There were high expectations for Sony’s keynote address at E3 last night. Coming just after the much needed price drop for the PS3 and at the start of a promising few months of releases for the PS3 and PSP, rivals Microsoft and Nintendo would have been hoping for another gaff-ridden disaster like last year. And the year before that.

Sony, however, was happy to disappoint. The show kicked off with a short demo of PlayStation Home, with Jack Tretton starting his speech within the virtual space then appearing on stage. It was a unique idea but slightly undermined by Tretton’s obvious nervousness at being on stage again for the first time in fair while. With that, the topic of Home was left (temporarily) so we could have a long look at some of the upcoming PSP titles in video montage.

Personally, I hate these bloody montages and this one was particularly bad: each game sporting its own ear bleedingly bad techno soundtrack – obviously trying to strike a balance between sounding dramatic and still being down with the kids. Nonetheless, the game line up is looking fairly promising: SOCOM US Navy Seals, Tactical Strike, Wipeout Pulse, Syphon Filter: Logan's Shadow, NBA 08, God of War: Chains of Olympus, Silent Hill: Origins, Patapon, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08, Sonic Rivals 2, Sims 2: Castaway, SWAT: Target Liberty , Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions and Castlevania: The Dracula were the ones mentioned. Some hit-or-miss titles in there certainly, but there’s a few gems and enough variety to keep the critics at bay for the moment.

Then it was back to Home, where Kaz Hirai had shown up, also in virtual form, and Jack Tretton used the opportunity to rib him about the infamous Riiidge Racer quote of E3 2006. Kaz then took the stage and delivered a slightly more polished performance announcing the new PSP model. Check here for our earlier report. The main news is that it is 30 percent lighter, 19 percent thinner and has a video output. The ramifications of this feature could be huge as it effectively makes the PSP into a home and portable console and puts it in a very unique place in the market.

The UMD drive is still in unfortunately, but the load times and battery power have been improved – the latter will be especially important what with the new processor speeds being unlocked. The one major omission I noticed, is that there doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to improve the screen brightness. It wasn’t too bad on the original, but it was clearly out classed by the DS Lite and it makes it difficult to play in brightly lit conditions.

Jack Tretton returned sporting the new ‘ice silver’ PSP which comes with a 1GB memory stick and the Family Guy; Freakin’ Sweet Collection UMD. Then, as the instantly recognisable Star Wars theme started, Chewbacca took to the stage touting a new white PSP with Darth Vaders head on it, which is part of the new Star Wars: Battlefront PSP pack. Watching the forced exchange between Tretton and the Wookie, a little part of my soul withered and died.

Thankfully, Phil Harrison showed up to take over and began talking up the PS3 – the most important differentiator between it and the other consoles is the hard drive now it seems. Funny I thought last year it was the Blu-ray drive. I guess I get confused. Anyway, he went on to announce a new puzzle game called ‘Echo Chrome’. It is definitely a new direction for puzzle gaming and looks like you’re stuck in an M.C. Escher cheese nightmare. Even if it isn’t my cup of tea, it may be well worth a look and this is very much the sort of new thinking we need to see on the PlayStation Store.

Next it was time for first-party PS3 titles and – you guessed it – another video montage. Yawn. Wipeout HD, SOCOM: Confrontation (which is promising to be a massive leap forward from previous games SOCOM: Quarrel and SOCOM: Squabble), Pain and Warhawk were on show. The new info from the Warhawk camp is that it won’t just be online multiplayer as it has a four-player split screen mode as well. Not sure whether you can do four-player split screen online as well though.

And then it was back to Home. This time another bit of news was confirmed that had already emerged earlier: that the Home functionality will be extending “sideways” onto mobile phones. Harrison demonstrated this by taking a photo with his Sony Ericsson W880i and then uploading it into his Home space. Neat. I also think I spotted the XMB running on the handset, but I could be mistaken. There is promised to be a large amount of plain old browser based functionality for Home too, including automatic blogging and content management.

Tretton returns to big up the PS3’s sales success since the price drop and to announce that Blu-ray sales are enjoying a 2:1 advantage over HD DVD. Referring to Kaz’s previous statement that 200 Blu-ray games would be out in the next year, Tretton clarifies that over 120 would be dropping in North America alone, including 15 exlcusives.

But what about publishers for these games? Well Sony has revealed that NCSoft (Lineage, Guild Wars, City of Heroes) is going to be joining the PlayStation camp and bringing MMOs exclusively to the PlayStation Network. Meanwhile, long standing Sony supporters Ubisoft are bringing Haze to the PS3 in Fall. This is one title I’m personally very much looking forward to – not just because the PlayStation 3 still needs more games, but because I really enjoy all of Free Radical’s previous FPSs. The new trailer still looks very promising, and is looking much less like a Crysis clone than it did before.

The next shock announcement was that Unreal Tournament III will be making an exclusive release on PS3 and PC in November, while the Xbox 360 will have to wait until 2008. Zing. Not only that, but it will allow users to import mods made for the PC version on to the PS3.
Cue another montage: Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, Kane & Lynch, Resident Evil 5, Burnout: Paradise, Madden NFL 08, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Simpsons game, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Medal of Honor: Airborne and Rock Band. The lady announcing each game sounds like she’s going to drop dead of boredom too.

With that it was time for none other that Hideo Kojima to take the stage and yes, it has been confirmed that Metal Gear Solid 4 is a PS3 exclusive. I guess Sony just weren’t prepared to accept losing all their exclusives to Microsoft after all. After Konami’s recent rumblings, there were serious concerns that Peter Moore would have been touting an MGS4 logo at E3.

Kojima announced that this will be his last game in the series. That means that all the secrets of the long-running story will be revealed. It is still being touted as a stealth game, but Kojima promises “new elements” and rolled out some fresh footage, which also promised a simultaneous worldwide release early next year.

By now you must have noticed a ongoing theme. That is exclusives. Exclusives from Konami, exclusives from Ubisoft and NCSoft, a timed exclusive from Epic and a ton of first-party titles. It looks like Sony is very much out to dispel the idea that it won’t have any original titles coming out.

And this trend continued into the latter stages of the keynote; Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, Folklore, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Heavenly Sword were shown off with some slightly more in-depth videos. Heavenly Sword was also shouting the praises of Blu-ray and the opportunities the extra storage space allows.

Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet also got a new outing and showed off some of the unique level creation mechanics. The PlayStation Network is going to be hugely important to this game as it is fundamental to the sharing of the user generated content. We’ve still really only caught this game in glimpses, but it is definitely looking very promising.

And last of all it was time for a look at the next iteration of Gran Turismo, called Gran Turismo 5: Prologue and will be hitting the PlayStation Store at some point. Possibly soon. Personally, I wish they stop pissing around with these half-game releases and get on with making a full title, which is also in the making. At least it looks like we’ll get some opponents this time.

And that was it. Oh wait, there’s still time for a little bit of Killzone 2 – those crazy fun-filled jokers at Sony. Harrison firstly reassures that this time the trailer is definitely real time and being played on a real PS3 by a real human (this time). And the result – well, we’ve seen it before actually, and it didn’t look at all bad. Clearly this is intended to be a Halo 3 killer, but judging from what we’ve seen of the two so far, I reckon Halo still has the edge.

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