Leave Luck to Heaven #19: Sony Overcomes Networking @ E3
For a company that should have been focused on apologies for their network Sony still came to E3 strong. Nintendo seems to have taken a large focus this year (especially when fans are writing the articles *cough*) but Sony also came to the show with new hardware and interesting game choices.
The game choices seem interesting to me because two of the biggest, Bioshock Infinite and Resistance 3, have no Move support. In fairness this is still up in the air for Resistance 3 but Bioshock 3 will absolutely not support Move. This seems weird because they make the claim that their motion control is somehow more mature than others. At the same time maybe Sony is right not to push this since porting to the Wii for third-party games would become much easier. The big game that will feature support for Move will be NBA 2K12, which from what I understand is a basketball game.
The more targeted innovation for games was a push for 3D TVs. Once again this will be great for Sony, since their current push seems to be their 3D TVs. A lot of games showed up on the floor with this, but once again Bioshock Infinite opted out on this feature. This is probably because it is also on the PC and Xbox 360, which aren’t slated to pick up 3D games till much later in the year.
Now for new hardware, the big thing was the Playstation Vita. This is Sony’s answer to the 3DS. The big news for this is the price point of $299 US. This is only $50 more than Nintendo’s 3DS. Functionality wise the system is on par with the 3DS but with better graphics minus the 3D. The system itself is also sleeker by comparison and most likely, based on Nintendo’s past, probably supports the online play in a much cleaner way. Although as I say that I am reminded of the current network issues, but still no online is as bad as Nintendo’s friend codes.
While the Playstation Vita was the big hardware announcement, Sony also had a Playstation branded 24” television on display. The screen is 1080p which is pretty pointless since the human eye cannot perceive the 1080p at this size. This was geared toward college students and came with two pairs of glasses. Let me cover what this TV isn’t. First it doesn’t have the PS3 built into it, it is just designed with the system in mind in close quarters like dorm rooms. The glasses do not have to be worn but the glasses aren’t just for the upcoming 3D games. Instead the glasses are utilized for two player games, at least two player games that support 3D in one-player mode. The glasses are specific to the player and rather than splitting the screen between players, the glasses filter out a portion of the displayed image giving the players individual screens on one TV. 
If you’re not wearing the glasses the screen looks like two images on top of each other and potentially just a huge blur. This still strikes me as a fantastic idea and one the other systems can hopefully embrace in some way. The only thing that I haven’t been able to figure out is the angles required from the players. The setup for this TV was a mock dorm so players were seated close to the screen making it hard to tell what angle is required.
Overall, Playstation came to the show strong and probably prepared to come under criticism about the network hiccup. If anyone was still focused on that after the show, they might be blind to the fact that Sony is also moving into new technologies.