Digital Trends
Despite Sony’s market position well behind Nintendo in both the home and portable console markets at the moment, the company had no problem drawing crowds at this year’s E3, where a full deck of high-profile titles made its booth one of the busiest at the show. We headed upstairs for a tour of the latest with developers on hand to explain.
Media Molecule’s game for the PS3, the cutesy Little Big Planet, was the big winner at the Game Developers Choice Awards on Wednesday. It took home awards for best game design, debut, technology and innovation.
However, the game didn’t have the evening all to itself. Shooter Fallout 3 won two awards, for game of the year and best writing trophy.
Prince of Persia won for best visual art, God of War: Chains of Olympus took best handheld game, Dead Space grabbed best audio, and World of Goo won best downloadable game. Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear Solid, was given the lifetime achievement award.
If PSPs decked out with graphics from Star Wars, Spiderman, and God of War haven’t tickled your sports-loving fancy, perhaps Sony’s latest attempt, a Madden-themed system, will be just the ticket. Sony announced on Wednesday that the August release of Madden 09 on PSP will bring with it its own PSP bundle with a metallic-blue PSP and other goodies.
The package will include the special-edition PSP system, a copy of Madden NFL 09, a voucher to download Beats for free from the PlayStation store, a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo card, and the movie NFL: In Just One Play on Universal Media Disc. The movie, hosted by NFL receiver Chad Johnson, showcases legends including Randy Moss, Reggie Wayne, Larry Fitzgerald, and more.
Although last weeks’ Gamers Development Conference in San Francisco has now wrapped up, Sony apparently held over a few announcements from the show for this week, giving PlayStation fans new news on both upcoming bundles and the future of the Dualshock 3 controller on Tuesday.
In a post on the official PlayStation blog, SCEA PR manager Al De Leon revealed that the Dualshock 3 controller, currently a Japanese-only release, will hit the states on April 15 for $54.99. The controller integrates the same Sixaxis sensing features as the original PS3 controller, but adds the Dualshock rumbling that had been missing due to a long legal dispute with Immersion over patent infringement.
If you’re someone who likes to carry the Bible with you, it just became a whole lot easier. ChristianMobile, a South African-basedcompany, is offering downloads of the Old and New Testaments for $12 each in the UK. The company will also offer daily inspirational messages by text. The company already operates in severalcountries, including the US, offering the same services. It claims to have distributed 80,000 virtual Bibles in the South Africa alone (the Bibles are in proper English, not text speak, in case youwondered). According to their site, ChristinaMobile exists so “to enable every mobile phone user to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ so that each phone user may believe in Him, call uponHis name and be saved by Him. That they may be equipped with wisdom and revelation for faith and action through His leading by the power of the Holy Spirit into the ministry of reconciliation of manwith God.” Of course, this isn’t really anything new to the US, where Christian content online and on mobiles has been quickly adopted. But it brings something different to the UK,which has never been a hotbed of religion. However, according to a report in The Guardian, ChristianMobile will have its work cut out in the future, asit plans to expand its efforts to Bahrain, China, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
You can already legally download the solo work of John, Paul, George and Ringo. But getting your hands on the work they did together has meant going out and buying CDs (or holding on to that oldvinyl) – at least if you want to do it legally. That will finally change in the next few months, according to an interview Sir Paul McCartney gave to Billboard.com. EMI has seemingly been on the verge of making the Beatles’ work available for legal download for quite a while now, but hasn’t tippedover the edge. Finally, though, it seems that most of the problems have been solved, with only one point remaining. "You’ve got to get these things right," McCartney said. "Youdon’t want to do something that’s as cool as that and in three years time you think, ‘Oh God, why did we do that?’" McCartney expects the music to be available next year, and it willdoubtlessly spark a spur in downloading, especially from baby boomers. One of the problems has been a legal trademark dispute between Apple Corps with computer maker Apple, which was settled in February.
A new poll by 463 Communications and Zogby International has found that the love affair Americans have with the Net might be, well, just that. 24% of respondents said that the Internet could be a substitute for a significant other. It might come as no real surprise, but the highest percentage of those who believed that were single (31%). However only 18% of those who considered politically conservative agreed with that statement, compared to 31% of those who classed themselves as progressive. The poll, conducted between October 4-8 among 9,743 adult respondents, was an attempt to take a snapshot of the role the Internet plays in peoples’ lives, and whether government should play a bigger part in regulating it. A third of 18-24 year-olds believed the government should step in on content compared to 72% of those over 70. But more than half of those polled thought online video should be under some kind of governmental control. 29% felt it should be regulated like television, and 24% felt a rating system, similar to movies, should be in place. Yet only 36% responded that blocking of Internet video would be unconstitutional. “Some view the Internet as their new best friend, others as an increasingly powerful tool that can infect our youth with harmful images and thoughts and therefore must be controlled,” said 463 partner Tom Galvin in a statement. “Our challenge as a society is to let the Internet flourish as a dynamic force in our economy and communities while not chipping away at the fundamental freedoms that created the Internet in the first place.” More worryingly, 11% of respondents were willing to have a chip implanted in their brains if it let them access the Internet, but 20% were willing to have one put in their children’s brains, to be able to track them in case of kidnapping or abduction. Among born-again Christians, 20% felt the Internet made them feel closer to God, while 11% said it made them more distant.
What was the best game of the year? You might have your favorite, but according to the judges who gave it the BAFTA award last night, it was the first-person shooter with a twist Xbox title, Bioshock. Although game awards ranged across platforms, Nintendo’s Wii definitely took home the honors as a console, winning for Sports, Innovation, Gameplay, Multiplayer and Strategy and Simulation. By contrast, Sony’s troubled PS3 went home empty-handed. Crackdown for Xbox 360 was named best game in Action and Adventure and for Use of Audio, while God of War, also for PS2, won for Story and Character and Technical Achievement. A third PS2 title, Okami, walked away with the titles for Artistic Achievement and Original Score. The student title Ragnarawk, developed in the Dare to Be Digital program, was named One ToWatch. Most awards were voted for by judges. But in time-honored fashion, there was one where the decision was left up to the public. The PC World Gamers Award went to Football Manager 2007.
Nintendo’s Wii continues to show its dominance. It’s not in sales this time, but in the 2007 BritishAcademy Video Games Awards, where the Wii Sports title received a staggering seven nominations, two more than its nearest competitors. The game has players participate in several virtualsports, and has proved to be particularily popular with the growing casual gamer segment of the market – as have many Wii titles. It was nominated in the Game of the Tear and Innovationcategories, among others. God of War 2, Crackdown, Okami, and Gears of War each walked away with five nominations. The British Academy, which puts on the BAFTA film and televisionawards each year, gives awards in 15 different categories, including The Fellowship, which is given by nomination, but bestowed for outstanding achievement and body of work. According to a statement,the Academy “is now committed to the development of the contemporary art form of video games, and to lending equal weight to its British Academy Video Games Awards as that given to film andtelevision.” The 2007 awards will take place on October 23 in London.
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