[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uToBarLr_U[/youtube]
If this was the Tokyo Game Show without the general public then there are going to be crush injuries on Saturday.
The first two days of the world’s premier video game show are now business days (although playing videogames with the PVC-clad girls that staff TGS is a funny kind of business) so you only have to queue for 45 minutes, rather than several hours, for a go at the most popular titles. I gave up quickly because, while I like to think I’m all right at games, I was getting murdered (and laughed at) by all of the game journalists and developers.
There were some impressive titles on show, though. Mirror’s Edge from Dice, Yakuza 3 from Sega, and Street Fighter 4 from Capcom were all drawing crowds, although it’s lots of violence that is unlikely to bring a new kind of gamer to Sony’s PlayStation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Nintendo scorns TGS for its own private event.
With the PlayStation 3 stuck at $399 in the US, versus $199 for an Xbox 360 without a hard disk, Sony has the console most in need of compelling content. The two things that looked like they might do the job are Home - the PlayStation’s long-delayed (and still delayed) online community – and LittleBigPlanet.
Sony kept the punters on Home strictly regulated, and it’s easy to make a networked service work under controlled conditions, but it looked pretty and the idea of your own apartment in a 3D world is easy to get across.
LittleBigPlanet, meanwhile, is a joy. It’s basically an old-fashioned platform game, but with beautiful design, co-operative play across a network, and tools for users to very easily design their own levels (SCE’s US chief executive Jack Tretton had a level made for his financial presentation at E3 in the YouTube clip above).
Kazuo Hirai, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, told me that it’s a title for which he has very high hopes, and if anything can move the PS3 this Christmas, LittleBigPlanet is it.
