It’s clear that this is the company’s first real attempt at the cheap downloadable mobile games market, as minis have in many peoples eyes been a colossal failure. Despite it being highly unlikely that they’ll give Apple any real competition, I think it’s the right tactic for Sony and their ambitions in mobile gaming to be using.

It’s a but strange that they chose to announce the service at this event, but they held back the announcement of the much talked about Xperia Play (rumoured name) until most likely the world mobile event in Barcelona in February.

The announcement of PS Suite all but guarantees the device is definitely coming and soon, but I suppose they just didn’t want to confuse everyone by showing two new pieces of hardware on the same day.

Hopefully we’ll get more info on the service including how and when it will be made available, the games and hardware soon.

• Two analogue sticks, and from what I’ve seen so far, they appear to be actual sticks and not nubs as before, making them hopefully much more usable.
• It’s not download only. This is a big deal. The go was a disaster, not because downloading isn’t the future, it was just implemented terribly and was also before its time. Adapted memory cards will feel familiar to Nintendo players and is the right thing for Sony to be doing now as it keeps them a big firmly placed in retail stores.
• It has a huge 5 inch touch OLED screen, but when you look at it next to the 3000, it doesn’t actually look that big. While it’s not as portable as before in terms of pocketing it, most people would likely put their PSP in their bag anyway so I don’t see it as a problem whatsoever.
• The touch panel on the back I was worried would be too big a part of the product, but I feel that it’s most likely going to be a gimmick like the sixaxis and hardly used. It will be good but will only give additional options to developers, just as the current gimmick started by Apple and now adopted by Nintendo and Sony of sensors and gyroscopes won’t feature in most games.
• It’s casual friendly. The interface looks very Apple inspired. The bubbles on each “home screen” change the formula around from the grid style Apple pioneered, but you can see where they got their inspiration from, especially when you look at the dots at the bottom which indicate what home screen you’re on. The array of sensors and that big touch screen really make this a device that can eventually have mass appeal. Like the 3DS is positioned predominantly to target hardcore gamers at first, Sony are doing the same here, but admittedly with far less chance of broadening the appeal later on. They won’t be too worried about that though as they know their market well.
• They have crammed in everything but the kitchen sink. The device has almost everything you could want. 3G, GPS, quad-core processing and PS3 like graphics as well the obvious things like wi-fi and bluetooth. This makes Nintendo’s SpotPass and StreetPass look very basic by comparison.
• Playstation Network is fully integrated, meaning we’ll probably get to see our online friends, message them, invite them to games, maybe even voice chat. This would all be in addition to trophy support. Even though I don’t chase trophies like I used to, it’s still nice to get them when I’m not trying and it’s a feature that a lot of people want so I’m happy about that too.

That is about all I can think to mention about the system. Normally, after events like these from Sony and other companies, in recent times I’ve often felt disappointed and always left pondering where they could have improved. This time it’s hard to find fault with the NGP.

While it’s essentially the same strategy as the PSP was launched with, of pure power and the promise of console style gaming on a handheld. This time Sony are in a much better position to truly fulfil that premise and give Nintendo a better run for their money.

The only remaining question everyone has is how much it will cost. Of course, all of the great news today could be undone if they announce it at £300 or more, and you could easily see them doing so considering the specs the machine boasts. You just have to hope that they’ve either found a way to produce it fairly cheaply, or are willing to take a hit on the system to make it back on game sales. Perhaps a combination of these is likely.

Another point to bear in mind is that Sony are desperate to put the failure of the PSP go and the PS3 launch price behind them, and therefore they may be considering being aggressive on price straight away to try to avoid damaging their reputation again. They will want to keep things going steadily as they have been with PS3 for the last two to three years.

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GT5 was highly anticipated for many years until its eventual release a few months ago. It’s not a game for everyone as a lot of gamers tend to either not enjoy or understand realistic racing simulations. Burnout this is most definitely not. I’m a huge Burnout fan too but this is a very different game, but we all know that.

This game, like the previous ones in the series demands absolute precision and rewards skill and practice. The 200 or so premium cars are things to behold. Stunningly detailed, with interior views that really make you feel like you’re driving the car. They even simulate the G-Forces and car shaking in this view. Sometimes it can be too intense to look at, especially on the oval tracks. It brings home to you the kind of punishment these professional drivers put themselves through.

Because I’m not a big fan of the other camera views the 800 standard cars, all without the cockpit view and in lower resolutions are almost worthless to me. They look awful most of the time and aren’t as fun to drive. It’s a real shame, especially as there are some great cars that are only available in standard versions, such as the Bugatti Veyron. 1000 cars is a great thing to be able to say in advertising, but in practise it’s a let down.

With this said, 200 cars is still more than almost any other video-game. I believe Forza 3 has approximately 500 in the special edition of that game. I wish Polyphony had cut the number of cars in half to that same number if they could have made them all premium quality.

Cars are nothing without tracks, and there is a great diverse collection of tracks in the game. From randomly generated Rally Stages to American Ovals, Le Mans and Suzuka, there’s something for every type of racing fan. There are even a selection of imaginary city tracks based on what could be possible if street races were held in those venues. As usual in Gran Turismo games, there are also some imaginary tracks designed to test driving skill to the maximum. These tracks are okay but they aren’t the best looking and sometimes the layouts aren’t entirely to my liking, but it’s a personal taste issue.

As far as gameplay, the cars handle brilliantly. They all handle slightly differently and you can feel this different when you race. Set-up changes, including tyre choice can make huge differences as well. Using the wrong tyre compound can cost you dearly, especially in b-spec races where the drivers can’t handle the cars and spin out.

Reviewers have been critical of GT5 as an actual game rather than a pure simulator, by saying that it’s essentially a 10 out of 10 simulator, wrapped up in a  5/10 game. It is true that some elements of the game are not entirely imaginative, and they could have made the interface a bit better, but it’s by no means broken and in my opinion I think those reviewers are being too picky. If you’re a fan of simulation racing, you will know exactly what you’re getting yourself into with GT5, and despite it’s few shortcomings, this is a very fine game that you’ll undoubtedly love.

I’ve spent a lot of time with it since it came out and I still don’t feel finished. I’ve got almost all the cars in the game I could wish for. I’ve driven every track many times and got about as far as I can with the special events as well as the regular A-Spec and B-Spec modes.

Why then would I want to continue further? Well, in a recent update, Polyphony added a new mode called Seasonal Events. This mode is updated every week with 5 new special event races for particular cars, as well as time trial and drift trial challenges with online leaderboards. It adds a lot of replay value to the game by making you interested in buying, tuning and racing cars you may have otherwise have overlooked. The rewards for these races far outweigh the cost of buying and tuning the cars. They also offer great XP to allow players to level up to the max of 40 a bit more easily by reducing the amount of grinding you’ll have to do. I assume that they’ll be doing these special events with almost all, if not all of the premium cars over time, so the game could continue to provide new reasons to play for many months to come.

Not only this, but Polyphony have stated that they plan to upgrade some standard cars to premium ones in future updates, as well as enable their online remote-racing service which you can use in a web-browser to play B-Spec races remotely. Your PS3 does have to be running and playing the game, but it’s still a nice and unique concept.

Just to mention some other small issues with the game, I feel that the online racing is below par and it’s disappointingly clunky to use. So much so that I don’t really want to bother with it until they patch it to make it much more streamlined and faster loading. Then again, most people, myself included will never race online and still play the game for months consistently and have a great time, so it won’t be a big deal for many people.

I can’t wait to see what else Kazinori and Polyphony have up their sleeves for us in future updates. In the meantime, if you don’t own this game, or even don’t own a PS3, you should pick this this game up if you think it’s your type of thing. I would also suggest buying an HD TV as well, since this game really gets the most out of it.

In general, it’s a brilliant driving game that just about met incredibly lofty expectations and you shouldn’t miss it.

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Playstation Plus is a kind of Playstation loyalty scheme in which players pay up-front for a subscription for either 3 months or a year for £40 or similar to that in other currencies. I wasn’t really sure at first if it would be worth-it for me to join because of the fact that I already own quite a few PSN games, and I have been very critical of the minis program in the past and still am.

What ended up happening though was that my brother bought a subscription for a year to plus. One of the main reasons for this was because of the special offer for people who join in the first month, which is a downloadable copy of LittleBigPlanet. LBP is one of my favourite games on PS3 and of course I already own a copy. We should now be able to trade in our disc version for credit at the store and make back some of the £40 joining fee. Hopefully the rest of that fee will be made back over the next 12 months.

I’m not sure if the LBP downloadable version is tied to the same expiration date as other Plus content, but when I went into the information page on the game it said that there was no time limit, while other games I downloaded did say they would expire in a year with the subscription if it wasn’t renewed. Even if LBP does expire in a year, I think because LBP2 is coming out a long way before then, and it is fully compatible with all old downloadable levels and DLC, unless you want to play the story levels again, there’s not much need to hang on to LBP.

For people who don’t already own LBP or WipEout HD, the £40 fee is worth paying just for the first month’s content. If you’re like me and you do already have both games, it should be worth the cost to you quite comfortably over the year. It just depends how much you are willing to take a chance that the content will be what you want to play.

If they go forward and add further features such as cross-game voice chat and possibly things like online game save backup then it will be worth the price for even more people and will probably go on to be very successful for Sony. So far it looks like it has a good starting position and can only get better from here.

Last years Nintendo conference was actually very strong for the hardcore crowd, following the disaster of the year before, but they went even further this year to entertain the core gamers who generally attend E3. There were some casual titles this year but they kept coverage of them to a minimum which I thought was a smart move.

Microsoft’s conference was in my opinion the weakest of the 3 main companies. While Nintendo have seemingly learned from the past and decided to focus less on casual games and more on the traditional market and Sony have included a good mix of both, Microsoft have gone in the opposite direction which I think is a bad move. Kinect is the new name for Natal. It’s not a terrible name but I’m sceptical of how well it will work for more in-depth types of games. Can the controller free concept deliver on its promise?

I’m also not a fan of the voice control aspect of the device either. Voice control is hardly new and Sony could probably do it with their eye camera if they wanted to, but so far they haven’t shown anything like that. I just think that talking to a machine is always going to make you look silly and feel awkward.

The most important aspect of this whole thing is that even if the device is great and has good support software wise, will the price be low enough to sell units and more importantly get casual players on board. It will likely cost around £100 when combined with £200 for the system itself. £300 seems a bit steep for a casual gaming family. The Wii is considerably cheaper and while it doesn’t offer the same level of technical power and also requires multiple expensive controllers and add-ons to use multiplayer, the initial outlay will put quite a lot of people off I imagine.

Then there’s the problem of Xbox 360 just not being a very appealing name for anyone other than core gamers. They will have to work very hard with casual game advertising in order to really sell this to the wide audience that Nintendo currently enjoys.

Sony I think had just the right mix of traditional hardcore games like Killzone 3 and Infamous 2 along with Twisted Metal, innovative titles like LittleBigPlanet 2 and their foray into full motion gaming with Move. SIXAXIS was their first, unsuccessful attempt but I think they have the right formula this time around. Move is the perfect motion controller, or at least so far. You combine the accuracy of camera tracking with the buttons and accelerometers of the Wii Remote.

Move seems like the perfect fit for sports games such as Tiger Woods and Grand Slam Tennis, both of which I’m very much looking forward to. It’s far from limited to that one category though. Unlike Kinect, which I feel at this point is somewhat limited in what types of games it can be used in, I think Move has much more potential to fit into many different types of games seamlessly.

I think there are two barriers for the Move to overcome. The first is the cost of buying multiple controllers for friends and family groups, but Nintendo haven’t been set back by this problem so far so I don’t see Sony struggling too badly. Of course, Nintendo supply the Wii Remote as their default controller so that does help them but even so. The other issue could be the complexity of the setup. You need the eye camera somewhere in front of your TV as well as the controllers and possibly a subcontroller (nunchuk or duelshock 3) which is similar to the sensor bar but it could get confusing for some.

Moving away from the motion control aspect, I felt the rest of the press conference from Sony was strong. While there weren’t really any surprises, and Playstation Plus doesn’t really offer much that I would be interested in, I think they showed good demos of great upcoming games, and we now have a release date for Gran Turismo 5 which is very exciting for me.

To point out two negative sections of the show, I would say that firstly Sony put too much emphasis on 3D. The technology is still in its infancy and the TVs and glasses are very expensive. Hardly anyone will actually be buying it and I think they should be keeping it low key for the first 6 months to a year of availability because they’re spending considerable amounts of time talking to only a very small percentage of their customers at this time. At the moment Nintendo are the pioneers of 3D because they’re making it available to everyone for presumably a reasonable price.

They also introduced a new PSP advertising campaign. However, they didn’t lower the price and while they did show God Of War: Ghost of Sparta and announced Patapon 3, they only showed it briefly in a video of upcoming games. To me they are sending mixed messages. On one hand, they want us to consider the PSP still alive and kicking, but at the same time, with no price cut and hardly any talk of new games, you wonder if they even believe it themselves.

I think the lack of a PSP2 could hurt Sony badly in their battle with Nintendo and Apple for the next generation of handheld gaming. Nintendo have already stated that they will release the 3DS before the end of March next year. Will Sony have even announced PSP2 by then? If not then it will be likely at least 6 months or maybe even more between the launches of the two systems, and I don’t think they can afford to give Nintendo a head start. Especially because of all the hype and positive press that the 3DS has had surrounding it at E3 and beyond.

E3 was a massive show with so many games announced and shown off. I can’t really go into everything in this post, but overall I think this E3 was a great show with a lot of interesting announcements. 3DS was the big winner and Sony did a solid job. I think Microsoft have something to prove now especially with their motion control. They did announce the slim system with wi-fi but that’s only good to a point. It should have been done years ago.

I’ll have more thoughts soon, and will be back to more regular posts on F1 and all other topics. Thanks for reading.

LBP provided such incredible tools for creation, and while LBP did allow you to make more than just one type of level like MNR does with race tracks, it was hard work trying to figure out how to make it all work well. Yes, they were all 2D platformers generally, but the level design could play in many different ways. Modnation is always a track with a beginning and an end and some corners. Of course, LBP2 will take it to a whole new level with full game creation and other views than just 2.5D but that’s for later and possibly MNR2 to compete with feature wise.

But while MNR doesn’t quite offer equally powerful level customisation as LBP does, where it excels is in its mod creation tools which allows you to make characters which actually look like who they’re supposed to. In LBP, any costumes either made or bought were Sackboys dressed up as the intended character. While that suited that game, I love how you can find realistic looking mods for almost any character you can think of.

To be clear then, the customisation aspect of this game is absolutely incredible. What you can make and find online will astound you. With that said, this is a kart racing game, and without good driving mechanics, tracks, weapons and online play, the customisation isn’t really enough to save it.

While I don’t think the controls are perfect, and while I’m not a huge fan of all of the weapons and the shielding system, I think the gameplay is solid and while not up to mario kart level, it’s still very good especially for a system with very few other titles of note, if any at all in this genre.

I haven’t yet played all of the tracks but from the half or so I have played, I think they’re pretty fun and well designed. It was always going to be tough to compete with Mario Kart in track design but they’ve done well regardless.

Online play is great. There are multiple modes which include XP races which limit you to the default tracks and standard rules and custom races which let you host a race with your own track or another track you’ve downloaded. You can also join in split-screen mode but unfortunately, like mario kart wii, you can’t get XP from these modes or import your character from another PS3 profile into the game as a guest character like you can in LBP. This is disappointing but overall not a huge problem.

The biggest issue I have with the game is the absolutely punishing difficulty of the offline career mode. I thought this about inFamous too. Even on easy mode in that game it was annoyingly difficult. The career mode in this game will make you feel awful at times and even when you drive an almost perfect race with great drifting and slipstreaming skills, and using the weapons in the best way you can, it’s still a struggle to get into the top 3 and especially to win races. Yes, mario kart Wii was infuriating at 150cc and mirror mode levels at times, but even so, I got it done eventually. In this, I honestly don’t feel that I could be doing a lot better in my racing style and ability. There are some areas where I could improve but I don’t think it would be enough to make me able to win comfortably.

Overall I do recommend the game to kart racing fans. I consider myself good at these type of games generally. I’ve been able to dominate on Mario Kart Wii online in the past but this feels much more hardcore. Winning online here will take a lot of practise to give yourself a chance to really do well. This game will attract a more hardcore audience despite its family appeal and colourful art style simply because of the console it’s on. You won’t get the same number of casual players to beat for easy points like you would on the Wii.

Go and get this game, marvel at the creation aspect, and if you’re like me, hope that they patch the difficulty along with the long load times soon.

How can they be so heartless to paying customers when companies like Sony have a much more lenient, customer friendly policy. All they’re doing is making people less open to downloading content, especially movies and TV shows because they know that if their storage fails, they lose the file forever. Making endless backups of things is more work than pleasure and no one wants to have to deal with all that stuff when they just want to enjoy their content.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be backing up your data. It’s an important thing to do for all your important data and media. However, the content download services like iTunes should provide a secondary safety net for situations where backups don’t work or you make a mistake like I did in this case, just to provide peace of mind to consumers where currently there is doubt and insecurity.

A couple of names have been rumoured for the final product since then. Those were Arc and Gem. In the end Sony decided on a simple name that clearly described the purpose of the device.

One of my initial concerns about the move was that they never showed a supplementary device to hold in the other hand with an analogue stick, as Nintendo have with the nunchuk. I feel as if motion control, to be used in a more hardcore way and to provide the best experience, you need to have elements of classic control as part of the overall setup. Sony now have announced their take on the nunchuk formula in the shape of the subcontroller which boasts and analogue stick, a couple of face buttons and possibly a trigger on the back as well as being wireless.

While many will simply say that Sony have stooped to simply copying Nintendo, my view is that a device like this is practically a must have for many types of games. For example, I was a big fan of Grand Slam Tennis on Wii which used a motion-plus remote and nunchuk combo for the optimum control. Having precise analogue stick control of your character makes it easier to focus on your shots and not where your character is standing. My hope is that now EA Sports will be able to simply translate across the same control scheme essentially, but the Move will allow greater accuracy and a more fun tennis experience, while also providing HD graphics and probably better online play. For this type of game, it really removes any chance of me buying the Wii version.

I also loved Tiger Woods 10 on Wii last year. It made great use of motion-plus as well and didn’t use the nunchuk which allowed complete freedom of movement. I expect the PS3 version, which has already been confirmed to support the Move when it is released, to take all the great elements of the Wii version and multiply them.

Of course, not all games are suited to motion control and it’s really personal preference as to whether or not you feel you would rather use classic or motion for different genres. I personally prefer classic control on a lot of my Wii games when given the choice. Mario Kart, F1 and more are much more fun with the more precise duel analogue setup of the classic controller. On the other hand, I can’t imagine playing Excite Truck, Wii Sport and Wii Sports Resort, Boom Blox (and bash party) and others any other way.

Gamers shouldn’t feel threatened by motion control because I’m confident that they won’t become the norm. They will be great in some ways, limiting in others but I think there will be a choice for gamers as to how they play.

This week they’ve launched a host of new spaces and items. The Audi space and Sodium One are the main two, but there’s also items you can buy based on LBP and other things.

The Audi space’s main reason for existence is the special game, which looks a lot like wipeout but with an Audi. The objective in the game is relatively simple. You try to build up as much speed as possible and then drive off the end of a large ramp. The further you fly, the higher the score. If you get a high enough score, you can unlock an Audi Apartment. I’m not sure what the required score is, and I probably won’t get it, but it’s cool for the people who get it.

In the end though, this space, like all the others except the original bowling alley, has next to no replay value.

The other space, called Sodium One is much the same story. The space includes multiple mini-games but it also asks you to purchase the full versions of these games to play at higher levels.

If the games were really fun and controlled well then fair enough, but in my opinion the hover tank game controlled very loosely and it didn’t feel very satisfying.