This week has been a busy one in the gamming world, with GDC ‘09 rolling in a lot of news have reached our ears and left us more than happy. For me the most important and resounding, is the announcement by Crytek that their engine would be coming to consoles. If you are a PC gamer such as myself, then you have to have heard of Crysis the over the top graphical wonder that made many of us upgrade our PCs; well we already knew that Crytek was working on getting the engine to consoles but the results they have presented at the GDC are just bit short from spectacular. Join us as we take a look at the new engine capabilities with the juicy videos and screenshots so far.

Here is what you need to see first, a live realtime trailer of the engine running on both PS3 and Xbox 360 showed at the GDC ‘09. Prepare to be blown away!

Here are some screenshots that show off diferent features of the engine:

It’s really no surprise that the engine handles ligthing and vegetation as well as it does, or at least as well as we can see in the video and screenshots; we will have to get more than a tech demo in order to fully judge this engine. Nevertheless so far so good, the engine is definetly looking like a winner; I expect more than one studio interested on it, specialy for the cross platform features included. If it’s as easy as Crytek claims it to be, it’s definetly going to reduce the workload for devs working on multi platform games. I just feel that to fully promote the engine, they should release a in sutdio game; maybe a remake of Crysis and Warhead all combined. They can give it a low price and release it as digital content, once people get really excited about the engine; then the sales will definetly come rolling in. Plus we gamers get to fool around with the engine and play a descent Crysis game(each Crysis game on it’s own is not much, considering it takes 4 hours to beat each one)

Well in anycase here is a list of features the engine has:

Simultaneous WYSIWYP on all Platforms

CryENGINE 3 Sandbox now enables real-time editing of multi-platform game environments; simultaneously making changes across platforms from CryENGINE 3 Sandbox running on PC, without loading or baking delays. The ability to edit anything within the integrated CryENGINE 3 Sandbox and simultaneously play on multiple platforms vastly reduces the time to build compelling content for cross-platform products.

Hot-Update for all Platforms

Changes can be made to original art asset sources (using standard art tools) for CryENGINE 3 Sandbox on PC, then CryENGINE 3 immediately and automatically converts, compresses and optimizes the content, then updates the output to all supported platforms. Developers can instantly see the effect of lighting, material and modeling changes within moments on any supported platform. Cross-platform development has never been so easy!

CryENGINE 3: Next Generation Real-Time Graphics

The CryENGINE 3 renderer provides seamless support for both indoor and outdoor environments on current platforms; and our multi-core and future-proof graphics technology ensure that CryENGINE 3 is next-gen ready. CryENGINE technology is world famous for its award winning rendering and CryENGINE 3 is no exception. CryENGINE 3 is the fastest, high-end renderer in the world, with new features specifically designed for console platforms. Benchmark-setting graphical performance, near-photorealism in indoor and wide-open outdoor environments and extra-ordinary real-time special effects are some of the hallmarks of CryENGINE technology. With CryENGINE 3, scalability across multiple platforms is a further evolution to enable great looking games – regardless of the target platform.

Flow Graph

The CryENGINE 3 simple visual editing system gives designers an intuitive interface to create and control events, triggers and other game logic. This allows designers to build complex levels without needing to write a single script.

Integrated Vegetation & Terrain Cover Generation System

CryENGINE 3 vegetation behaves according to natural rules about the desirable and allowable groun slope, surface altitude and allowable plant density, at run-time. Vegetation placement tools automatically create realistic, natural environments in a fraction of the time of traditional hand-placed systems, but still grant the freedom to position individual elements to achieve the perfect look.

Real Time Soft Particle System & Integrated FX Editor

CryENGINE 3 simplifies the creation of extremely complex explosion, fire, smoke and other special effects using next generation soft particles, which in turn can be affected by: collisions with any other objects, forces such as wind or gravity and can interact with lights and shadows.

Dedicated Road & River Tools

All worlds have paths, roads and rivers, so CryENGINE 3 features a dedicated toolset to enable instantaneous smoothing and leveling of terrain and application of materials, based on the placement of roads and river networks.

Dedicated Vehicle Creator

The CryENGINE 3 vehicle toolset allows easy creation of any vehicle type, with intuitive control over vehicle characteristics, including defining component damage and damage effects, passenger positions and functions, weapon hard-points and turrets, engine and physics parameters as well as vehicle specific special effects.

Multi-Core Support

To get the most out of modern multi-core processor architectures, CPU intensive subsystems of CryENGINE 3 such as graphics, physics, AI, networking and sound have been optimized to support multiple processors.

Real-time Dynamic Global Illumination

CryENGINE 3 features a novel real-time dynamic global illumination solution, fully optimised for current and next generation platforms. For the first time – without pre-computation or geometric limits – you can experience light-bounces, colour bleeding and specular effects in a real-time game engine – unified for all static and dynamic objects.

Deferred Lighting

The CryENGINE 3 unique deferred lighting solution allows the rendering of a vast amount of light sources with per pixel shading efficiently; and simplifies engine performance tuning across multiple platforms.

Natural Lighting & Dynamic Soft Shadows

CryENGINE 3 features near-reality natural lighting at low-cost on multiple platforms; and creates soft shadows that dynamically respond to natural movements in real time. High-resolution, perspective correct and volumetric smooth-shadow implementations are also included in CryENGINE 3.

Volumetric, Layer & View Distance Fogging

Clouds, smoke, visible gases and fog banks are all rendered realistically, allowing physical phenomena, such as; ground-hugging; realistic reduction in visibility and contrast, and interaction with dynamic lights and shadows.

Normal Maps & Parallax Occlusion Maps

CryENGINE 3 includes parallax occlusion mapping, for all supported platforms, to give a sense of depth to a surface texture applied to a polygon, to achieve realistic levels of detail without needing hi-poly models, for example the relief surface structure of a brick wall or a cobblestone street.

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

First pioneered by Crytek in 2005 and now used in most high quality graphics engines, SSAO provides a real time simulation of ambient light occlusion, to provide the real darkening of edges and corners as in the natural world. This high performance solution creates a low overhead on all platforms, with a very high quality result. CryENGINE 3 provides improved visual functionality alongside the fastest implementation of SSAO available on Xbox 360, PlayStation3 and PC.

Uber Shader Technology

CryENGINE 3 shaders are written once in a high level language, then compiled automatically to each platform. The shader output is optimized based on the artists’ settings and the 3D environment in which the shader is used. This creates high performance unique effects, such as: “cloaking”, wet, muddy, and frozen surfaces, which can be layered together and combined with other shaders, such as: metal, glass and other visual effects. CryENGINE 3 supports real time per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections, refractions, volumetric glow effects and animated textures to simulate windows, bullet holes, shiny surfaces and many other effects. CryENGINE 3 also takes advantage of the unified shader architecture of current and next-gen hardware. The combination of deferred lighting and this technology allows CryENGINE 3 to avoid the traditional shortcomings of Uber Shaders alone.

Eye Adaptation & High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting

Eye Adaptation is used to simulate the human eye’s adaptation to sudden or extreme changes in lighting conditions, like dark indoor environments suddenly transitioning to bright sunny outdoor environments, while HDR allows scenes with extreme brightness and contrast ranges to be more realistically rendered.

Pristine Motion Blur & Depth of Field

Motion Blur can be applied to individual objects (object based motion blur) and to an entire scene (screen based motion blur); Depth of Field effects can be defined easily with the multi-platform WYSIWYP editor. CryENGINE 3 now implements the highest quality for these effects at a low performance cost, across all supported platforms.

CryENGINE 3 Realistic Characters

Characters and faces are becoming features of almost all modern AAA title and Crytek are in the vanguard of the quest to achieve realistic characters in real-time graphics, as demonstrated in Crysis. CryENGINE 3 brings the most technically advanced, integrated and scalable animation and graphics technology together to deliver astonishingly real characters to cross-platform games, at no extra licensing cost.

Character Animation System

Our new character animation system considerably advances the state of the art in real-time character animation. A dedicated character editor allows animations to be previewed inside of CryENGINE 3 Sandbox, for all supported platforms, while our extremely powerful animation tools allow animators to visually define the states and transitions of a character to ensure realism is achieved in concert with aesthetic quality.

Character Individualization System

CryENGINE 3 uses an innovative attachment system for skinned, animated, or physicalized elements to be attached to the skeleton or mesh of a character. With this system it is even possible to replace entire body parts such as heads, hands, or upper and lower body – in real-time. A multiplatform, hardware-based, shape deformation system also allows flexible variation of the character meshes, supporting manual and procedurally generation to ensure a small memory footprint. An additional variation system, based on shaders can be used for dirt, decals for clothes, and camouflage shaders for the skin.

Parametric Skeletal Animation

By blending example-motions based on user-defined parameters, CryENGINE 3 delivers responsive interactive control over a character with a focus on believability. Characters in CryENGINE 3 can follow paths where the direction and speed changes smoothly or suddenly, move uphill or downhill and react to changing scenarios on-the-fly – dynamically blending animations to create a believable and realistic, yet dynamic and game-controlled representation of movement.

Procedural Motion Warping & High-End IK Solutions

Procedural algorithms like CCD-IK, analytic IK, examplebased IK or physical simulations are used to augment pre-authored animations to avoid the typical computergenerated look that is often exhibited when combining artificial and captured animations. The CryENGINE 3 scalable and cross-platform warping technique preserves the style and the content of the base motion, despite the transformations complying with the everchanging constraints.

Unique Dedicated Facial Animation Editor

The powerful Facial Animation editing tool within CryENGINE 3 Sandbox uses audio waveform analysis technology to extract phonemes (and other key features of speech) to animate facial features and provide convincing lip-sync. The sophisticated yet convenient user interface allows expressions to be defined and combined, then animated quickly and intuitively to multiple models across multiple platforms. The CryENGINE 3 video tracking tool captures movements from an actor’s face and these movements are transferred directly to the facial model in the editor, where the expressions can be com-bined with the lip sync and/or further edited by an animator.

Subsurface Scattering

Simulates the diffusion and diffraction of light transmitted through translucent objects, like ice and jade. The CryENGINE 3 unified solution can be used on in-game assets such as trees and plants or to create realistic human skin.

Advanced Modular AI System

Realistically rendered and animated characters require state of the art AI systems to intelligently respond to the game environment and maintain the illusion of realism. CryENGINE 3 features powerful, scalable and flexible AI technology to handle character behaviours with modular sensory systems (such as sight and hearing); and fully support the complex requirements of the character locomotion system. AI in CryENGINE 3 requires no additional middleware and is fully integrated for your game within CryENGINE 3 Sandbox, with WYSIWYP functionality on all platforms.

Designer-Friendly AI Editing System

CryENGINE 3 Sandbox enables designers to control basic AI behaviours using the Flow-Graph visual scripting system, placing most AI gameplay control in their hands. Simple LUA scripting enhances the variability of these behaviors, creating more complex AI responses and even extending state machine behaviors. This combination of systems enables the creation of any AI behaviour through an extremely simple WYSIWYP pipeline.

Dynamic Path Finding

Advanced 2D and 3D algorithms allow the AI navigation paths to be modified in real time in response to events which may create, modify or destroy existing paths, a critical feature for creating believable AI in highly interactive and destructible environment.

Automated Nagivation Mesh Generation

CryENGINE 3 will feature an automated navigation mesh generation for AI pathfinding unlike most waypoint-based systems, generating paths and information about the vicinity. The system is unified for indoor and outdoor areas and generated automatically, within volumes placed by designers. Generated nav-mesh supports multi-storey surfaces (such as floors in a building), special moves (jumps, climbing etc.) and adapts itself in real-time to dynamic obstacles.

CryENGINE 3 Realistic Infinite Worlds

CryENGINE 2 introduced incredibly interactive photo-realistic worlds, with huge natural environments that responded to player input and game events as if in the real world. From naturally frozen nature to fully destructible vegetation and buildings, players saw the game world as near real for the first time. CryENGINE 3 continues with this benchmark level of interactive realism in worlds limited in size only by the development budget; thanks to intelligent streaming of game data.

Natural World Effects

CryENGINE 3 features the most natural looking environments available in real-time – adding enhanced natural lighting to our existing large scale natural world representations.

CGI Quality Time of Day System

Time of day dynamically changes during a game mission to reflect sun/moon position, lighting and atmospheric conditions over any predefined day/night cycle, from a blue and foggy morning sunrise to fiery orange sunset to a clear cold moonlit night. Create visually rich time of day simulation for your game world or its locations; and achieve the most realistic or creatively surreal settings.

High Quality 3D Water

Crytek has spearheaded the creation of realistic, real-time 3D water in games, with X-Isle, Far Cry Land Crysis over the past 10 years. CryENGINE 3 water and ocean surfaces can be modified due to wind and wave direction, generating soft shoreline effects automatically where the water meets the shore or bank, depending on the shoreline contour and water depth, while caustics simulation creates the most realistic looking moving shadows and highlights in underwater environments available in real-time 3D.

Dynamic Volumetric Light Beams & Light Shaft Effects

These are used to create visually stunning light beams and shadows when light intersects with solid, highly detailed geometry, and to generate god ray phenomena in skies, on earth and through water.

Streaming

Game levels rarely fit into memory of most hardware platforms, so streaming content is often required. With the CryENGINE 3 scalable streaming solution, data is clustered for fast access, platform-specific features are utilized and data content is prepared and compressed for optimal streaming. CryENGINE 3 utilizes multiple CPUs and schedules access based on dynamic priorities, to deliver an efficient and scalable multiplatform streaming solution.

Integrated Multi-threaded High Performance Physics Engine

CryENGINE 3 physics can be applied to almost everything in a game world, including buildings, props, trees and vegetation, to realistically model reactions to forces such as: wind currents, explosions, gravity, friction and collisions with other objects, without the need of external middleware.

Interactive & Destructible Environments

All environments in CryENGINE 3 can be dynamically physicalized, regardless of their nature (wood, steel, concrete, natural vegetation, cloth, etc.). This allows procedural destruction of as much of the nvironment as the game requires. All broken objects or parts can be interactive, with realistic properties such as mass, buoyancy, etc. applied to the debris.

Advanced Rope Physics

Bendable vegetation which responds to wind, rain or character movement, realistically interactive rope bridges, and physically driven creature tentacle animations are just some of the uses to which we’ve put our rope physics technology.

CryENGINE 3 Achieve Your Vision At Maximum Speed

In 1999 Crytek started to work with a novice team on ambitious game that no existing technology could deliver. Concentrating our efforts on CryENGINE as much as our games, we improved as developers. Great tools make great developers! The benchmarks that Crytek set for graphics performance and quality are matched by the performance and quality of the development tools our internal teams and engine licensees all utilize. CryENGINE 3 features many innovations to accelerate development and ensure teams are able to maximise their own creativity without delays or painful development processes multi-platform game content.

Performance Analysis Tools

Powerful instrumentation features allow the developer to analyse engine performance in real time, create detailed memory usage reports, and run automated walkthroughs of each level to get consistent test results from build to build.

CryENGINE 3 Sandbox Development Layers

In a similar fashion to most professional art programs, CryENGINE 3 Sandbox features a layers system allowing controlled separation of a game level. By locking any elements into (up to) 256 layers, each can be worked on in parallel, exported, imported and merged. This system allows an entire team of developers to simultaneously make changes on a single level, without concern of impacting colleagues’ work. Such unequalled parallel control of levels; local, layered source control of assets; and clearly organised level data management materially increases development progress.

Polybump

Polybump, the CryENGINE 3 normal map creation tool has again been enhanced to take advantage of multicore hardware and 64-bit operating systems. Crytek developed Polybump in 2001 and shipped Far Cry in March 2004, as the first game ever to feature normal mapping, powered by Polybump. Polybump can be used as either as a standalone utility, or fully integrated with other tools, such as 3ds Max. Polybump creates a high quality surface description that allows quick extraction of surface features like normal maps (tangentspace or object-space), displacement maps, non-occluded area direction, accessibility and other properties. The extracted information can be used to render Low poly models with surface detail almost indistinguishable from higher-poly models at high-render speeds. The data is stored in a intermediate file format so it can be exported in different ways without doing the computation again. Even very high polygon counts (e.g. 10 million triangles) are processed quickly with the improved Polybump technology.

Offline Rendering

Creating streaming videos or still images from within the game is made easier by the inclusion of specific console commands which can output a scene at any arbitrary screen resolution and/or aspect ratio, including generating auto-stitched panoramic views for use on 360 degree projection video displays. Creating marketing material becomes a matter of a single button-press!

Resource Compiler

Resource Compiler Assets are compiled from their original formats to an optimized platform dependent one by the resource compiler at project build time. This allows making global changes (e.g. mipmap computation, mesh stripification) to the output data depending on presets and target platforms without affecting the final level loading times, or requiring developers to keep multiple versions of assets on hand for different platforms.

Sound and music

The sound system in CryENGINE 3 offers many features and improvements with its data-driven concept which guaranties a flawless and low-risk audio development. Each sound carries its own specification with it, so sound designers are in full control of the dynamic behaviour and the final quality of the sound.

Data-driven Sound System

Complex sounds can be easily created and delivered with studio quality while supporting any available surround sound speaker configuration up to 7.1. Multi-platform compatibility, improved data streaming, and individual performance optimization for Xbox 360 or PlayStation3 are guaranteed by the included sound library FMOD Ex.

In Game Mixing & Profiling

Integrated editor functionality and advanced sound specification tools ensure the WYSIWYP method. Turn around times of only a few seconds constantly guarantee a well mixed game in every development stage. Reviewing and polishing the game audio through network auditioning and profiling it on any target platform is easy and possible at any time.

Dynamic Sounds & Interactive Music

With minimal coding effort sounds can automatically react in a complex manner to parameters like distance, time-of-day, or battle noise using real time DSP effects. This technique provides non-repetitive and responsive audio feedback in an interactive and physicalized game world. The customizable music system reacts to any desired game event in order to give the player an interactive and movie-like emotional experience.

Environmental Audio

Sound designers can create a dense sound impression by accurately reproducing sounds from nature, with seamless blending between different environments sweetened with oneshot sounds ontop. New technology allows an ambience sound to be directional in the distance and then to open up into a surround mix the closer the player gets.

Key frame Accurate Sounds in Animations

In CryENGINE 3 sounds can now be triggered by adding them directly onto blended animations to improve implementation of all foley effects, allowing for example, limping characters over several walk cycles. Adding audio assets onto animation attachments increases character individualization efficiently.

Sound Moods

Audio mixes can be defined to match any gameplay situation. Not only volume and pitch are controllable but also DSP effects like filters and equalizers can be added. In-game the audio mix blends into the predefined sound moods in realtime and mimics the current environmental effect, for example, when driving inside a tank.

CryEngine 3 Promotional Documentation

Lately it seems that Microsoft has taken some heat because their exclusives for 2009 seem elusive at best, compared to the seemingly strong exclusive line up that Sony is preparing. However this could not be further from the truth; we have searched the net and, leaving aside many rumored titles, there is a decent number of exclusives coming to the Xbox 360 this year. The old bill does have some aces under his sleeve and this is what I found out about them.

Well some of the exclusives for this year have already been released, such as Halo Wars and Star Ocean The Last Hope;  however there are still many good exclusive titles on the works for the Xbox 360. All indicates that this will be a busy year, in regards of the many exclusives coming up for the platform, for any Xbox 360 owner. This is the list I came up with, it includes all the confirmed and relevant titles for this year is was able to get info on:

Alan Wake

This is THE game for the box on 2009! From everything i have seen on it, the game will simply rock.Yeah for some time it seemed the game was dead, with little to no update on it’s progress, but last time we checked it was alive and thriving at Remedy. It seems it has been ages already but Remedy Entertainment seems ready to confirm the title for this year. Alan Wake it’s being pitched as a psychological action thriller; by the mess up story and gameplay, we know so far rightfully so. Keep an eye out for this one, it sure seems like a winner.

Velvet Assasin

We are going back to WW2 with this game in order to relive the life of Her Magesty’s agent Violette Szabo. In the role of Violette Summer, players will have to use stealth to get behind enemy lines and blast nazi plans resistance style. Some graphics to die for and the promise of some stealth gameplay hardly seen before, seem to be the strengths for this game; at least that’s what Replay Studios would like us to think.

Lode Runner

A platform game with a level editor, far from what Little Big Planet’s Media Molecule would like you to believe, is nothing new; specially knowing that this game was released on 1983! The XBLA will be getting lots of coins and stairs this year around April.This may seem yet another remake ala Bionic Comando Rearmed, but I for one love this game getting new life on the XBLA.

Ninja Blade

After the success of ‘Ninja Gaiden’ and Itagaki refusal to continue the saga, it seemed the Xbox 360 would be ninja free this year. Thanksfully From Software is far from giving up on the genre, they got to work and produced a game with several similarities to Tecmo’s franchise. ‘Ninja Blade’ is packing up some heavy dose of blood, guts and quick time events. Not a recipe to success per se, but close to it. This one is out March 7, keep an eye out for it.

Dead Island

What better way is there to start your honey moon than crashing on a pacific island and getting attacked by the local… zombies! Is it me or zombies are more hip than ever? Well everyone knows that if there are zombies involved, it deserves at least a try. Plus the whole shortage on ammo( ala Resident Evil) will make sure that your FPS experience doesn’t seem so deja vu at least.

Halo 3 ODST

Halo is practically a synonym of Xbox, so there is no surprise that Bungie is cooking up another entry for the IP. Masterchief is on vacation this time, so you’ll take the role of a Orbital Drop Schick Trooper (ODST). Due to the insistence of Bungie on the fact that it will be a “short title”, one can do nothing but wonder if this latest entry on the franchise is merely an attempt to get on the halo train money and little more. We’ll see if Halo 3 ODST is measures up to previous entries on the Halo story and if Bungie will keep on milking the cow!

Champions Online

Super heroes in a MMORPG? Not very original if you ask us or any MMO follower, but the truth to the mater is that Champions Online does seem to have what it takes to get ahead of the rest. With an improvement on the City of Heroes Tech Engine, specially produced for this title, Cryptic Studios will let us enjoy super powered shenanigans on an open multiplayer world. User created content and the ability to play from either an Xbox 360 or a Pc, are the strong points for this gem from Cryptic.

Forza 3

So many vehicles and tracks have been included in Forza 3, that 2 discs will be needed to bring this game to your Xbox 360. To sum up, something like 400 cars and 100 tracks have been produced by Turn 10 Studios for your enjoyment. It definitely is shaping up to be one of the best and complete driving simulators to date. You will have to keep an eye out for the limited edition on Forza 3, which will include lots of goodies. Check back on Forza 3 for it’s launch on the third quarter this year.

Theseis

Theseis is a third person adventure destined for PC and Xbox 360, based on the greek mythology. One would think that after Rise of the Argonauts and before God of War III we would have a breather, but it seems that’s not in Track 7’s plans; these greek guys are determined to tell the story of 2 brother, one devoted to science and the other to mysticism, whom will have to put their differences aside in order to locate their missing father. We’ll see if this new greek studio are able to deliver on the game arena, after their success in music, artistic and cinematic productions.

Age of Conan

From developers FunCom and after it’s debut in PC,  ‘Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures’ arrives on the Xbox 360. The game is a MMO which tries to differentiate itself from the big bad winner, yeah you guessed it; World of Warcraft. How do you ask? Well it had a story more real, with heavy dose of violence and what some may call maturity. All indicated that it would be better than what if finally was on Pc, let’s hope that Conan can get the throne he deserves on the Xbox 360.

Venetica

A hybrid action and role play game, this one will have you as the death’s daughter on demon devastated Venice. Yeah, i know; wacky premise right. Well one thing is for sure, if the screenshots so far are any indication, the game graphics will not be it’s strong point. Overall it seems to recreated some of the things that have made the ‘Fable’ games so good. We’ll see what the creator of ‘Jack Keane’ have in store for us with this new IP.

Metal Slug 7

After it’s debut on the DS, with a less than stellar apearance, the trigger hapy franchise is coming to the XBLA. It seems the tactil screen of the DS didn’t deliver the graphical quality the game deserved. Nevertheless if the sales of previous installements of the franchise on XBLA are any indicattion, we can pretty much bet it all on this one’s success as well.

If you are wondering where are Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2, two of the heavy titles that MIGHT show up in 2009; on top of having no expected release dates, at least Bioshock 2 is multiplatform. So what do you think? Did i miss any big one? Or maybe some obscure project that promises to deliver?

Everyone is talking about how the PS3 will overcome all other consoles or how it will burn into nothingness, yeah most articles provide extreme views on it’s future either way; and let’s not forget the whole “<insert year> will be THE year of the PS3”. But how did we get here? Why is Sony, whom enjoyed and still enjoys it to a certain point the success of the PS2, struggling with the PS3 in third place in most charts; behind the Xbox 360 and the Wii? Well let’s see just what the hell went wrong with the seemingly unstoppable and mighty Sony.

These in order of severity are in my opinion, the reasons why the PS3 is in third place right now.

5 – Launch price tag and weak launch line up

At $499 the 20GB PS3 at launch, was 200 hundred dollars more expensive than the basic Core Xbox 360. That combined with a weak launch line up, out of the 14 games available at launch, only Resistance: FOM and Ridge Racer 7 were hits. We know we were getting a lot for that price, after all the PS3 was one of the first and cheapest Blue Ray players; but a time Blue Ray was still off the map and HD DVD was coming up, this wasn’t much of a good thing.

4 – Removal of PS2 compatibility

I have seen people debate over this, some say it’s a feature no one will miss but I will surely help if the price is less and others actually miss it; so all I can say is that I don’t think the few dollars they saved with this move are worth the frustration many PS2 gamers felt and still feel with the new PS3. Even Jack Trenton(Sony America boss in 2007) commented on this saying that the removal of PS2 backward compatibility wasn’t “dramatically reducing Sony’s cost of manufacturing” instead it was done to ”encourage buyers of the entry-level PlayStation 3 to purchase more games designed specifically for the new system.”

3 – Marketing fiasco (overconfidence and the six axis controller)

Remember the whole bet on finding a PS3 at a retail store? Jack Trenton would pay $1200 if you brought him a PS3 soon after launch, which you had found at a retail store. Let’s just say that the PS3 did not sell as Trenton expected and many people would have gotten rich if there was any truth to that proposition. Furthermore Sony continued to expel overconfidence with the whole Six Axis controller, ditching the proven Dual Shock format at launch; thankfully they later fix that mistake by re-introducing the Dual Shock 3 as the next best thing. However the damage to Sony’s reputation had already been dealt. All this led to the PS3 being trashed all across America, with the typical Gamestop employee being an example of this; not to mention how many retail stores practically HIDE the console and it’s games.

2 – Lack of online features

Ok the PSN NOW has little if at all to envy to the XBLA, however that was not always the case. At launch and for the better part of 2007, the online features in a PS3 were practically inexistent; you couldn’t even send a message to someone in mid game, not to mention that there was no such thing as trophies. Last generation, the Xbox innovated (in consoles at least) with the Live service; that really changed gaming and brought the birth of what we dubbed the “new gamer era”. Sony’s “mistake” was focusing on making a strong console, with lots of power and stability (lower failure rate) and rather than focusing on its online interface; which now is just as important. After looking at the story of the PS3, the PSN seems almost like an afterthought or at least feels rushed.

1 – Lack of development support

But the top mistake that Sony did with the PS3, was that although it produced one of the most powerful computing devices ever, there was practically no research done on the tools needed to develop software to run in the platform. Giving the developers the PS3 to develop for was like giving a Ferrari to someone who could barely drive and one must not look further than the awful multiplatform titles released on 2007 and the better part of 2008 to realize that. Games like Burn Out Paradise and Farcry 2 really changed this, at there was practically no difference between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Thankfully this seems to be a thing of the past, but to some extent it will haunt the PS3 forever; even after the Killzone 2 engine is released and the alleged support network established between studios for developing PS3 exclusives.

We all know the made them, but have they learnt from them? I think that the lack of PS1 games on the PSN store, lack of media available and the poor marketing Sony is doing lately is any indication… then hell no! Someone needs to go in there and put the house of Sony in order for god’s sake! What do you think? Did I miss some other Sony/PS3 related screw up? Have they learned from them?

A couple of years ago, no one would have understood that title; not because the consoles didn’t exist, but because DLC was anything but “Downloadable Content”. We PC gamers are old time users of the “DLC”, after all we’ve always had mods, map packs, expansions, patches and the sort; however the console crowd is relatively new to this and how could they not be since up until this generation no console had a proper hard drive to speak of.  So both the Xbox 360 and the PS3’s gamers enjoy DLC  in some form, however as of late(okay maybe since last year) Microsoft has been securing DLC for Xbox 360 multi platform games with large sums of money in order to gain the competitive edge. Sony’s response? Basically “hey it’s your game, if you want to sell less in one platform; it’s your problem”. As bad as that sounds, should console manufactures have to really pay for DLC? Do we want that market to exist? Is any party thinking on us, the gamers? Should we pay for it?

First of all, i think that the ones that will always have a win-win situation here are the devs; because they can make money by accepting Microsoft “bribe” lets say and also by the DLC itself. This is the case of the really cool GTAiV’s expansion The lost and The damned. Furthermore Xbox 360 owners also have exclusive DLC for Fallout 3, another hit multiplatform game. Microsoft really made an effort to bring exclusive content for these critically acclaimed top games and that of course will show in the charts. After all, if you havc 2 identical versions of a game but one has the option to increase it’s gameplay value for a few more dollars; i think you, as well as i, would choose this last version.

Is Sony screwing itself over by refusing to pay for DLC? I think they obviously losing sales, but very little in that;  because multiple console owners are not that common. And if we count the fact that Sony is still losing money on the PS3, i think they might have the right attitude on this. After all isn’t the developers the ones that should be concerned in getting their game to as much people as possible? I don’t want to sound all high and mighty, but does creativity and fan support all have a price? I know that when all is said and done, it’s always about money; but i would like to think otherwise.

On the other hand i really like that Microsoft is willing to spend money to bring users new content and i would like to think(i might be a little naive here), that thanks to them DLC is getting made; regardless that it’s being done for just one platform. Maybe Maguire is right and PS3 owners might get their DLC version as time passes by; but i wouldn’t be counting on it. So out of all the parties involved in this process, i think however misguided their offerts maybe, Microsoft is the only one thinking on us; the gamers.

But one question still remains, should we have to pay for DLC? The answer is yes … and no. Think of it from a consumers point of view, you get what you pay for; thus obviously paid DLC will tend to be better. On the other hand, think of it from the devs point of view. Free goodies, bring happiness to consumers; happy consumers are loyal consumers and provide free advertising. Thus your next big game might have a loyal fanbase BEFORE it’s released. In conclusion there isn’t really one single answer on this, both options not only can but MUST coexist.

Ok, enough of my ramblings on this; i am feeling quite spent right now. What about you? What do you think? Yey MC, boo Sony? DLC, paid or not? Let me and the rest of the gang hear your take on this!

We all have read one, haven’t we? One of those articles that come up in whatever site you are browsing, which have a controversial title and deal with current events/products. Let’s take the recent Killzone 2 debacle as example. I really don’t care about the articles written before the game came out, as they are bound to be highly speculative, but even after it actually came out(2 weeks after the demo and months after the beta) it was still receiving hate articles when i think every decent gamer, regardless of any feelings of personal taste or brand loyalty, can say that IT IS A GOOD GAME. And it’s not only Killzone 2, it happened to all major releases last year as well(granted, probably not nearly as much); such as Gears of War 2, Resistance 2, Little Big Planet and so on. Notice anything in that list? Yeah, they are all exclusives!

So what does that tells us? Hey it’s no big secret, a war is going on between the PS3 and the Xbox 360; and that’s reflected on the articles written. One can compare multiplatform games, as sites such as gametrailers.com can’t get enough of, but the real deal is in the exclusives. At the end of the day, the exclusive games are the ones that can tilt the balance one way or the other. That’s why they are are often quite popular with BOTH crowds, as they are expectant not only of their consoles performance but the competitiors’ as well.

The writers take avantaje of that by writing articles either praising or ditching and incredibly some times both, in order to gather attention from their audience; but you know what the best part is? That no mater whatever highly delusional crap they are writing and how people even know that’s the sole reason why they wrote that particular article, they STILL RECEIVE THE ATTENTION. You know that as the saying goes, there’s no accounting or disputing for taste; but when someone claims the earth is flat, that’s bound to receive attention, regardless if it’s positive or negative.

Do they all write these articles solely for “attention”? No of course not, money and brand loyalty are involved as well! But i think the real motivation is simply that ATTENTION. But can we call these articles expressions of journalism? After all they are not objective and don’t really bring anything to the community … My opinion is that these articles give us exactly what we want: controversy, speculation and discussions on the subject of taste.  They are written simply because we want them to be written. Therefore expect hate, crap, suck articles and the sort when browsing for info on the next big exclusive hit; regardless of which console it’s for.

When all is said and done, we gamers just want play and be entertained; that’s what we look in a game, that and that’ its worth whatever money we paid for it. These articles don’t help us with any of this, they neither give us an unbiased fact based description on a game (to see if we would like it or not) nor an in depth review so that we can justify to ourselves the 60 bucks coming out of our pockets for it. But as much as I wished them gone, as long as fanboys thrive and these articles receive the attention they are looking for, i am affraid they are here to stay.

Have you ever heard of Valve’s digital pc game download service called Steam? Well if you haven’t, then prepare to get a cash course because you will need it in order to play these games. Basically you set up a free account with them, download a software that manages your games and then you buy whatever games you want from their numerous catalog. Want to know the best deals for your money there? Coming up: the list.

• Half Life Source

This is one of the finest games from Valve and the start of their main franchise, i still remember the scares i got with those damn creatures “chirping” in the dark or the great A.I. found on enemy soldiers(for it’s time) Anyhow the original Half Life has received an graphical overhaul by using the relatively new Source engine from Valve as well. For those of you who missed the original or just want a to experience the game again, there is no better alternative than having the same good old game with stunning new graphics.

• Sacred Gold

There have been many Diablo’s look-alikes, clones and so forth;  one that really stands out from the pack, it’s Ascaron’s Sacred. There is noting really innovative with the game, besides the fact that each character class has a completely different story within the game and maybe the huge game map; nevertheless what is there it’s really excellently accomplished. It’s one of those games, if you like RPGs that is, it’s easy to pick up and very difficult to put down; there are no turns here, but to me the effect feels like Civilization’s “one more turn” dilemma. Just that in this case it’s probably a quest instead of a turn! Plus here it comes packed with it’s expansion Underworld, so you probably have like 50 house of gameplay in total.  That packed with multi player options, is definetly worth 10 bucks.

• Nexus - The jupiter incident

Nexus is really an odd thing, born out of the remain of Imperium Galactica 3’s demise, it really surprised many people with it’s graphics and tactical fleet combat. If you ever wondered what is like to command a fleet of space ships, ala Sheridan on B5 or Ackbar on SW, then this is the game for you. Launching fighters, boarding enemy ships/installations, targeting specific ship systems and much more is at your disposeal to take down enemies. Years later from it’s debut, it’s still an awe inspiring game due to it’s graphics; watching your ship leaving a plasma trail due to it’s engine, while it’s living quarters rotates to create a G force and listening to great atmosphere music it’s still a beautiful experience unto itself. If you want to have a fling with a tactical space RTS, then this is your chance, but if you are a genre fan; how come you still haven’t played it!?

• Psychonauts

It’s really hard to describe this game, i mean “a wonderful third person original fun platform adventure” just doesn’t seem to do it justice and sounds even worst. But that’s what Psychonauts is, a masterful combination of platformer with the humor, story telling and dialogue options often found in adventure games. Furthermore the whole look of the game it’s really original, it kinds of reminds me of American Mcgee’s Alice; although of course in a much ligther tone. In any case this is real treat for adventure/platformer fans, to me it wasn’t much for the platformer but the great story telling that really hook me up. We have a winner gentlemen!

• Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

Brother’s pitch is a tactical squad shooter take on ww2 and for the most part they really got it right. You have great authenticity, atmosphere and of course tactics you can give to your squad_ but it really falls short from excellent in some aspects. Nevertheless what you have here, at it’s very worst, an excellent ww2 first personal shooter experience. If you are looking for a COD WAW replacement until you can come up with those 50 or so bucks, this is a really cheap and excellent alternative.

• Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition

THE best RPG/FPS hybrid in my opinion until Fallout 3 showed up, this great title is often overlooked when looking back on gaming; i don’t know why since it not only was a smash hit back then but today it plays pretty darn good as well. Furthermore with this version that includes multiplayer and a mission editor, you really are getting your money’s worth.  Conspiracies, terrorists, robots and even aliens all included with some great story telling; you really can’t ask for more.  So if you are looking for a “meaningful” FPS experience or are an RPG fan wanted to get down an dirty with an FPS, this is your chance.

• Beyond Good and Evil

A simple beat em’ up at first glance, don’t let this fool you. You are looking at an superb third person action adventure, with strong stealth game elements and the best of it al, taking animals! Great action sequences, mixed with great story telling and plenty of stealth to go around; make up this excellent game.  Some vehicle segments also help to keep up the pace with some variety. All in all it’s a great way to spend the time until Beyond Good and Evil 2 arrives.

• Rome: Total War Complete

Both Gold and Alexander, whichever fancies you, are a must get for any strategy fan and damn well worth the ten bucks; the fact that you will get BOTH these games for that money is beyond superb. We are talking about masterpieces, well technically only one because after Alexander was more of like a “grand mod” of it; but nevertheless both excellent games and you can’t call you a strategy fan if you haven’t try them or at least Total War series game. What is there to say? Historical recreation, managing of cities, grand armies on the map and epic real time battles; perfect for the so called “arm chair” commanders, and i am proud to say i consider myself among their ranks.

• IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946

There seems to be a shortage of flight simulators as of late and no, HAWX doesn’t count; all indications say it’s more arcade focus than simulator. IL-2 Sturmovik now, that is a simulator;  400 different planes, 200 missions, historical campaigns, realistic flight models, what if scenarios, online play and tons of stuff make this THE most complete simulator out there. A real bang for your buck. If you are a flight sim junkie, not even the ww2 period can put you off; you have to try this one. WW2 air combat simulations have never been this complete nor this good.

• Civilization III Complete

What is there to say!? It’s a civ game for 5 bucks for god sake, it’s definitely a no brainer. Specially when you can’t afford it’s little brother which eats up 6 times as much money; okay, the 3d graphics upgrade do chip in. In any case this great 4x title for only 5 bucks it’s a must get, however be warned if you are not into deep strategic thinking; this is not for you. RTS junkies stay away! Only people well acquainted with the “just one more turn” syndrome are allowed!

Well that’s it, these are my ten games you should really take a look over; specially to Steam; if you haven’t done so already. On a side note, I really wanted to write “… under 10 minutes… ” but that was pushing it too far, for any Internet connection; 1 hours makes more sense! Well what do you think about the list? Is some masterpiece missing?

If you have seen the latest trailer on wolvie’s latest gaming adventure, you probably are as suprised and incredibly deligthfuly so as me, with how the game is coming. But as we have been fooled far too many times in the past with movie games, in fact almost everytime some company does the smoke and mirros trick with a flashy trailer; thus this could still be very well be another big fat flop…  So how come i still feel this is going to be the best game ever!?

Before going any further, here is the trailer for those of you that missed it:

Let’s enumerate the strong points so far for this game:

1. Wolverine is on it
2. Raven Software is deveoping it (these guys have some very cool games under their belt)
3. Lots of action sequences, with what i can guess are quick time events
4. Claw Missile Deflection? That’s just cool!
5. Geat story
6. Cool graphics

Do all this means is going to be a great game? I don’t know; frankly if it’s just going to end up as a beat ‘em up with quickies, then they can keep their game. I think that best case scenario, it will be something along the lines of Heavenly Sword; cool looking game, with simple controls, lots of quick time events and tremendous actions seques and great stoy telling. Can we sincerely expect more? It’s not like it’s going to redefine the genre, beat ‘em up have changed little if at all in the last twenty years.

But is that a bad thing? Not at all, I think that the game will be a blast; although a short, with little replay value and not very challenging one. We’ll see when the final product is done and the fat lady sings; but i trust Raven to deliver at least an average action experience to our gaming devices.  The question is … what do YOU think?

One can’t help but really chuckle every time one of these top dogs releases some numbers, may it be console numbers, sales, online service clients, whatever; only to be met by another such announcement from whoever wasn’t first. I guess they both need to reassure their clients that they “are not losing”. But there’s is something fishy about some numbers released and I intend to get to the bottom of it.

Numbers can lie! Sorry but i needed to open with that, make sure no one is on the wrong page here. Numbers can lie, they are not set in stone and whatever truth they hold can be manipulated into a seemingly truth but a lie nonetheless. Want a clear cut example? Go here.

Now that we got that out of the way, there are numbers from these two companies I am very concerned about; from Sony, as doubt was raised by Microsoft’s UK Xbox Chief, y would like to know if Sony is manipulating the numbers or not. Think about it this way, one can have as many accounts as he or she likes in a PS3; so is Sony counting every account on every PS3 or just one account per machine? If it’s the later then that means something like 98% of all PS3 owners have a PSN account, something that at this day and at age it’s still something difficult to believe.

However Sony is not the only one that’s toying around with it’s numbers, what about Microsoft? Well they claim to have sold over 28 million consoles right? But out of all those consoles,  how many are hardware malfunction replacements? Ah “Hardware Malfunction” doesn’t it sound better than RROD, E74 Error and the new adjective “bricked”? Sadly many proud xbox owners are faced sooner or later with the experience of having RROD, some even have it multiple times; and if we are to believe people posting on forums and such, then there are many people on their 3rd and 4th consoles. So the new remplacements, if you are lucky to get a new one and not refurbished one, do they count in the sales total? After all it’s a console derived to client isn’t it? There is also some people that are not covered by the warranty, the 3 years expired or in some rare cases because their XBOX died of something else than RROD ( basically if it’s something else than RROD you are screwed, however you can screw them back by making it RROD. Go here for suggestions on how) So should they count because they bought their console TWICE?

I know what you are thinking,” so what if Sony counted some more users or if Microsoft squeezed some double XBOXs in there, it’s not like they are going to make a difference in the final number”. And my response is, that’s not the point; the point is that in a self persecuted slightly paranoid way; we are being lied to. And that’s something i for one, don’t like. Plus you never know what difference they can make until someone does count them out.

Well I guess we will continue to see numbers thrown around, from both sides of the fence, never really knowing EXACTLY what they mean. At least we know that if someone is lying, then everybody is; because after all, you always have to match up to the competition.

UPDATE: As someone pointed out elsewhere, PSN accounts include those set up through the PSP and the web interface; so that does make the numbers much more believable. It would be interesting to see how many accounts were created through each one of the interfaces though…

Nathan Hale is alive! No pussy headshot can kill resitance’s signature bad ass hero, like all blockbuster protagonists;  sooner or later Insomiac will bring him back, it’s just a mater of time. Now it just happens that day may be sooner than we expected…

Some very gaming devoted people have noticed in Insomniac’s Twitter account the following comment:  “Preparing to reveal some news tomorrow about Insomniac…shhh!” I know, I know; it can mean anything! New Ratchet and Clanket, DLC for R2 or maybe episodic content but ever since i read this article (which for all intent and purposses might be random nonsense); i can’t shake this feeling that Resistance 3 just might be around the corner …

The day when finally the latest installment in the Resident Evil franchise will hit all major consoles is approaching, the 13th seems an adequate date for such a survival horror game to make it’s comeback. Now I as a long time Resident Evil fan (played all of them, including the demo for this new installment);  wonder… Has Resident Evil “lost the horror”?

I can still remember walking through the halls of the Raccon City’s Police Precinct, fighting off zombies and solving puzzles; when suddenly looked up a red alien looking creature with blood dripping from what we can guess its his mouth staring back at me or suddenly coming across the Nemesis monster and trying to escape it (thankfuly no one ever bother to teach him how to open doors) … now that’s horror!!;) But seriously, the game created a tense atmosphere worthy of a survival horror game; which in my opinion is not so much the case for Resident Evil 5.

Resident Evil 2 is the best Resident Evil sequel ever, it really marked a turning point as it solidified the presence of the genre in consoles; and by genre i do mean “Survival Horror”. Now every game seems to have a little survival, after all generally to die is perceived as a bad thing (unless you are playing Silent Hill, another great survival horror game, in which case you’ll know that’s not always the case… ). But the “Horror” part, that’s a little more exclusive.

Now I have played several times to the Resident Evil 5 demo by now and i can’t seem to get not tiny bit scared or excited whatever about anything on it and let’s not forget there doesn’t seem to have a single damn puzzle in the entire demo; the most you can do it’s examine something. Ok, it’s a given that Resident Evil’s puzzles where never that hard; but to be totally absent? That’s just not right. The only familiar thing i feel is the pain in the ass of having to stop to aim, but that’s one of the things you can get tense about; however this doesn’t mean i like it either.

Maybe i am just being paranoid and the game when is finally released will make me shut the hell up, but i have a feeling that will not be the case; and if the reviews out so far  are any indication (in most cases however they aren’t), the final game will have little left of what Resident Evil was originally.  However i can understand the need for developers to take the game into a mainstream adventure/third person shooter way, like they did to certain extent with Resident Evil 4; it will definitely mean more units sold and money for them. However all in all, it doesn’ mean i have to like it.

Nevertheless the game sure does look great and plays even better as a co-op adventure, be sure to pick it up if you are into that kind of thing. You can check it’s review here.