to talk about a facebook game here.  And why not.  If millions of people are going to play farmville they might as well be playing the Sims right?  Got a pretty good reaction from the audience.

+ Reckoning - Looks alot like a Morrowind game…oh wait its led by one of the designers of Oblivion…and RA Salvatore…and Todd Mcfarlane.  Well thats a pedigree of…names.  It looks really good and they actually bothered to show gameplay in the trailer, what a novel concept.  Its a 2012 game.

+ Overstrike – Insomniac’s new multiplatform game.  The group is referred to as Overstrike 9, but there are four of them…  I always like to see an original property that has the combination of marketing/visuals/gameplay/charm/character and hype to succeed.  We can’t run on sequels forever.

+ Battlefield 3 – Can it give MW3 a run for its money?  It certainly looks the part.  The Frostbite 2 engine is pretty impressive.   Wow if I had a nickle for every game developer that stumbled over their words in e3 press conferences…  I like the shot they took at MW3 by announcing their online service, battlelog, would be 100% free after the recent anouncment of the Elite service for Call of Duty.  Open beta in September, great looking game.

Summary – 10 games, 8 pluses and I’m sure representing millions of upcoming sales.  A great showing for EA.  They had desired sequels to existing franchises and some new properties that look to be set up to become the desired franchises of tomorrow.  They did just about everything they could as a third party at E3, I give them an A-