PS3 Fanboy

So a few days ago you read about Phil Harrison's big decision about going to Infogrames. Today, you get to listen to Phil speak about that very decision in this video. It appears that the freshly appointed Directeur Général Délégué is getting comfortable at his new post as he introduces Eden Studios' Alone in the Dark. While we don't get to see much about the game, Phil seems excited about pushing it forward. Anyway, we really should stop our babbling and just let the man himself give you the low down.

Well, well, well, the rumors turned out to be true. The former president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison, is now president of French company Infogrames. Harrison will be working alongside newly appointed CEO David Gardner and will be overseeing the studios and content development for the group -- including the Infogrames-owned Atari.

As this comes as quite a surprise to many, Phil backs his decision by stating, "This is the perfect time to join Infogrames and help shape the future of Atari." Can the old Sony heavyweight do it? Can he help restore the sinking ship that is Atari? We always want to see success, so we're hoping for the best. Score one for France.

The embedded Japanese Home trailer above shows off some of the new outdoor environments displayed at last month's E3 and a couple other features as well; mainly, the ability to dress up like your favorite Sony executive. About halfway through the video, during the character customization portion, you see a pretty wide variety of clothing options including shirts, pants and suits modeled after the clothing that Phil Harrison, Kaz Hirai and Jack Tretton wear.

That's right, you can run around the Home world in a Ratchet hat, a custom blue Phil Harrison t-shirt, and Jack Tretton's pants. Now who amongst us can say we've never dreamt of that? Right now, it's unknown if this is just a Beta feature or something that will go into the full release this fall. We can only hope it stays in, since dressing up like Kaz Harai and running around yelling 'Riiiiiidge Racer!' is just too fun of an idea to ignore. So which sexy Sony executive would you dress up?

Phil Harrison can't seem to get through an interview without receiving the first degree on Home and LittleBigPlanet. We bet when he sleeps at night, he might just be plagued with dreams about answering questions on those two titles. Not that it's a bad thing, but we're sure it's taking its toll on him. Anyway, in a recent 1UP interview, Phil answered some of the questions we've been wondering about for a while.

• About Madden on PS3 running at 30fps: "It would concern me if the platform was incapable of doing it, but we've proven the platform is capable of doing it, so it's not a PlayStation 3 issue. I'm trying to be polite." He talks about the Edge dev kit and how Sony's own titles are running at full 1080p with 60fps, basically dodging the more obvious answer: EA Sports are lazy.
• When asked if Home were going to be shipped with completed features and basically everything that Home could possibly have upon launch, Harrison replied: "There will be features that get added over time, it's not going to be everything that we've ever talked about at the beginning of the service. I'm being very clear we never intended for that to be the case, either, but we have a clear road map of where and how and when we're going to be adding functions and features."

As far as Home itself, it's progressing well and is still due out this Fall. Development kits were sent out on July 10th to developers to start prepping titles to be Home-ready and the beta is going well. We can't wait to get our trophies for playing games in Home, or our fun little T-shirts letting people know that we really, really dig Virtua Fighter 5. Or whatever else we dig at that point.
[via N4G]

Sony engineers are hard at work optimizing the Unreal Engine 3 for the PlayStation 3, reports Phil Harrison proudly. For those of you who don't know, the Unreal Engine 3 is the "big deal" graphics engine for this generation of systems (sans the Wii). News that the system is getting optimized for the PlayStation 3 is pretty handy, letting us know we can expect some excellent titles in the coming years, possibly exclusive due to said optimization.

Phil also apologized to Epic indirectly, admitting that Sony did not support them as much as they could have in the beginning, but are taking steps, like those mentioned above, to rectify the situation. With the Unreal Engine 3, optimizing the use of the SPU's is the crucial task. Harrison explains the importance of that aspect: "The benefits that it yields to end developers, whether they're writing exclusive titles or multiplatform titles, is that the performance on PS3 goes up exponentially - and it will make for a much better game experience." Let's just hope that lawsuit between Epic and Silicon Knights ends in a way that won't attack such lofty goals for massive damage.

[via Games Industry]

Game Informer has posted a great post-E3 interview with Phil Harrison where he talks about Trophies, Sony's response to Gamer Scores, and the ever popular GT 5 Prologue. For GT 5 Prologue, Phil clarified that unlike GT HD, this will be a full game with a full feature set. While he wasn't willing to go into specifics at the number of tracks and cars that will be available in the game when it is released later this year, he indicated that it won't be nearly as stripped down as GT HD and will actually represent what GT 5 will be like.

When it came to Trophies, he mentioned that they are actively looking at creating 'retro-Trophies' for older games like Resistance and Motorstorm. It wasn't clear if this would mean you would have to replay the games to get the Trophies, or if they would be automatically awarded based on your past performance -- either way it's very cool to hear Sony is working on this. This is something fans have been asking for since they heard about Sony's Trophy idea and is a pretty exciting idea.

Phil also (kind of) talked about their response to Microsoft's bizarrely popular Gamer Scores. He danced around the question a bit, clearly not wanting to reveal too much information but he did give a hint that they're going to avoid a point based system. It's going to be interesting to see how they're able to great a non-point system -- maybe they'll reward you with a number of Loco Rocos depending on your score!

Enter Echochrome, one of the most interesting and engaging new titles popping up at this year's E3. "Least graphics, most game play is their angle," said Sony's Phil Harrison, as he introduced Echochrome in the midst of Sony's E3 keynote. In addition to our earlier description as, "Jenga blocks, plus stick figure man plus acid," game play seemingly bears a distant resemblance to games like Crush (PSP) and the upcoming PC release Portal. Echochrome looks like it will have players assembling the game world to steer the stick-figure hero to his end goal. An orchestral score keeps an ambient atmosphere, which should help for those ultra-tricky sections that will be sure to induce cold sweats. Ah, the intense pleasures of a great puzzler. Echochrome certainly looks promising and the fact it will arrive on both UMD for the PSP and the PlayStation Store as one of the "more than 80 first-party games available" makes it all the more desirable.

If there's one thing we love about Sony's Philliam Harrison (what, you mean Phil isn't short for Philliam?), it's that he's always available to answer questions for whatever reason. These are interesting questions, so we'll go ahead and summarize the Q's and the A's below. Enjoy!

If you could go back in time, what would you tell your past self?

Phil said: "the professional advice I'd give myself is to "think bigger"...I would have encouraged him to be more ambitious, bigger scale, more aggressive in changing the way games were made and also to have invested more heavily in creating online experiences - however experimental, however unsuccessful."

Where do you see gaming, socially and culturally, in 20 years?

Phil responds thus: "I hope that videogames and electronic forms of interactive entertainment continue to expand to new audiences, all the time. Linked to that, I want to see videogames given more credibility as a mainstream form of entertainment through appropriate cultural commentary and criticism." We all do, Philliam, we all do.

So... encouraging or discouraging "homebrew" games?

Phil? "Let me first say that Homebrew is sometimes a misused term and so for the purposes of this answer I will exclude pirates and hackers with illegal intentions from the definition." He goes on, "I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone. We were one of the first companies to recognize this in 1996 with Net Yaroze on PS1...we will do our industry a service by providing opportunities for the next generation of creative and technical talent." But remember, guys, piracy isn't allowed and Sony will do what they can to prevent that.

Does SCE grow concerned over the loss of multiplatform titles?

"We have the widest selection of meaningful exclusives on PlayStation 3 - by virtue of our own investments in our development studios and strategic support of independent developers and publishers...Within SCE Worldwide Studios we have the largest platform-dedicated development resource in the industry - with more people, and more teams, dedicated to making games exclusively for PlayStation 3."

What're you going to do about all the negative Sony press?

Phil replies: "We absolutely have a lot of work to do but I'm convinced we have the right strategy - and recent announcements like Home and Little Big Planet have resonated very positively with our audiences around the world, including some commentators who had been previously critical of us." He also goes on to discuss the mistakes Sony has made and apologizes for them. He also mentions that positive word-of-mouth is far more impressive than any PR firm can do. So as people enjoy the system, they'll grow comfortable in talking about it and recommending it.

So... price drop?

We're not even going to quote. Because the answer is no. What'd you expect? Feel free to drop some comments on what you think of all this -- we feel he's a pretty competent guy and answered all these reader-submitted questions with the greatest of Sony style. Take that as you will.

Before we even get into the awesome list about what Phil Harrison spoke about, we have to quote the original article's opening sentence because it's so inspiring: "PS3 may have cemented its place in history as the most successful home console launch ever in the UK, but Sony World Wide Studios boss Phil Harrison says that there has never been a product launch like it in any sector." Bragging rights, anyone? No? Too selfish and rude? Okay, well, still. Fantastic.

Harrison's statements can be split into three long quotes, which we'll summarize below because we know you've got other stuff to get done. Right?

• 165,000 units sold, equating to £100 million worth of business over the course of 2 days. He said: "This not only makes it the most successful games hardware launch, we think it is the most successful consumer launch of a product in the UK."
• Sony is dumbfounded by their own success: "We have been in the office scratching our heads trying to think of a consumer product that has achieved that level of consumer sales in such a short period of time. If anyone can think of a UK product launch that has raised this amount of business in such a short period of time I'd love to know because we can't think of one."
• Out-of-stock? Paychecks coming in? Says the Phil: "We are already seeing across Europe out of stock situations where retailers re re-ordering. It was always our strategy to have a good supply. There's never been a launch of a console in Europe that's had a million pieces of hardware sold in or available. We've kept some back in order to continue to supply the market."

Good stuff, Phil Harrison. What do you guys think? Was the launch a failure, or was the media quick to hop back onto the Sony-hate wagon and cover the failure of launch events and not the actual sales numbers/data/facts?

Making an appearance at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, Phil Harrison gave a speechy-speech about the importance of the European market and how he gets all warm and fuzzy inside to see people waiting to get their greasy claws on the see-every-piece-of-dust-and-fingerpint PlayStation 3. We'll just list his quotes that were worthwhile. Why? ...Because. Every speech has highs and lows, you know?

• "The fact that we've got the launch here with more consoles shipped on day one that we've ever had in our history is a compliment to the importance of the European market." Well, the extra months to stockpile the Emotionless PS3's probably helped!
• "I've seen PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 launched on Oxford Street but this is the most meaningful for me personally, because I think it's so important not just for our industry but for UK consumers - the fact that they're going to get the best machine with the best software support, the most Network service and the firmware update." Eh, give or take on the software support and network service. But yeah, the PS3 definitely has the firmware update!
• "They had to wait, and I feel really bad about that. But I'm hoping we can make it up to them with the quality of software that we've got coming out." He refers to HOME and LittleBigPlanet, insisting their announcement was coincidental and not meant to build up some European launch steam.
• "The fact that people are prepared to invest their time, their money and their passion in queueing up to be part of a launch is great - and it kind of makes all the hard work worthwhile. It's not just for people in the UK, it's for the guys in Japan who make the hardware, it's for the people who make the software, and the thousands of people who are part of the PlayStation story." Aww, that's a nice note to end on. We're part of a story!

That's about all he said that we're going to mention. Actually, we didn't leave all that much out. Did anyone go to the Oxford Street launch? Was he there in person or was it a video or something? Not sure how that works since Georgia isn't the biggest attraction for important corporation personalities.

Yeah, ever since the announcement, a lot of the press-related folk and small-time bloggers have all raised their hands and asked in a query-chorus (where we all sing a question in very high-pitched, reverent voices): How will you present to us this Beta, oh Sony, father of PS3? Phil Harrison had his notecards ready and tossed a few super-sized quotes our way.

PHarr... hmm, we're going to go with that (pronounced "Fahr"... closer to "Ffahr" though). Anyway, Pharr said: "We haven't announced the specific invite mechanic but it will be a closed deployment with a capped number of users and then we'll extend that through the summer. When we go live with the service we'll actually have gone through a number of betas before we get to final deployment in the fall." What's also interesting to note is that within Sony itself, testing bugs and glitches is pretty easy to manage because when online, one tester can bring another Sony member to the glitch and show them exactly what is wrong. We'll probably be doing that, too, if they miss anything (which everyone always does).

Pharr also was ecstatic that everyone else was ecstatic about all the announcements at GDC, but we've been over that already. Can we put this GDC thing behind us now? We'd like to get more info on the Beta, but that'll depend if we get invited or whatnot. Let's move on to bigger things, like... screenshots? May as well.

This is basically a big PR move with Sony and ThreeSpeech and this Tom Kiss fellow took a lot of very nice pictures for us to gawk at. What a swanky pad! We'd love to sit around and play games at ThreeRooms. Without further ado, we present the knowledge gained at this event.

• Phil Harrison took a picture of everyone in a room, popped the memory stick into a PS3, turned on HOME, and in a matter of seconds, he had placed the picture into a frame and it was sitting on a shelf in his personal HOME-space. Pretty neat.
• In another room, he put up a Bravia TV (figures it's a Bravia, huh?) and made a Casino Royale trailer play on it, with proximity-related audio. Oh, then he picked up the TV and threw it down a set of stairs. Not in real life... that would make Nick angry.
  
• Tom Kiss took some video of Phil and three other guys playing LittleBigPlanet. It's still cute.
• The lobby size of 64 users in HOME is likely to not change, since that's pretty crowded when text bubbles are popping up everywhere.
• Here's a biggie: Remote Play from any wireless hotspot in the world will be available with the 1.6 firmware update. That means anywhere you go with a wireless connection, you can get any video, music, or photos from your PlayStation 3 right onto your PSP. Oh, that's hot.

That's about it. Check out Tom Kiss's (kisses? oh, someone please smirk) article and scope out his pictures and videos

I'm on Spring Break. I'm in Las Vegas, sitting in the Mirage hotel after enjoying some Craps... what better time to admit to you guys that I'll still be bringing you the news? Albeit... 3 hours earlier. Or later... something. I don't really understand how that will work out -- but the amount of postings will be the same. I love you guys that much. With that in mind, more Phil Harrison stuff!

This is actually part two of an interview we covered the first part of yesterday -- where Blu-ray will ensure the PS3's success or some such. We'll make a general compilation of his points and you can check them out in more detail for whatever you're interested in.

• Phil says that Sony has always concentrated on user-oriented strategies as is being seen with Little Big Planet and user-generated content (what?)... he cites developers taking big risks with projects like Shadow of the Colossus and God of War, Loco Roco, among others. He says that such games wouldn't have come out of a more conservative marketing strategy, or a multi-platform game.
• Background compatibility: Phil says "calm down". It's all there -- the entire PS-One catalog and an ever-increasing software emulation of PS2 titles. Over 1,000 PS2 titles so far.
  
• Phil is very confident that Sony will remain the market leader this console cycle. But if he wasn't confident, that wouldn't reflect on Sony very well, would it? Sony may just stay on top, but by a much thinner margin, if we could place our bet.

That's mostly it. Like we said, you can check out the article and read the full interview if you'd like to hear more about any of that, but that's pretty much a superb summation. Anybody have any games I should play for you while I'm here? I'll let you know if I win (or how fast I lose).

The challenges of the PS3's first few months are in the past. The age of bashing Sony is coming to an end as they get the ball rolling on the right side of the mountain (the side that, arguably, goes downward... imagine a 2D mountain. The right side is downhill, so it's easier to roll a ball. They've been pushing the ball up the left side... that's hard. Get it?) and start busting out some great ideas and some even greater games. Games are the emphasis now, Phil Harrison said. "It's all about software now, it's not about hardware. It's all about services, it's about the way the industry is changing and the way we hope to be taking a leadership position in that change."

Phil also responded to his own fantastic keynote address: "We're taking some pretty giant steps forward... The keynote here at GDC was a very, very significant moment for the evolution of PlayStation 3." He also talked about why he titled his speech "Game 3.0" and what it means for the industry: "It's something that as a platform holder we have a responsibility to grow the market, and to try and push the market. What I wanted to do here at GDC was paint a picture for where this industry should, I believe, move - which is to empower the user with user-created content. That's what I was referring to with the Game 3.0 aspect to my presentation. I hope the industry debates it and challenges it and takes it to another level beyond what we have imagined. We're just trying to kick off the debate; we're not trying to own it or control it."

Well said, Philly H. User-created content is going to be huge this console cycle, what with the internet taking over the universe in the guise of SkyNet and Time magazine labeling the collective "You" as person of the year... it's important to be narcissistic this year. What do you guys think? Is this where the industry is headed? Or should they concentrate on making fun toys instead?

We've been slowly releasing details from yesterday's bloggers meeting with Phil Harrison. One of the biggest points of discussion (unsurprisingly) was Home. There are still a lot of questions that we had, and Harrison was quite candid about the upcoming "Game 3.0" project:

• Considering the wild support of Home at GDC, why didn't Sony reveal this information earlier? According to Harrison, the idea might have been "too complex to explain" so close to the PS3 launch. It might have been "misunderstood" during a busy launch period. Also, Home simply didn't have the polish it needed to be shown at the PS3 launch. With that in mind, Harrison would have made "no adjustment on the PS3 launch."
• The world of Home will never get too big: additional worlds will spawn when a certain one has become too full. Through matchmaking services, Sony will attempt to place you in an environment you're most likely to have fun.
• Home's arcade games were originally going to be based in Java to make it as easy as possible for indie developers to get content ready. However, they moved away from the language for better performance.
• When asked, "will this sell PS3s?" Harrison quickly answered: "Yes. It's another reason to play PS3 every day."
• Like Nintendo, Sony believes this will attract non-gamers. They've attempted to make the interface as easy as possible. Yes, the characters are in a 3D environment, making it "not 100% accessible."
• Gamers that don't want to use Home are still free to use the XMB for PS3 navigation. "It's still an important interface." Most of the features of Home can still be accessed from the XMB--you simply lose many of the social interaction aspects.
• Home is nothing like Second Life, according to Harrison. The similarities end at both having 3D characters in 3D environments.
  
• The "PlayStation focus" of Home will be what keeps the community together. "PS3 owners all share a love of digital content." Expect the sharing of music, video and game content to be what keeps PS3 owners connected to Home.
• No touching! Your digital avatars in Home will not be able to touch each other. You will, however, be able to jump on each other in LittleBigPlanet.
• Like Nintendo Mii, your digital avatar will be available for use in other games. However, it won't be too easy, says Phil Harrison. Not only does the character model have be exported, but the animation system will need to be moved as well.

It's clear from the enthusiasm of the individuals in the room that everyone's interested in Home. The public beta is going to be available soon, and those of you with PlayStation Network accounts will want to pay attention to your inbox: you may be getting an invite (they're figuring that out, though).