The Obligatory E3 Wish List
By Jared Newman | Friday, May 29, 2009 at 7:17 pm
The run up to the Electronic Entertainment Expo is always full of predictions, rumors and promises, but I’m tired of peering into the crystal ball. Instead of guesswork, here are my wants and needs for the games industry’s biggest trade show:
From Microsoft: Word on the street is that the Xbox 360 will get a motion-sensing camera to compete with Nintendo’s Wii. No thanks. I’m pretty happy with the Xbox 360’s thumbstick gaming, and I’d rather see Microsoft wait on motion control until the next console cycle, when the company can gather a full stable of game developers behind it. Instead, lets see Hulu support over Xbox Live. A robust gaming handheld, as rumored, would be cool, too.
From Nintendo: This is a tough one. Conventional wisdom holds that The Big N will focus on games instead of hardware this year, maybe with a Zelda or Mario-related announcement to please the fanboys. I’d like to see something that uses the Wii MotionPlus in a mind-blowing way. If such a game involves any Nintendo icons, so be it.
From Sony: Cut the price of the Playstation 3 already, jeez. Seriously though, the most likely rumor — that of a UMD-less PSP — is the one that I like. I desperately want to see what happens when a game console ditches physical media, and Sony has the chance to be ahead of the curve.
From Game Publishers: It’d be nice to hear that the old way of piling up game releases around the holidays is being phased out. Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera has a story today on why this may not happen — basically, there’s still a market for all those games, so no reason to hold back — but as a gamer it’s frustrating. This spring was fruitful for good games, but I think we’re headed for a dull summer before the usual fall/winter pounding.
I’ll be covering the show here in Los Angeles, starting with Microsoft’s Monday morning press conference. In the meantime, feel free to offer up your own hopes and dreams for the future of gaming.
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Rumor: New Console to Host Microsoft’s Motion Cam | Technologizer Says:
June 15th, 2009 at 3:35 pm[…] said before that Microsoft should wait until the next console generation to introduce motion controls. […]
May 30th, 2009 at 5:26 am
I don’t think Sony will ditch physical media: Sony is a company creating products solely to push their own data-carriers: all their camcorders/camera’s use Memory-stick, an expensive, slow cash-cow of Sony’s. The PSP was a platform they tried to launch UMD with, whic acording to Sony would be the next big thing to watch movies and listen to music with… Luckily it didn’t turn out that way :p
So imo it is possible the PSP loses the UMD (Fianlly!!!) but I think it will just be replaced by another Sony-only storage-device. Hopefully something solod-state, but I fear we’re gonna see a blu-ray version of the UMD…
May 30th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Hey Ben,
The latest rumor says we might have it both ways. Hmm:
http://kotaku.com/5273208/
May 30th, 2009 at 11:18 am
I believe Sony is taking the “upgrading components and keeping the price near the same” strategy on the PS3 and PSP. Unfortunately, there isn’t that much to upgrade on a console, just the hard drive primarily. I feel if Sony is not going to drop the price, then give hardware emulation of older games back.
And the PSP hasn’t changed all that much since its launch; just a size and weight reduction and a better screen on the PSP-3000s. There has only been one price drop in its five-year history; and I think that it still costs too much. I would really like to see it lose the UMD drive also, and for backwards compatibility; run disk images stored on a Memory Stick; the same with PS1 and maybe PS2 games (if it has a powerful set of hardware).