E3 ‘09: Sony’s PSP Go & motion controller

The Shrine Auditorium was the site for Sony’s E3 2009 Media Briefing Tuesday morning, where the big news was the PSP Go, God of War III, and the upcoming PlayStation motion controller.

Sony kicked things off with this slick video that introduced us to the hardware and software of PlayStation:

Next, they showed us tons of game demos for the latest and greatest PS3 games, including Uncharted 2, where the crowd went wild over a firefight that ended inside a falling building:

There was the first public unveiling of live game play from MAG, with 256 live players all on the screen at one time:

We watched a new trailer for Final Fantasy XIII, after which the audience was stunned by the announcement of the PS3-exclusive Final Fantasy XIV Online. There was a trailer for this one, too. And it’s coming in 2010, just like XIII.

Agent, a new game from Rockstar, was talked about but not seen.

But worth admission alone was the live demo for Assassin’s Creed II. I videoed this bad boy, check it out below:

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get much more video than that at the Sony press conference, as my video camera’s battery died.

In the vein of Little Big Planet, a kind of game where you “create, play, and share,” is next-big-thing Mod Nation Racers. It’s a racing game where you can customize out the wazoo with simple but powerful level editing and creation, and it’s coming in 2010.

The Last Guardian, the next game from the creator of Shadow of the Colossus, got a huge reaction from the crowd.

Gran Turismo 5 displayed uber-realistic graphics, while the long-awaited God of War III, the final game in the bestselling PS exclusive trilogy. It looks ultra violent and ultra gruesome, just the way fans like it, and will hit in March of 2010.

Longtime PlayStation evangelist Kaz Hirai took the stage to tout the next big thing in PlayStation Portable: the PSP Go, a new, more compact PSP with a slide-out control pad that’s intended for users who prefer to download their games digitally instead of buying UMD discs. PSP Go launches October 1st and will be priced at $249.

Hirai also announced four new titles for the PSP:

• Gran Turismo PSP, a fully featured GT game with 800+ cars
• Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a true sequel that fills in a missing chapter from the saga of Solid Snake. Being scripted by Hideo Kojima himself.
• Resident Evil Portable comes to PSP in 2010
• Final Fantasy VII comes to PSP as a downloadable game starting today

Sony had to answer the challenge thrown down by Nintendo and then Microsoft on the motion-controller front, and its answer is an as-yet-unnamed peripheral device that’s basically a wand with a lighted orb on the end that the PS Eye camera can track with “submillimeter accuracy.” (Think of a motion-capture suit — like the one used to create Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies — with a single ball on a stick.) A few tech demos were shown to demonstrate an early engineering build of this wand controller, showing how the wand can simulate guns, swords, painting tools, hands that grasp and throw, and much more. You can even hold one wand in each hand, for more complex movements. The rate at which it mapped to the real time movements of the user was impressive, but like the Wii Remote and Nunchuck, it maps only arm movements, whereas Microsoft’s Project Natal is promising full body tracking. PlayStation’s motion controller is launching Spring 2010.

Not a bad press conference. A little dry in a few spots, but overall very engaging.

All photos and video by Robin Parrish.