Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: Eight Days, PS3, PS3 Exclusives, SCEE, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony, The Getaway
Sony’s new head honcho Shuhei Yoshida (the new Phil Harisson but not bald and English) has been talking with Sony Europe’s independent blog ‘ThreeSpeech’. Yoshida has been with Sony since 1993 and claims credit in the interview for convincing Sony to invest in the PlayStation brand.
Here’s what he had to say about The Getaway and Eight Days – two games recently cancelled by SCEE.
“There are many new ideas that sound very interesting, but we don’t know whether they would really work, or how much it would take to accomplish our vision – that’s why we use the early pre-production stage to try new ideas and measure how much it would take to develop the product. With all that understanding, and with all the other projects that are going on – perhaps other projects are at the same stage and demanding lots of resources from many fronts, because we support many platforms in PS3, PSP, PS2 and PSN – there are more things we want to do than we can, given the number of people and resources. So, it was not like Eight Days was in jeopardy: it was making progress. But it was more about business situations and priorities.”
He also talked about PS3 exclusivity.
Q: I’m wondering about Sony’s policy regarding exclusive PS3 games – it leans more towards internal development rather than paying third parties for exclusives. Are you re-evaluating that policy?
SY: My role is to run first-party development, and we are always exclusive. Because, in this generation, it costs much more to develop one product, it’s just natural for third-party publishers trying to recoup the investment from multiple platforms. I think that’s pure economic pressure, pushing most of the third parties to move from some exclusive titles to more multi-platform titles. Because we know that is the trend, we, as a company, can invest in our first-party studios; in terms of exclusive titles, our role becomes more important.
As far as I can see, with major publishers like Activision and EA, their major titles will be day-and-date with the Xbox 360 and their quality will be really good. And some of the titles, I expect, will have something extra because of the PS3’s abilities and the space on the Blu-ray format.
He gave us a pretty good insight there but I still wish those games hadn’t been canceled.
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: Echocrome, Elephunk, PS Store, PS3, PSN, Puzzle Games, Sony
This was reported last week but it’s one of the few things I didn’t get around to, well now I have. Black and white puzzler Echochrome was meant to appear on the PS Store in Europe last week but was, for an unknown reason, delayed. With this being the week of 2.40 could it be that Sony’s puzzler is getting trophy support added to the EU version (with the US version being patched o’course). Hopefully this is the case Echochrome trophies would be cool. I already have an American version of the game but for those who are yet to purchase it’ll be up on the PS Store this week (hopefully).
Secondly the next game to be delayed was another anticipated title from the PSN, Elephunk. This was meant to be hitting Europe this coming Thursday but has been delayed hopefully to add trophy support to the Lemmings-esque game. This game does intrigue me and I’ll be looking at picking it up if it does appear.
It had been rumored for a while and did turn up in a leaked PS Store content list but now it’s pretty much confirmed. The ESRB (American ratings board) has rated a new Ratchet & Clank game: Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest For Booty. Like I said this was rumored a while back and could possibly be some R&C DLC or possibly a new game but is more likely to be a PSN game.
This has got to be announced at E3 next week it’d be weird if it wasn’t.
This is the announcement I was alluding to in the previous post. I’ve been having talks with Mysor and we’ve decided that it’d be cool to do a podcast. Many of the guys from the previous forums and stuff will know that i’ve been clamoring to make a podcast for AGES and now it’s about to happen.
We currently do not know when the 1st podcast will be recorded but it is likely to happen within the next week or two. We’re just ironing out a few details.
I’m really quite excited about this new venture as it’s even more uncharted territory than many of the projects that have gone before. There should hopefully be a guest on the show that week (i’m still waiting for conformation) so it should be a good one. The podcast will definitely be available from here and PCPG and quite possibly iTunes. So watch this space!
I would like to make another announcement. Over the past few months i’ve been writing sparsely for another website. Fear not readers I am not leaving you but I do have a rather big announcement. As of next week XeNonX and PC gaming forum/website ‘PC-Progamers’ will be ‘linked’ if ya like. Myself and PC-Progamers founder Sam ‘Mysor’ Van Der Zee have decided to create a link between the two sites to provide best of both console and PC gaming news and such.
This new merger will not affect either of the two sites in any major way. I will still continue to write daily on the blog and the usual stuff will go on at PCPG but this should help strengthen both sites and will help create a host of new features to be shared between here and PCPG.
The first of these new features is to be announced soon (right about now, it’ll just look better in a new post). Can you now see why I was advertising for new writers.
Whoo a bit of rock-goddery here with myself and Ads getting a very nice 100% score on Guitar Hero III. Yeah it might be on medium but still that’s pretty sweet. I don’t usually like to gloat about Guitar Hero/Rock Band scores but personally think thats a pretty decent score for two non-hardcore Guitar Hero players. Hey, you can only beat what’s in front of you.
Next stop Through The Fire & Flames :).
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: Cell Shaded, New Screenshots, Prince Of Peria
I really like the new look POP the cell shaded graphics look really nice I can’t wait to see some gameplay footage – E3 perhaps? Looks like Ubisoft are doing a good job with this one. Not played a Prince Of Persia game before but i’m tempted to pick ’em up on the cheap. Do I need more to play?
You can check out the rest of the screens at Kotaku
There seemed to be a lot of problems involving Sony’s 2.40 firmware update last week so much so that Sony had taken it down. It’s been down almost a week now and Sony have announced that the new 2.41 firmware will be hitting “midweek”. Or at least that’s what Sony’s customer services have said. I’d really like to see an official release from Sony sometime soon. I’d be nice to see that Sony’s customer services have the right info though because they’re not the most believable bunch. “Yes you will recieve your game in 28 days Mr. Barlow”. 3 months I had to wait to get Everybody’s Golf back! *rant over*.
Watch this space people!
I’ve had Rock Band for a while now but have never noticed this before. I was playing through the ‘solo tour’ mode when I thought i’d dabble with the bonus unlockable songs in the game. After beating a few songs this is what came up as the next song in the playlist, ‘Timmy & The Lords Of The Uunderworld’. Sure enough it was as I had expected, the song Timmy and his band perform in the “Timmy 2000” episode of South Park.
This is pretty cool that not only are Harmonix providing players with a massive ammount of great rock songs but stuff like this from TV shows. It would be great if some other great South Park stuff came to Rock Band. Does ‘Uncle Fucker’ have guitar in it?
XeNonX 