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Forums are igniting with discussions. Twitter is rife with speculation. And hardware rumors old and new are popping up across game blogs and news sites. This can only mean one thing.

Happy new console day, everybody!

At least, that’s what we think is going to happen. Sony Computer Entertainment is only a few hours away from its big announcement at 3 p.m. Pacific in New York City. Though it hasn’t said anything about it, the leaks and teasers of the last few weeks clearly point to the coming-out party of the PlayStation 4 (or whatever Sony is going to call it).

But console reveals are tricky. Lofty promises are often made and then broken by the time of the actual launch. Games depicted in promotional trailers may not represent the final product, and in some cases, may never see the light of day again. The company obviously wants to show its fancy new system in the best possible way, but if experience has taught us anything, it’s that we should view these momentous occasions with a healthy dose of skepticism.

That’s why we decided to dig through the past three PlayStation reveals — PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3 — and remind you of Sony’s track record of preparing its new consoles for launch. Some things it did were funny, other decisions left us scratching our heads, and a few choices were just plain weird.

PlayStation

Announced: October 1993
Release date: 9/9/1995 (U.S.)
Launch price: $299
Number of launch games: Eight

A new challenger appears: 

In the early ’90s, Nintendo joined forces with Sony to create the Play Station (with the space), a console that featured the cartridge-based Super Nintendo Entertainment System combined with a CD-ROM drive. But that didn’t work out.

In short, Nintendo wasn’t satisfied with the business terms of its partnership, so during the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, it announced that Philips, a Sony rival, would be the one developing a CD-ROM expansion to the SNES. This came a day after Sony publicly revealed its Play Station plans.

Sony executives were understandably furious. But at least two of them, a former Sony engineer named Ken Kutaragi — often called the “father” of PlayStation — and president Norio Ohga, didn’t want to scrap the project. After facing some internal strife, Kutaragi spearheaded the creation of a standalone 32-bit system to compete against both Sega and Nintendo. It re-branded the project simply as “PlayStation,” which made a big splash at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 1995. At the time, the PlayStation was the scrappy underdog in a market dominated by giants.

Fun facts and broken promises:

• During the U.S. rollout at E3 ’95, Sony said “20-Plus” launch games would coincide with the console’s release (at the 4:50 mark in this clip). It delivered less than half that amount.
  
• Early marketing in the U.S. labeled the PlayStation brand as a lifestyle, not just a product or toy. Its TV ads featured such cryptic messages like “U R Not E” (You are not ready) and “ENOS Lives” (Ready Ninth of September). In the U.K., advertisements proclaimed the console was “more powerful than God.”
• The disembodied head known as Polygon Man was the first PlayStation mascot. But disagreements about marketing led to the poor guy’s quick demise prior to launch. About 17 years later, developer Superbot Entertainment brought him back as the final boss in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.
• On 9/19/00, Sony released a new, petite PlayStation model called the PS One for $99. This set the precedent for a slimmer line of systems during the latter part of a console cycle, as we saw with the redesigned versions of the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3.

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It turns out that real soldiers don’t regenerate and machine guns don’t have unlimited ammo. Who knew?

It’s no secret that first-person shooters — in all their Hollywood-inspired clamor and spectacle — don’t simulate the realities of war very well. From basic rules of engagement, to gun safety (such as “don’t flag your buddies”), and the dynamics of combat, first-person shooters are more akin to interactive action flicks than a proper re-creation of armed conflict.

Of course, no one wants to play a hyper-realistic military simulator, as this hilarious Onion sketch illustrates.

No one wants to fill out endless paperwork, take mandatory sexual harassment training, write NCOERs (noncommissioned officer evaluation reports), sit through Powerpoint presentations with the potency of 10 Valiums, or stand 12-hour watches. No one wants to experience “hurry up and wait.”

Because that would be boring. Too realistic.

People want an escape from the mundane. But surely we can find a happy medium between silly action flicks and boring reality.

With the recent release of what will probably be the best-selling video game of the year, Call of Duty Black Ops II (for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC), I thought it instructive to get the low-down from a real soldier, a veteran who deployed in support of the Global War on Terror. Sergeant Dave Mull deployed to Iraq in support of the Global War on Terror three separate times: ’04-’05, early ’07-late ’07, and ’08. His Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) is Cavalry Scount (19D), which essentially means that his job is enemy, area, and route reconnaissance. Altogether, he served 12 years.

Our conversation yielded some fascinating insights, and some of it may surprise you.

GamesBeat: What are some of the most basic details that your average military shooter gets wrong?

The author firing the M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon). The barrels get really hot and have a tendency to overheat.

GamesBeat: What inaccuracies seem the most jarring? Is there anything that would prevent you from playing such a game?

Dave Mull: Hmm … they seem to be trying far too hard to make everything “epic” in campaign mode. It can sometimes be a chore trying to figure out which enemies actually count and which ones are the infinitely respawning cannon-fodder bots.

It won’t stop me from playing it, but you’d think they could remember that sometimes nothing happening can be just as, if not much more, suspenseful.

GamesBeat: It does seem like the goal of many shooters — Call of Duty especially — is bigger setpieces, bigger explosions, and bigger bodycounts. Which naturally makes them more like a Michael Bay movie than anything resembling reality.

Dave Mull: Remember in the Metal Gear Solid games, it’s intended that you don’t kill anyone. Of course, you can, but it’s not the way [series creator Hideo] Kojima envisioned it.

GamesBeat: Indeed. And a reader on Bitmob, GamesBeat’s sister site, pointed out that MGS4 is one of the few games to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. In many ways, it’s a more realistic depiction of war than any first-person shooter.

Dave Mull: Very much so — specifically toward the end with Adam’s adoption of Liquid Snake’s personality and with the four gals of the Beauty and the Beast unit.

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If you missed the original Killzone back in 2004 and have spent the last eight years praying for a chance to play it in glorious high-definition, your wait will be over soon. Today on the Official PlayStation Blog, Sony announced their next multi-game PlayStation 3 collection: The Killzone Trilogy.

Maintaining a pattern established by releasing HD remakes of all of their other popular franchises that began on the PlayStation 2, the Killzone Trilogy will feature an updated version of the original game with 720p graphics and Trophy support, as well as Killzones 2 and 3 and all the multiplayer map packs that Sony released for the two games. Plus, if you already have the sequels (or refuse to own them for some reason), the first game will be available as a separate download on the PlayStation Network.

The collection’s box art (which you can see below) proudly touts PlayStation Move and 3D TV compatibility, but it isn’t clear if that refers to all three games or only Killzone 3 (which already supported Move and 3D). We’ve reached out to Sony for clarification but have not yet received a response.

I’ve also asked Sony whether or not the Killzone Trilogy will allow Remote Play on PS Vita (like the God of War and Shadow Of The Colossus/Ico collections) and will update this story when we have an answer.

What we do know is that the Killzone Trilogy Collection will be available for the PlayStation 3 on October 23 for $39.99. For more information, check out the Official PlayStation Blog’s announcement, which also contains a trailer showcasing the franchise’s history of rousing space Nazi rallies.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Four Kratoses are fighting in Hades. Suddenly, a bunch of Patapon show up in the background and launch volleys of arrows at them. Kratos wins.

This is pretty indicative of my experience in the beta for PlayStation All-Star Battle Royale, developer SuperBot’s upcoming four-player fighting game. Somehow, my three opponents and I had all managed to pick the God of War series’ antihero during character selection, and chaos followed.

The beta let me choose between six characters from a variety of properties, matched me with other players, and then turned the four of us loose to duke it out. The game awards two points for each kill and subtracts one for dying, and the player with the most points when time expires (or the least low score, in some cases; you can still win with a negative total) wins the match.

After you choose your character, the game randomly selects an arena. In addition to God of War’s underworld, the available levels also include a LittleBigPlanet map that builds itself around you as you fight, a stage full of constantly shifting conveyor belts and platforms from developer Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank series, and an island from Naughty Dog’s PlayStation 2 platformer Jak & Daxter.

All of the levels presented their own strategies and surprises, including bizarre cameo appearances from other game characters. In the middle of a round in that LittleBigPlanet area, the background dropped away, revealing the “set” from Buzz!, Sony’s series of quiz games.

“Huh,” I thought. “That’s weird.”

It was at precisely that moment that Buzz presented a multiple-choice trivia question; four possible answers, each on a different platform in the level; and a timer. Everyone who wasn’t standing on the correct answer when the timer expired received a pie in the face and damage.

Minigames like this only make the already frantic matches in Battle Royale crazier. Not only are you expected to fight and kill your opponents, but you also have to prepare to answer quizzes at the same time or dodge rains of golf balls from characters from the Hot Shots series.

It’s not surprising, then, that the game is often confusing, and not just in the “too much stuff happening at once, and where the hell is my guy?” way that Battle Royale shares with its partner in inevitable comparison, Nintendo’s Smash Bros. series. Even once I’d played a few matches with the same character, I was never entirely sure what would happen when I pressed an attack button.

Square, Triangle, and Circle control different attacks, but sometimes I’d push a button expecting to do a shotgun blast, and my character would do something else entirely, like a chain saw spin move. Some attacks are continuous if you hold the button down, and others deliver ongoing damage to opponents.

I’m not ascribing my confusion to any inherent flaws in design but rather to my general lack of ability at fighting games and the sheer amount of options SuperBot has crammed into Battle Royale. Every one of my losses taught me something (most often that the Twisted Metal series’ insane clown-jockey Sweet Tooth is a little unbalanced), and I could tell that I was improving. OK, maybe I didn’t improve enough to actually win a round, but I occasionally convinced myself that I was doing well. But I still died a lot, and often in strange ways.

As you damage your opponents, a meter fills up. When you complete a “level” of this bar — up to three in total — you can unleash an unblockable finishing move that kills anyone it hits. Low-level finals include dash moves or devastating melee attacks, but if anyone fills up their meter completely, it’s not good for the rest of you. My causes of death in the beta included the chaingun on Sweet Tooth’s armored mech, Killzone 2 villain Colonel Radec’s dude-seeking rocket, and a rap from original PlayStation rhythm-game superstar PaRappa.

A rap, people.

What I’m getting at is that this game is often the best kind of completely nuts.

Sony is launching a public beta for PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale this fall, and the game comes out for PlayStation 3 and Vita on October 23.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SuperBot Entertainment has revealed that a young Heihachi (from Namco Bandai’s Tekken series) and Toro Inoue (a longtime feline mascot for Sony Japan) will be starring in their PS3-exclusive crossover fighting game, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. A new stage, Chop Chop Master Onion’s Dojo, based off of a level from the PS1 Parappa the Rapper game, was also revealed. The developers were showing off the game for their Exhibition Presentation at the annual fighting-game tournament Evolution Championship Series (EVO) taking place this weekend in Las Vegas.

They join the rest of the known cast for PS All-Stars, including Nathan Drake (Uncharted), Radec (villain from Killzone 2), Kratos (God of War), Parappa the Rapper, Fat Princess, Sly Cooper, Sweet Tooth (Twisted Metal), and Big Daddy (BioShock). Earlier today on the PlayStation Blog, Sony also announced that those who preorder the game will receive an exclusive set of costumes for the entire roster.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale will arrive on store shelves on October 23 for both the PS3 and the PS Vita.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s a pity because Killzone 3 promised to be one of Sony’s great games for 2011, with enough potential to help swing the console war ever so slightly in Sony’s favor. And if the motion-sensing technology worked perfectly, Sony could have introduced hardcore gamers to a truly next-generation experience in first-person combat and thereby carved out an important technological leadership role for its console in the process.

The game is important because it is the first real hardcore game to exploit Sony’s Move controller, which has been outsold by Microsoft’s more casual Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360. There are dozens of game publishers and developers working on Move-related games, all of them hoping that they can create a Move game with mass appeal among hardcore and casual gamers alike. If they succeed, the PlayStation Move can become a critical part of the PlayStation economy. But if they fail, then the Move could suffer the same inevitable decline that many accessories do after their initial splash in the market. If that happens, both Nintendo and Microsoft would breathe a sigh of relief, as they’re targeting gamers who have more casual tastes.

Playing with the wand-like Move and its companion left-hand navigation device is merely a good experience, not a fantastic one. And while the motion-sensing Move and the non-stop combat won’t make you sick, the story of the otherwise-epic sci-fi combat game is very hard to stomach. I suspect that the weak story is the reason Killzone 3 received a lukewarm rating of 84 out of 100 on Metacritic, a review score aggregator. By comparison, the ground-breaking Killzone 2 received an average review score of 91 out of 100 back in 2009. At the time, I considered Killzone 2 to be the best game on the PlayStation 3, before the even-better Uncharted 2: Among Thieves game came out.

That’s why I’m disappointed to give Killzone 3 a score of 84 out of 100. It seems that developer Guerrilla Games, a subsidiary of Sony, tried to push Killzone 3 out too fast, just two years after the debut of the previous game, which took more than four years to develop. It has become fashionable for game publishers to take their biggest hits and churn out game after game, but in this case it seems to have hurt the brand. This could easily have been a 90-plus-rated game.

I played the single-player campaign all the way through and was impressed with the outstanding core combat experience. Fighting in Killzone 2 is intense, with lots of enemies challenging you at the same time, both at close range and from far away. The enemy is smart enough to hide and shoot. If you stand out in the open, you’ll easily get taken out. This is a continuation of the high-quality experience that made me believe last year that Killzone 2 had lived up to its hype. The movie-like experience of combat is as good as any of the great shooting games, such as Gears of War, Halo, Resistance, Battlefield and Call of Duty.

The problem is more with the storyline that leads you from one combat scene to another. It starts out good, but then gets a little ridiculous as characters get into a rut of stupid behavior, like an ISA commander who repeatedly refuses to commit his forces to a battle that is going to stop an invasion of Earth. I mean, what commander could be so dumb? The only thing dumber are the enemy Helghast generals, who engage in infighting to a ridiculous degree. They fight and they almost kill each other, only to drag out the uncivility to crazy levels even as the ISA becomes a mounting threat to the existence of the Helghast.

Of course, with a video game, you can put up with the story if the game play itself is fun. In Killzone 3, you can play in much larger, sweeping levels. Bullets can pierce through then metal walls and it’s quite satisfying when you score a headshot on an enemy Helghast soldier, whose haunting orange-lit helmets are spellbinding to look at. You can fly over enemies with jet packs. The sound of the Helghast screaming through their muffled helmets is riveting. The combat is as close to realistic as this generation of consoles is going to get.

Fans who can stomach the violent first-person action and foul language of this mature-rated title shouldn’t miss it. I didn’t play the game in stereoscopic 3D, largely because I don’t like that experience for games.

But I played half the game chapters with a regular game controller and half with the Move, which is very much like playing a shooting game with the Wii but more accurate. I was skeptical that the Move would work well, with a movement control in my left hand and an aiming device and trigger in my right hand. But it does the job, allowing you to shoot very accurately.

By itself, that’s a big technological victory. For years, game developers have been trying to deliver accessories, such as the Wii remote and the Wii Motion Plus, that allows you to shoot accurately in a game. Most of the time, the aiming doesn’t work. I’ve always been much better off using a game controller than a pointing device in shooting games. But after a short time of getting used to it, I stayed with the PlayStation Move and finished the game with it.

I had to dial down the sensitivity of the Move controller by a notch because I found that the cross hairs moved around too much. Once I changed the sensitivity to a notch below what was recommended, I was able to get a steady aim. This didn’t turn me from a couch potato into an active gamer. Rather, I just sat on the chair and moved my fingers a little. That’s important because it’s very easy to get tired playing a game where you have to hold your hands out from your body for a long time. I managed to play Killzone 3 for hours at a time with the Move controller. If you want an even more realistic experience, you can buy a PlayStation Move Sharp Shooter peripheral that turns the Move into something resembling an assault rifle.

But the story is the hard thing to abide. Killzone 3 picks up where Killzone 2 left off, with the forces of the human Interstellar Alliance (ISA) forces stranded on the planet Helghan (homeworld of the Helghast race), where they have taken out the Helghast dictator, Visari. Tomas “Sev” Sevchenko and Rico Velasquez (heroes from the last game) are back in the middle of the action. The Helghast have counter-attacked (setting off a nuclear bomb in their own capital) and driven most of the ISA off the planet, save for a small contingent that has to survive in the planet’s war-torn ruins. The dark atmosphere of planet is one of the star attractions.

The plot starts out good enough with Rico rebelling against his hesitant commander, Captain Narville, and the Helghast leaders jockeying for control of the remaining Helghast forces. But the infighting devolves into a ridiculous civil war that makes the job of the ISA easier. The problem with the civil war is that it moves the focus of the story to the Helghast leaders, which you can’t play. You can only play the ISA grunts, who seem to be treated like a sideshow in the story toward the end.

I did enjoy playing with the jet pack, which added a third dimension to tactical combat in the freezing arctic installations on Helghast. And it was a lot of fun being inside a walking tank, known as a mech, with lots of cannon and machine gun firepower. Beyond city fighting, you now get to see more of the jungles of the planet Helghan and you have to face off against some very difficult and fast-moving enemies. A lot of the game has to be played in stealth mode, where you try to avoid other soldiers rather than fight them. But there just aren’t that many great places to hide in the terrain. Also, the frame rate, or speed of animations, gets unacceptabl slow at times.

There’s an interesting battle that takes place in zero gravity. When you shoot the enemies, they start floating up into the air. But your grenades become virtually worthless in that environment, as they fly forever and you can’t really aim them. I also enjoyed the “brutal melee” system, where you can close ranks with an enemy and engage in a brutal scripted knife fight. The finishing kills are animated in a particularly gruesome way. Believe it or not. For gamers, that’s considered innovation. The game has also gotten kudos for its addictively fun multiplayer combat.

Killzone 3 takes two steps forward with all of the innovative things it tries to do. But the story takes it one step back from being a great game. You have to admire the folks at Guerrilla Games for pushing the envelope. But it’s getting very expensive to swing and miss in the age of blockbuster video games. Fortunately, Sony has a very full slate this year, with big titles ranging from Uncharted 3 to The Last Guardian. Hopefully, one of those games will knock it out of the park.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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