The Sandbox

In the Don't They Have Anything Better to Do department: The other day in Parliament, a Parliament member asked prime minister Tony Blair if he agrees that "when Sony used images of Manchester cathedral as part of a game [the first person shooter, Resistance: Fall of Man] that extolled gun violence, it was in bad taste and very insulting, not only to the Church of England, but to people across the land who think that it is inappropriate for big corporations to behave in that way?"

He was referring to a scene of the game in which you battle aliens in a photo-realistic version of the Manchester cathedral. The "discovery" of the church in the game is causing a stir in the UK, and Sony says it is now in talks with the church of England - presumably to work out a compromise (like what, maybe using the Eiffel Tower instead?).

The au courant love to dish on the PS3: sales have been less than hoped for, Sony's losing money on each console, Kutaragi was moved out as CEO and chairman, and the vaunted performance over its rivals hasn't been as much of a differentiation as hoped. It has produced insecure fanboys, and fanboys who mock them.

But what's the real problem?

So the next Grand Theft Auto game, GTA IV, has been delayed from its original release date of this fall. That's a major blow to the industry that was hoping for a "perfect storm" of blockbuster releases including this game as well as Madden 08 and Halo 3.

Why the hiccup? Analyst Michael Pachter suggests that PS3 hardware may be to blame. GTAIV was planned for a simultaneous release on the Xbox 360 and Sony's system. Microsoft had recently paid $50 million to release exclusive episodic GTAIV content. Pachter intimates that Rockstar, developers of the game, hit a snag with the PS3 version - and, as a result, had to put the entire plan on hold.

Ten months after release, Sony has sold its millionth Playstation 3, something that I don't think anyone – anyone not a PS3 developer, that is – would have predicted twelve months ago. But the release of Hot Shots Golf 5 spiked sales, and the PS3 has only taken one month longer to one million sales than the Zune took.

I am one of the few people I know to have bought a PS3, and I have to admit that I'm enough of a geek that one of the turning points was that it's mega-fast at processing Folding@home data. Having a game machine able to devote spare cycles to helping find cures for Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, that's something real. That, and Virtua Fighter 5.

Author's Note: yes, I know the 360 version of VF5 will have full online play. But that's a value of "better" that doesn't include "playable right now".

Interesting story in the Journal today about Sony's plans to offer a video-download service via its Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable gaming systems (full story after the jump). The market is set to pop, big time, hitting as much as $7 billion in the U.S. by 2010.

Sony and Microsoft, of course, have been bullish about positioning their consoles as the home entertainment hubs of the future. While covering E3 this year for Spectrum, I was surprised that more people didn't pick up on Microsoft's pact with Disney to offer HD movie downloads via Xbox Live, the X360's online service.

I wrote a feature for Spectrum about how game designers Insomniac are working with the Playstation 3's Cell processor. This week at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Sony is demoing how to install and run Linux and Firefox on the PS3 as a means of running online office applications. The showcase will include a system fetching web pages over a Wi-Fi connection.

This comes on the heels of my post yesterday about Sony's battle for control of the living room. And who said game systems are just about games?

Why am I blogging about the PS3 so much lately? It seems Sony is giving us more and more reasons to divine some master takeover at play.

The latest salvo: word of a Playstation-branded phone. This doesn't surprise me in the least. The ultimate end game is gaming anytime anywhere, as Microsoft has suggested too. And shouldn't that be the way life is? You kick back on your couch for some hard-core Madden play, mess with your roster on your phone, trashtalk on message boards while at your PC. Games need to become as accessible and ubiquitous as, um, phones. Imagine if you could only call your friends while you are sitting on your couch in your living room. The fact that games are so tethered right now - and that we take this for granted - is going to seem silly in hindsight.

Who says videogames make you dumb? A team of students from the University of California at Irvine and Dartmouth used a PS3 to recreate brain algorithms for visual processing. They won $10000 from IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine Professor University Challenge for their efforts.

I wrote about the power of the Cell for IEEE Spectrum. You can read more about it here.

An old coworker (or, the shibboleth of an old newsgroup of mine, cow orker), Jason Booth, has blogged about his low opinion of the PS3, and was inundated with a lot of Sony defenders saying all kinds of, well, web-forumish things.

Trouble is, he's right, guys. Face up to it.

Because I finally bought Heavenly Sword, and it's beautiful. I don't care about whether or not it's short, because with a new baby in the house, I don't really have time to play a super long game. I am very impressed with the art direction and animation, and I have enjoyed every minute of the game so far.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

Sony took a lot of slack for its decision to include a pricey Blu-ray drive in the Playstation 3. But could the company laugh last?

This week, word comes that two major retailers - Best Buy and Netflix - will be throwing even more weight behind the Blu-ray format. On Monday, Best Buy's chief operating officer singled out Blu-ray over the competing HD DVD for "fast emerging as [the] single format" and announced that his stores would be promoting Blu-ray discs front and center. Netflix, the online DVD delivery club, followed suit by announcing on Monday that it would be doing away with HD DVDs by the end of the year.

That all bodes well for the PS3, but what will bode even better is this: some really cool games. Hopefully titles like LittleBigPlanet will fit the bill.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

It's hard to read about any other game but GTA IV these days, but there's one coming tomorrow that deserves your thumb-time. It's called echochrome - and the lower case spelling hints at the poetic ambition. When this game was unveiled at E3, we in our seats let out a collective "wow cool." The game is elegantly simple - a MC Escher pencil drawn puzzle game that feels like a super-arty Tetris for the 21st Century.

The lo-fi beauty of the game is a perfect counterpoint to GTA IV - proving how vidgames don't have to be blockbuster violent immersive world epics to deserve attention, or define an entire industry. The timing of its release couldn't be better.

As I blogged from last year's E3, I'm a big fan of the upcoming Playstation 3 title LittleBigPlanet. It's a quirky and addictive side-scrolling game but, more importantly, a killer example of the power - and fun - of user-generated content.

Today, Gamespot Australia has a quick Q&A with the developers.

In December 2006, I wrote a cover story for Spectrum on the engineering of Resistance: Fall of Man, the PS3 shooter from Insomniac. One thing the guys told me is how coding for the Cell processor is a work-in-progress. The more they learn, the more they can do.

Now we can see what they've grokked about the PS3 over the past year. Videos are hitting the web of Insomniac's hotly-anticipated sequel, Resistance 2. Check out Kotaku's user-friendly excerpts here.

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.

It's a Soulcalibur kind of month, it is. Soulcalibur is, for my money, the best fighting game series ever, and Soulcalibur IV is coming out at the end of this month. They're prepping us with a cute little manga about how to play, and they've brought the retro with a release of the Dreamcast Soulcalibur on XBLA.