ps3

LOS ANGELES--Microsoft's E3 press conference was packed with new software and services, from Kinect-enabled games to the promise of live TV. But, at the same time, some Xbox staples were missing in action, as were some hoped-for hardware announcements.

The biggest omission was the lack of a new Halo game coming this year. After Halo 3, Halo ODST, and Halo Reach, there has been a new Halo game each of the past three years. However, Microsoft couldn't go cold turkey. Instead we get Halo: Combat Evolved: 10th Anniversary Edition, a remade version of the original Halo game with … Read more

LOS ANGELES--This is largely a rhetorical question, as Apple is not fond of making appearances at trade shows, including CES and Computex. In fact, Apple dropped out of the one trade show it regularly participated in, the Macworld Expo, a couple of years ago. Additionally, this year has an additional wrinkle, as Apple is hosting its own WWDC conference the very same week as E3.

Yet, the question is not as ridiculous as it seems. One area of interactive entertainment that has experienced tremendous year-over-year growth recently is the mobile games segment currently dominated by iOS and the triple-play of … Read more

With Apple's iCloud coming next week, hot on the heels of Amazon and Google's cloud services for music, it seems like the years-old dream of cloud media streaming is coming to greater fruition than ever before. That's promising news to me, a person who cut the cord on his cable TV over a year and a half ago. I live off the Internet and my various devices--my laptop, game consoles, iPhone, and iPad--to get my media, be it TV shows, movies, music or books.

So far, it looks like 2011 will be more the year of Cloud Music than that of Cloud Video. And that's a shame, because I'm getting fed up with my half-baked digital-video life.

I've spent the last week with a product called Pogoplug Video, which attempts to do what no one's currently offering yet: the ability to stream multiformat video files easily across multiple platforms, be they gaming console, computer, or phone/tablet, even across the Internet or 3G.

I held high hopes for the Pogoplug Video. The $199 device is much like the Pogoplug Pro we reviewed last year, equipped with a more powerful processor. And, it does what it promises, to a point: video files stored on hard drives or USB sticks plugged into the Pogoplug do indeed technically play back on iPhones, iPads, laptops, or even via DLNA on an Xbox 360 or PS3.… Read more

Looking back at previous coverage of the annual Electronic Entertainment Exposition, I found several photo galleries of images cobbled together from as far back as 1999.

For the past few years I've largely left the photographic duties to our able staff photographers, who have done an excellent job of chronicling the show, but I thought it might be fun to round up some of the slideshows of personal pics that we've run previously.

According to media ratings and research company Nielsen, E3 is generating online buzz at a level 59 percent higher than last year. The key driver is interest in Nintendo's successor to the Wii console, which is expected to be revealed on Tuesday, June 7.

The buzz level was measured by counting the number of messages from blogs, Twitter, and message boards during April and May of 2010 and 2011, and Nielsen says that 22 percent of this year'… Read more

We've been cautiously optimistic about online streaming game service OnLive since it launched about a year ago. For the uninitiated, it's essentially cloud-based PC gaming that originally allowed nearly any laptop or desktop to play high-end PC games by offloading the CPU- and GPU-intensive tasks of actually running the game software to a remote render farm, then beaming the gameplay back to you as a streaming video.

Later, the company added a MicroConsole--a small box that connects to a TV via HDMI and acts as a streaming dongle for the games, which are played with a wireless controller … Read more

At E3 2010, we wrote that the show's usual software focus had been temporarily eclipsed by a flood of new hardware, from the Microsoft Kinect (which actually debuted a few months before at the Game Developers Conference), to the the PlayStation Move, to Nintendo's handheld 3DS console.

Since then, all three devices have been released commercially, each to great initial success and generally positive reviews. But, we've also noted, in anecdotally talking to people in and out of the industry, that a user's interest level in all three of these groundbreaking projects can drop off quickly in many cases.

Case in point: after moving to a new apartment a few months ago, neither my Kinect nor PlayStation Move have been permanently hooked up again yet (at least partially because of the logistical problems that come with using the Kinect in a small apartment). We've talked to many other gamers who also find that their hot hardware from E3 2010 is collecting dust.

The primary culprit seems to be a lack of must-play software. The number of new Kinect games slowed to a trickle almost immediately after the motion-sensing camera launched, and the same is true of the PlayStation Move (although that camera at least works with high-profile games such as Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4). The Nintendo 3DS, groundbreaking as it is, also suffers from a lack of killer apps. Big buzz games aren't here yet, nor are long-promised features, such as 3D video recording and streaming, although the built-in 3DS shop is set to go online next week.

So, our question here for you is: Of the big three hardware releases from E3 2010, the Xbox 360 Kinect, PlayStation Move, and Nintendo 3DS, which ones have you purchased but now rarely, if ever, use? … Read more

Even though it's supposedly an industry-only trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo is an event of epic proportions for video game aficionados, as evidenced by the legions of fans who follow the show's daily announcements online, through blogs, news outlets, and (a more recent development) video feeds.

But despite its decade-plus place in the public consciousness (I've been attending since 1999), the E3 show has been to the brink of extinction more than once, and while it has pulled off a remarkable recovery over the past couple of years, there's still a chance history may repeat itself.

In brief, what happened was the trade show equivalent of a boom and bust cycle. Throughout the 2000s, game companies competed to outdo each other, with excessive budgets and outlandish displays, creating literal mini cities inside the Los Angeles Convention Center that easily trumped anything seen at the larger Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place in Las Vegas every January.

The trend peaked in 2006, after which the participants collectively realized that entirely too much money was being spent on the show, which had long since stopped being a place for retail buyers to make deals with publishers, and had become essentially a weeklong press conference. Simply put, the week's worth of media hits was judged to be simply not worth the investment.

At the time, the Entertainment Software Association, a trade organization that runs the event, agreed to retrench, scaling down the 2007 version into what then-Entertainment Software Association President Douglas Lowenstein called a "more personal, efficient, and focused" show. E3 went from 60,000 attendees the previous year to about 4,000, and from 400 exhibiting companies to fewer than 40. E3 2008 was a similarly small affair, returning to the Los Angeles Convention Center, but keeping the small, low-cost format.… Read more

For all the accomplishments of the video game industry, there are still barriers that interactive entertainment has yet to break. Many games look fantastic and play well, but with few if any exceptions, there remains a stubborn wall between the player/observer and the characters in the game world (sometimes linked to the evolving "Are games art?" debate). There are many symptoms of this phenomenon, from stiff animation to stilted dialogue to unconvincing voiceover work, and the situation now is only marginally better than it was when I started writing about games more than a decade ago (many players can name a handful of choice performances, but these are the rare exception, rather than the rule).

Coming closest, in recent memory at least, to bridging that gap (which is much deeper than the typical explanation of an "uncanny valley" between near-photographic images and reality) is L.A. Noire, a gritty detective story set in 1940s Los Angeles. The combination of careful writing (much rarer in interactive entertainment than it should be), a cast of competent professional actors, and a few bits of new technology, puts the game leaps and bounds past the typical action/adventure experience, where it usually feels like most in-game conversations exist only to push the kind of dull exposition that would make David Mamet's head spin.

I've criticized some of my otherwise favorite games for this very problem, saying of Dragon Age, for example, that the game was buried under uptight, wooden characterizations that come off like the dated, stagy delivery of an old fantasy film. Arguably among recent games the inventive detective thriller Heavy Rain probably came closest to surmounting these obstacles--or at least bravely attempting to.

So, why is effective storytelling, as seen in television programs such as "Mad Men" or "The Wire", such a difficult task for video games, where paradoxically nearly any setting, character, or event imaginable is just a few keyboard strokes away for an able team of programmers and artists? … Read more