Obvious Diversion

There was a decent showing of playable PS3 games on the floor which was great and more than I expected. It speaks well of how far 3rd parties are in their development cycle and should calm any fears of there not being enough games at launch.

The Best PS3 Game at E3: Heavenly Sword

Heavenly Sword was head and shoulders above any other PS3 game there. Visually, it reminded me a great deal of Soul Caliber with highly stylized moves and a flow that seems natural, but instead of two people in the the ring, you find yourself fighting many many more. It easily had the biggest crowd around it at the Sony booth and will hopefully be available at launch. If you want a PS3, you’ll want a copy of Heavenly Sword to go with it.
Heavenly Sword Video

PS3 Games I Played

Heavenly Sword

Comment above.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Gorgeous, but odd. Easily the best looking Sonic you’ll ever see, but some of the environments and effects seems way too realistic in look for the cartoonyness that is the Sonic character.

Gundam Mobile Suit

Visually impressive, although extremely spare in features. Everything looked crisp and real in a way I hadn’t seen on the Xbox 360.

Gundam Mobile Suit Video

Resistance: Fall of Man

As a first person shooter, it looked good with very impressive fire and smoke effects, but visually couldn’t stand up to PC crownholder Crysis. That may be an unfair comparison, but it’s worth pointing out that the visual cutting edge will continue to belong to expensive PC setups.

Grand Turismo HD

A lot of the people watching this game were grumbling. It looked great. There’s no question about that. But, did it look better than the last GT for PS2? A little, but the difference seemed subtle. People stood around and studied it as if observing an oil painting in a museum, but no one walked away shocked or impressed by the improvements. It’s strange to see us so spoiled visually by these games, but it’s the truth of where we are at.

Formula 1 06

Visually crisp, but ultimately nothing to write home about.

Games I Watched

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

This wasn’t out on the show floor, but there was a presentation by the development team you could watch. The game allows you to put a team of four marvel characters together to fight your way though various levels of traditional bad guys. This game looked really nice with great shadowing. It allows four players to play the game online and also has a one player mode that lets you actively switch between the four characters in your team. The one player mode looked less compelling, but playing this with three of your friends looks like a lot of fun. I found myself fairly interested in this one and would consider this one to look forward to. (It’s also coming out on Xbox 360 and Wii.)

Virtua Tennis 3

This often looked like watching real tennis on television.

Genji

There were some neat heatwave and fire effects, but overall this game was unimpressive with low-res textures and poly counts that seemed too low. This was more than likely the result of it being early in it’s development cycle.

Games Not seen

Final Fantasy XIII

Metal Gear Solid

Note that Metal Gear Solid 3 was only shown as a CGI movie on the big screen. People seemed excited by this, but I didn’t see anything that looked like gameplay and I’m not going to swallow a promo movie as anything real.

Some Thoughts

All in all, people seemed underwhelmed at what they saw at the Sony booth, with a nice exception being Heavenly Sword. Yes, the games were prettier than what the Xbox 360 offered, but not dramatically so. There’s no question that this is the starting point for ps3 games and it’s bound to get better over the life of the system, but for now, it was simply underwhelming and the sense could be felt not only on your own, but in your conversations with those around you.

I absolutely do believe that the PS3 is better than the Xbox 360 from a purely hardware point of view. As both PS3 and Xbox 360 development matures, I expect the PS3 versions of games to be visually superior provided developers take the time to take advantage of the PS3s hardware. The PS3’s inclusion of a blu-ray drive is also very nice allowing for 50 GB of storage on a single disc versus the 360’s 9GB.

All these extra features though come at a price increase, largely because that blu-ray drive. Will consumers be willing to pay it? I’ll get into that in my competitive analysis.