Sunday, August 22, 2010

Sony at GamesCom 2010


Sony unveiled a few unannounced games this year at GamesCom in Cologne, Germany, and showcased some of their upcoming titles like Killzone 3 and Motorstorm: Apocalypse in full stererscopic 3D.

Cramped into the eWerk theatre in the Mullheim district of Cologne, a massive crowd of games journalists eagerly waited to see what Sony would show off at this year's GamesCom. Here are some of the highlights of their press conference.

  • A LittleBigPlanet 2 trailer highlighted some of the ways players will be able to not only create their own levels in the upcoming sequel, but design their own fully-fledged games. This includes utilizing connectible stages, so player-designed games can go beyond the “Go from A to B” formula of the previous title.
  • The company announced new bundles for their PS3 system, including Move packages. You can read more about that here.
  • Each person attending the conference was given (err, rented) a pair of 3D glasses for one presentation, which highlighted many of the upcoming and currently supported 3D games Sony has to offer. By far the most impressive was Motorstorm: Apocalypse, due to the speed and visceral nature of the racing series. Especially awesome was the amount of destruction going on in each track; like Split/Second, the world is literally coming apart at the seams while players race through it--very cool.
  • Greg Goodrich of EA once again took the stage to show off more Medal of Honor, only this time he called upon the skills of Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, who wrote a song for the game. The stage the pair showed off was called Gunfighters, and took place inside a helicopter equipped with enough firepower to take out a small middle eastern village, which is exactly what Shinoda did. Many enemies equipped with RPGs didn't make the mission a cakewalk, but they eventually made it through. It seems the devs have put a bit more polish on the game since the last time we saw it, as the framerate was much less choppy this time around.
  • In what was easily the shortest gameplay segment of the press conference, the crowd was shown an extremely brief Killzone 3 MP segment, though aside from watching players score points by getting kills, it was hard to take away much from the video, other than making us want to get our hands on the game even more.
  • Insomniac Games' Ted Price took the stage to reveal what one of the newer branches of the studio was been up to, which turned out to be Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. The four-player co-op game relies on teamwork between players just as New Super Mario Bros. Wii did, though the teamwork aspect becomes more complex in the three-dimensional arena. A boss fight towards the end of the demo showed how teamwork is integral in All 4 One, as players needed to launch their buddies into the air to activate switches which would cause huge structures to collapse onto the towering boss creature.
  • Ted Price didn't leave the stage without one last bit of news: Resistance 3 is under development. He debuted a live-action trailer which showed survivors making their way towards New York on a train. The grim scenery on the way included countless massacred corpses and homes ransacked by the Chimera forces. Upon entering a tunnel, the survivors came under attack by a ferocious group of Chimera, and the trailer faded to black under a “Resistance 3” logo. Exciting stuff, but show us some gameplay!

No comments:

Post a Comment