A new Golden Age of gaming. Part two

Mike Bantick
Saturday, 25 August 2007 23:13

Opinion and Analysis

I asked the major publishers to furnish a list of what they believed to be their top offerings over the important holiday sales period.  There are some gems amongst them, across all gaming platforms.  Part one gave Ubisoft and Activision a platform; this time around we will focus on Sony and Microsoft.

Sony have been criticised somewhat for a lack of gaming content that begins to take advantage of the power on offer from their flagship gaming console. 

In answer to the question of what hot upcoming titles are arriving from Sony over the next few months, it is an interesting list to peruse under the light of the PS3 power utilising question.

To begin with we have Time Crisis 4 from NAMCO BANDAI games - straight from arcade and featuring all the shooting and ducking behind cover a player can take. 

Sony say ;" Time Crisis(tm) 4 is the first
next-generation instalment of the classic PlayStation(r) arcade shooter - and with High Definition graphics, improved gameplay, an all-new First Person Shooter mode and the next-generation G-Con(tm) 3 controller with 6 action buttons and dual analogue sticks, it's going to hit the target."

Introducing the new controller G-Con (or Guncon in some territories), can it compete with the Wii-mote?

Next up, coming late October/November will be in collaboration with traditional board and trading card experts Hasbro a game titled The Eye of Judgment

Sony say; "THE EYE OF JUDGMENT is a new concept of interactive entertainment that combines Hasbro trading cards expertise, a strategic board game format, the immense power of PS3 and the groundbreaking technology of Sony Computer Entertainment's next-generation PLAYSTATION(r)Eye camera. Magical, visually stunning, conceptually unique, easy to play and seriously enjoyable, THE EYE OF JUDGMENT will appeal to gamers of all ages and abilities and is set to become a PS3 must-have."

Using the  Eye Camera - sitting on a tripod over a physical game board - players will be able to place trading cards in the 'real- world', watch them come to life on the screen and play out a traditional card battle game by prodding the cards under the eye-toy in a turn based way.  Using a starter deck that comes with the game, The Eye of Judgement will no doubt unleash another fury of card collecting amongst fans, as they strive for an unbeatable deck.

Then there is SingStar for the PS3, taking the popular franchise into Next-gen will have the major advantage of having downloadable content for a game that relies heavily on song-lists.

Look for SingStar on PS3 towards the end of this year.

On Page two we will see what Microsoft consider the hot couple of soon to be released titles as must-haves for the Xbox 360.