PS3 Attitude: GDC 08; the PS3 Attitude wrap-up ¦ PlayStation 3 news with bite

Last week saw one of the big events on the PlayStation 3 calendar hit San Francisco. The Game Developers Conference landed at the Moscone Center with the PS3 riding a wave of positivity after the much catalogued 'death of HD-DVD'.

So it was unusual that this year Sony would not be giving a keynote speech. Instead, they decided to let the developers do the talking. The idea from Sony's point of view was that the message of how good the PS3 is would be better coming from all the different external angles instead of from the horses mouth, and maybe that was a good idea.

What it did mean, however, is that it made it harder to track what was being announced and where from.

Before the event started we had our suspicions of what might be talked about at the show.

We expected Square-Enix to announce their forthcoming MMORPG for the PS3. They kinda did and didn't. The game itself remained unannounced, but they did talk a lot about the Crystal Tools engine (formerly known as the White Engine) and gave a snippet of Final Fantasy XIII to the baying crowd.

We said that CryEngine 2 would be available to see on the PS3 and it was. We posted some nice videos of what CryEngine 2 can achieve during the show. Once again, this does not mean Crysis is on the way for the PS3. We'll just have to wait and see what people actually produce using this advanced game engine.

There was a good chance of some kind of God of War III announcement, but in retrospect this is more the kind of thing Sony would want to announce themselves. With the lack of a keynote, it's clear that E3 in July is the best bet for this.

We also struck out on any Home, in-game XMB and LittleBigPlanet announcements for the same reason. Although the 'in-shirt XMB' was very popular!

In other announcements we were pleased to hear about:

PixelJunk Eden (with a first look at the gameplay)
Call of Duty 4 feature patch
Havok's new Cloth and Destruction tools (with a first look at a technical demo)
Details of the top PSN downloads and purchases

In other news we didn't report during the week, we also got wind of:

The 'secret PS3 game' the BBC reporter saw could be a 'Fight Club' styled online-only brawler called Tears of Blood. It apparently looks 'more spectacular than any game I've ever seen' according to one source. It is not to be confused with the old Magna Carta: Tears of Blood RPG game for the PS2.
Two nice tech demos using the PS Eye were shown; one that tracks your face for 3D game positioning and another that allows you to draw a tank on a piece of paper which the PS Eye then scans and converts into a playable tank on-screen.
Prototype looks better than we thought possible (video to come soon).
Bionic Commando (the new 3D one) looks great too, but Bionic Commando: Rearmed is a brilliant re-imagining of the original 2D sprite-action game and can be played via Remote Play on the PSP.

So that's it for another year. The next main show we'll cover is the Play.com Live event at Wembley Stadium in London which opens this March.

Labels: GDC, news, Playstation 3, PS3