Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably have heard that E3, the biggest game expo of the year is happening this week. It’s going to be an exciting week of news. Today is Sony’s pre-E3 news confrence. Expect a new PS3 controller and maybe even a new console case. Hopefully some PS3 games will be closer to playable, but I expect a lot of video footage again this year from Sony. Also, don’t be surprised if Final Fantasy VII is announced for the PS3. It’d be a license to print money for both Sony and Square. That alone could steal all the thunder from the Nintendo/Microsoft events before they even happen. (more…)

Accoriding to Reuters Sony plans on its game division losing 100 billion yen, or roughly 900 million dollars. Most of this has to do with the PS3 launching this year. Now, this begs the question: how much does Sony plan on losing per console? (more…)

As much as I love to bash Sony, sometimes I feel bad about always being so harsh on them. However, this is not one of those times that I feel bad for a little Sony bashing. It wasn’t long ago that I heard about Sony and their cool new carbon fibre laptops. Carbon fibre is a pretty sweet material to be making a laptop out of, but it has this nasty problem of being a bit on the expensive side. Thus, the laptops themselves sell for an extra $500. Now, what happens if the carbon fibre laptop isn’t even made out of carbon fibre? (more…)

Right now everyone is trying to figure out the HD-DVD and Blu-ray battle before any products even hit the market. Ironically, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have seen endless delays. Sure, techies and journalists love to blog about the virtues of both formats, but do consumers care? (more…)

It seems like every time you turn around Sony is pimping some new format that is meant to change our life, or perhaps just Sony’s bottom line. Yet Sony, more than any other company I know of, seems to be consistantly hell-bent on creating a new format for every device they create. At the same time the failure rate of these formats is extremely high and very well known. When I hear Betamax, MiniDisc, and UMD almost by default my eyes glaze over and I think what might have been. I sypmathize with Sony because they create some really awesome technology, but the more I look at Sony, the more I see a company who doesn’t even understand its own success. (more…)

According to a report in Next Generation, Wal-Mart will soon stop selling UMD movies and most of Hollywood is also backing out of Sony’s portable movie format. Why? Sales of UMD movies have died completely. None of the UMD movies are making any money. Chalk this one up as another Sony format failure.

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CVG reported on a couple rumors yesterday. First, the Nintendo Revolution is going to get renamed this week at the Game Developer’s Confrence. That makes a lot of sense to me and it’s only a matter of time. Second, that the Revolution could launch in June. That’s right, June. (more…)

The Mercury News is reporting that Microsoft is working on a portable game system based around the Xbox brand. It’s being assumed that this portable gaming device is going to be some kind of iPod/PSP/DS killer. I really just don’t think that Microsoft can pull it off. Wait, let me rephrase that. I sincerely hope that Microsoft doesn’t rip off the PSP or the iPod because if Microsoft does that, the Xbox Portable would be a failure. The iPod is great because of the fantastic iTunes integration and a super-simple interface. It’s does all the important things right and is a huge success because of it. Competitors who have tried to kill the iPod have failed because they tried to do the whole bigger is better/more features thing that just doesn’t work in consumer electronics.

The PSP is successful because of the Playstation brand and that’s it. There are a handfull of games that are good, but it’s mostly overpriced trash rehashed from the PS2. To combat the lack of real games Sony has opted for a media strategy with the PSP. Make it do everything other than games and people will love it. Where this strategy falls short is that it doesn’t do music as well as the iPod and it doesn’t do games as well as the Nintendo DS. In most respects I think that the PSP is a pretty weak product among gamers. I and I’m sure many others don’t even use mine anymore and am waiting for the Nintendo DS Lite. The hottest thing to do on a PSP is to play emulated (and illegal) copies of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo games. Even UMD sales are slowing to a halt.

Microsoft, take notice of these facts. You need to create a device that capitalizes on the coolest innovation that you’ve created in gaming - The Xbox Live Arcade. Don’t try to do what Sony has done and made a portable PS2. Instead, make a cool device that plays Xbox Live Arcade style games - fun games that I can pick up and play for a few minutes and stop as needed. Geometry Wars on a portable console would be incredible. Gamers don’t want to play through an hour long Halo level on a portable gaming machine. Gamers want quick fun that they can put down at a moment’s notice. If gamers have to spend ten minutes getting to a save point, then you’ve already lost the battle. Take a page out of Nintendo’s playbook. Make the Xbox Portable cheap, make it have some killer games, and make it “portable fun” instead of living room fun. After all, the Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Advance SP, DS, DS Lite are the gaming machines that are on top, not the PSP.

A lot of sites today are posting about the rumor that the next Bungie project is going to be a Halo game that isn’t Halo 3, but does exist in the Halo universe as more of a prequel. I know what you are thinking, sequels suck but prequels are worse and I agree. This project is being called Forerunner, a refrence to the race of beings that created the Halo rings in the first place. Most sites are calling this pure rumor or speculation. It’s possibly an April fool’s joke.

Now, being that I am the mole and I love to banter about such rumors I have to put my two cents in on what is likely to happen. As you may already have read, I was pretty much right about the PS3 annoucements earlier this week, so maybe I can go 2 for 2 on rumor prediction for the week. Ok here goes:

The next game will be online. MMOFPS if you want to call it that. Let’s just call it Halo Online. Ok, so Halo Online will be all about being a huge multiplayer battleground. The battle will probably be for Earth and the player can pick a side and battle in huge battles - 100+ people trying to take over a base and 100+ people trying to hold the base. Instead of getting tons of XP to level a character as you would in a MMORPG, players will need to carry out missions to get better equipment, tanks, and just more bases. The game will probably launch this fall, let’s say around November or at the very least will be announced at E3. Halo Online will be as big as World of Warcraft and will be Microsoft’s first “billion dollar game.” Don’t be surprised if this game gets 10 million subscribers paying $10-15 a month within the first three years. That would be over a billion dollars a year in revenue.

I know this all sounds a bit crazy, but here is the reasoning. Bungie originally promised huge multiplayer battles and epic battles for earth in Halo 2. That didn’t happen, but I’m sure Bungie tried to make it happen. At the same time World of Warcraft has been making huge waves in the gaming world with it’s 6 million subscribers worldwide paying $15 a month just to play. A couple years ago those kinds of numbers would have been seen as pure insanity, but Blizzard’s near-perfect execution of the MMORPG genre in World of Warcraft made 6 million subscribers a reality. Bungie is one of the few studios who could make the same thing happen to the MMOFPS on a console. After all, Sony and Nintendo pretty much wrote off online console gaming before Halo 2 came out and lauched online console gaming into a viable business. Now even Sony is raving about how the PS3 games are going to be “Live” and online(just like Xbox games have been for the last couple years).

In short, Halo Online is just too big of an opportunity for Microsoft to pass up. It’s a billion dollar idea that if they don’t do they would be completely foolish. The Halo fanbase would go crazy for it and it would be the biggest game of the next generation. If Bungie and Microsoft make Halo Online happen, the Xbox 360 will will the next-generation console war. Period. Not only that, but a version of Halo Online playable on Windows Vista would ensure that gamers who don’t have an Xbox 360 will still upgrade to Vista.

I’ll try and keep this short, but there will probably be some followup postings in the next week or so about the ramifications of today’s annoucements. Yes, the PS3 is delayed until November worldwide(I was pretty much on the money with that) due to Blu-ray DVD copyright protection issues. Yes, the PS3 is going to have a big online service that is more media-centric, but will probably have some cool gaming features. Yes, Sony still doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure to have games hosted on their servers. No, there was no iTunes integration for the PS3 announced. There was also more media-centric stuff annouced for the PSP, but I honestly don’t care about the PSP anymore. It’s not a good enough gaming device or a good enough media device for me to use it as either, much less both. I think the real winner in this is Microsoft, but I’ll get to that later…