The Richter Scale^®

Quite an interesting day today attending both the PS3 unveiling at Sony Pictures Studios and the Xbox 360 Kick Off.

Key Announcements of things I hadn’t heard before today:

Sony PS3
- Sony will launch the PS3 at E3 in May 2006
- All major game developers appear to be on board, no exclusives announced (although it’s presumed that Sony’s own games will work only on Sony platforms)
- The PSP will be able to be used as a remote control for the PS3, and the PS3 is intended to be the center of the living room, as a media center
- Up to seven wireless controllers, connected via Bluetooth.
- Will support up to two, count ‘em - two! - HD displays simultaneously for a 32:9 aspect ratio, 4K by 1K pixel display. Wow.

Xbox 360
- Will offer backward compatibility with with the leading Xbox games. This implies that not all original Xbox console games are guaranteed to work. As I stated below, this is not particularly surprising, as the Xbox 360 hardware is radically different from the original Xbox, and thus Microsoft has to run in “Xbox emulation mode”. Ill behaved games will break the emulation.
- Still apparently, for an “HD Era” device, will apparently not feature an HD or Bluray DVD drive.
- Will offer support and integration with a variety of media devices, and an image shown by J Allard at the briefing also showed the Apple iPod as one of the supported devices, and a Sony PSP as another - wow! (if they can pull it off without Apple or Sony getting all ballastic on them)
- Will ship in time for Christmas 2005 sales, with 25-40 titles available then
- Has convinced Square Enix, previously a staunch Sony supporter (although recently also Nintento Gameboy too), to support the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live! with a forthcoming release of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI.
- A number of exclusive titles - including Activision’s Call of Duty 2 and EPIC’s Gears of War

Live pictures via Cell Phone cam can be seen below.

More details available at:

http://www.xbox360.com
Engadget and Joystiq’s Coverage of the Xbox 360 Kick-Off
Engadget and Joystiq’s Coverage of the PS3 Briefingand more pictures of the PS3
MAKE: Blog - PS3 Specs vs. Xbox 360 Specs
Ployer’s PS3 Coverage

Live, from L.A....

Microsoft certainly knows how to throw a party… The Killers - in about
ten minutes, on this stage....

The presentation’s over. Time for the reception…

Yoichi Wada, president of SquareEnix, just announced support for the
Xbox 360 and Xbox Live! Final Fantast XI was demonstrated.

This is a major deal for Microsoft, which has been courting leading
Japanese developers for some time in order to be able to better
establish a foothold in Japan.

Rob just announced that the Xbox 360 will be backwards compatible “with
the leading Xbox games”. Implication is that not all original Xbox games
may run, which is not surprising as the Xbox 360 will have to emulate an
Xbox - x86 architecture and NVIDIA graphics hardware, instead of having
native hardware compatibility.

Also announced was a simultaneous three continent release of the Xbox
360 in the Fall in time for Christmas.

It’s about a half hour late, but the briefing has started. Microsoft’s J
Allard, Peter Moore, and Robbie Bach have kicked things off.

They claim that Xbox Live! will have 2 million subscribers within 2
months, and 6 of the top 10 games out now are Xbox titles.

Registration was a mad house. Fortunately both my senior editors at TechWatch were with me. (And thanks
to Heidi too!)

Here in the Shrine Auditorium there’s an excited buzz in the air.

The briefing starts at 7:30pm and will go on for an hour. That will
apparently be followed by a party/reception - The Killers (who played
two sets during the Xbox 360 infomercial on MTV last week) are slated to
perform at 9:30pm, and The Chemical Brothers at 10:30pm. At 1:00am
there’s either a Doors revival band playing or The Doors Close to not
allow anyone in, and the last bus leaves at 2:00am. I plan on being on a
much earlier bus…

The big difference between the Sony approach and the Microsoft one is
that the latter is making their briefing an entertainment event, and
Sony made their briefing a entertaining briefing.

More later.

More details will be forthcoming on the Sony PS3 briefing once I get to
a real keyboard, but meanwhile here’s a shot of the chaos at The Shrine
Auditorium waiting to register for the Microsoft Xbox 360 briefing.