Hey, we’ve got a little while before this starts.

I’m basically expecting to see a lot of games, a lot of expansion on the currently available products, like Home, and some surprises as well.

• That’s it! See you later.
• LIVE God of War III demo! The ingame graphics are amazing. Like the other game, it started on Kratos’s face, but this time, it looked pre-rendered. It wasn’t. Release coming March 2010.
• GT5 Tease! Not much is shown, but it’s clear there’s car damage. WRC and NASCAR are both mentioned in the trailer, by name, so it seems that Polyphony Digital is embracing the total “car lifestyle” direction.
• The Last Guardian. This is “TRICO” Trailer. It looks like the one that’s been online already, though not as rough around the edges. We see many scenes of a boy and a giant, yet cute, beast. There’s running, there’s jumping, there’s throwing barrels at evil looking guards. Looks very stylish.
• Mod Nation Racers Announced. The next game for the Play, Create, Share movement.
  It’s cartoony looking characters in a “Cars” looking, very detailed environment. It’s a kart racer, with weapons and powerups.
  Beyond character creation and car creation, car tracks are created by users as well. Making the tracks is as easy as driving over terrain. It seems far simpler than LBP. Not less powerful, just easier to make something quickly to play. Nice.
  It’s coming in 2010.
• Disney Interactive Studios Teams with LBP. Jack Sparrow, Mr. Incredible, and more costumes coming to LittleBigPlanet.
• PSEye Motion Controller. They’re showing a wand with a colored ball on the top. The Eye can track the wand and the color of the light in the ball. Tech demos here. We see some typical casual stuff, hitting balls in 3D space, etc.
  Clearly, this is a hit back at Natal, showing how accurate the wand tracking is and emphasizing that often one still needs something to hold, rather than Natal’s “nothing to hold” approach.”
  How’s it look? Pretty nice actually. Capable enough. It’s to be seen what software releases to support this in Spring 2010.
• FFXIV Only on PS3! Looks like Square Enix’s new MMO. Wow.
• FFXIII Trailer. Game Coming in the Spring! It looks amazing, as you can imagine. New environments are shown. It’s in English and it’s a story trailer. The voice acting sounds alright. You’ll need to see it yourself.
• Assassin’s Creed 2 Gameplay Demo! It’s looking much more interesting than Assassin’s Creed 1. We see some new tools such as the flying machine, double assassin blades, smoke bombs. There are 30 weapons to use. 6 exclusive weapons are unlocked through connecting Assassin’s Creed 2 to Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines on the PSP.
• Rockstar North’s Exclusive for PS3: Agent. No info.
• Upcoming PS3 Titles Trailer: Uncharted 2, inFAMOUS, White Knight Chronicles, Batman, Madden, Brutal Legends, FFXIII, Dirt 2, Ghostbusters, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Wet, Mafia II, new Buzz, Saw, King of Fighters, Tekken 6, Ice Age, Overlord II, Red Faction Guerilla, Heavy Rain, Battlefield 1943, Pixel Junk Shooter, Trash Panic, Critter Cruncher, Katamari Forever, Fat Princess, Zombie Apocalypse, DC Online, LBP, The Saboteur, Bioshock 2, Ratchet & Clank, Fight Night Round 4, God of War III, and many many more that I missed.
• Talking PSN. Home. 100,000 units of Street Fighter IV products downloaded from Home. More spaces coming. Trailer.
• PSP Titles Trailer. LittleBigPlanet, Jak & Daxter, MotorStorm Arctic Edge, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, SOCOM, Monster Hunter, Soul Calibur (a new character!), Persona, Eye of Judgement, echochrome, Tiger Woods, Madden, Hot Shots Tennis, Fat Princess!, Star Wars Battlefront, something that looks like the Petz series, Rock Band, too much to tell. Plus, there are no titles, so there are some games I don’t even recognize. There were at least two RPG’s I’ve never seen before. A fighter too.
• A New Resident Evil Coming to PSP. Next year.
• Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. For PSP, being made by the MGS4 team, it’s a true Metal Gear sequel. Takes place 15 years after the events of MGS3. Kojima intends to utilize the PSP’s full feature suite. Here’s a trailer!
  We start with some stock footage of the Cold War, followed my Big Boss running through various wooded environments. These events lead to the rise of Outer Heaven.
  In a typical Kojima twist, there’s some weirdness. We see 4 Big Bosses or Snakes(?) Two get in a box together.
  Looks pretty good for the PSP. Coming 2010.
• All future PSP releases with both be digital and UMD released.
• GT on PSP! 800 cars, 35 tracks, full 60 FPS, basically, a full sized Gran Turismo experience on the PSP. 4 player adhoc. Trading and sharing of cars is also supported through adhoc. It’s supposed to make gathering all the cars in the game that much easier.
  Meeting with friends to do this adhoc trading and racing is part of the experience, so it’s all but confirmed that this won’t have infrastructure mode. A trailer for the games plays. It’s difficult to tell if that’s in game or not.
  Gran Turismo PSP is coming October 1st to launch with PSP Go!
• New Partners for Video Content: G4, Showtime, and More!
• PS Video Store is now natively supported on the PSP. Starting today.
• PSP Go is $249.99 in the Fall. October 1st, to be Exact.
• Development tools will be 80% cheaper for PSP.
• SenseMe. New music analyzer for PSP’s of both types. It’ll look at your music collection and select music for you. Hm.
• Media Go Replacing Media Manage for PSP. That’s great! It’s supposed to be much easier to use.
• This is heading toward the PSP Go. Officially Announced. It’s got no UMD drive. It’s not going to replace the PSP-3000. We’ve heard this. It’s 50% smaller, 40% lighter.
• Kaz Hirai!
• Dissidia Final Fantasy Coming, Followed by Assassin’s Creed on PSP.
• MAG. They’re doing a LIVE 256 player battle demonstration. 8 people are there at E3, the rest are testers at the various studio locations.
  The squad commander is using various skills, marking targets, calling in a UAV.
  They’re taking a bunker. There is a Call of Duty style XP counter for each kill. To destroy objective, they need to place charges and then guard them. Kinda like Killzone 2.
  Taking out an anti aircraft turret has allowed them to bring in mobile spawn points (choppers).
  Full 256 player battles will be on the show floor. Why aren’t we there?
• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. “Sets the new bar for goal pushing.” Beta starts tonight! Now, we’re getting a single player demo. Here we go.
  We join Drake, looking at a palm tree. The colors are extremely vibrant. Looking down over the city looks incredible. We see some cinematic camera work as Drake traverses the upper parts of the city.
  Helicopter! Intense firefights break out. Some “shoot even while hanging and climbing” is shown. Also, creating cover with overturned tables. Grenade throwing is much faster now.
  Okay! The whole environment was moving as a building collapses with Drake and Chloe inside of it! Very impressive physics simulations going on there.
• inFAMOUS got great reviews. One of 35 exclusive titles coming to PlayStation.
• Latin America sales are doing well.
• Starting off with PS2. Good sales after the price drops. Outsold next gen systems in April.
• Jack Tretton takes the stage. He seems… funnier.
• It has begun. Dramatic trailer of PS3 games. There’s a lot of them.

This is the updated Metal Gear Next teaser site. Now, it’s sunny, and we’ve added the letters “0” or “O,” “6” or “G,” and “B” or “8.” Not really that’ much more clear, but the timer runs out today at around 6PM EST. Finally, the wait is almost over.

For those of you who don’t know:

A teaser site for Kojima Productions (MGS4) next title has been counting down for several days now. When the first countdown ended it revealed another countdown. When that ended, another countdown.

Of course there was a little bit more than that. The site’s image, a field on a stormy looking day has grown progressively stormier. Accompanying flashes of lightning, one could occasionally glimpse a hidden character, letter or number, in classic MGS font. We’ve seen "5" or "S" "e" "E" "3" "R" "P" so far. Then a few days ago, an image of whom appeared to be Big Boss from MGS3.

As if this kind of teasing wasn’t ridiculously infuriating enough, a Kojima interview with Famitsu was recently released, heavily edited, as not to spoil the announcement that is to come at E3.

SNEAK PEAK:

That’ll be showing up somewhere on this site soon so I everyone can keep track of my Trophy Quest’s progress. On to the main event!

Dissidia: Final Fantasy is really cool, cleverly designed, and quite fun. It’s funny, because if you watch the videos that explain the game, it seems extremely complicated, but the game is actually pretty simple. Basically, you have two “health bars.” One is an actual health bar (HP) that once depleted means that you lose. The other is something called Brave Points, more on that in a bit.

Next, you have two attack buttons, each of which damages one of the two health bars, special attacks knock off HP, regular attacks knock off Brave Points. Here’s the interesting part. The number of Brave Points you have determines how much HP your special attacks will take off, so by using regular attacks, you take away your opponents ability to hurt you. Not only that, each Brave Point knocked off the opponent means another Brave Point for you, so in addition to weakening your opponent you strengthen yourself. There’s some special situations (like when your Brave Points fall below zero), but it’s basically a game of horde all the Brave Points until you have enough to really do some heavy HP damage with a special attack.

I call them special attacks because, as far as I have seen, the animations used are those of the limit breaks (overdrives, etc.) from the characters’ original games, which is just one of the many Final Fantasy touches that makes the game so cool. In addition to the attack buttons, there’s also a “special motion” button that lets you run on walls, air dash, grind on rails, fly from platform to platform, and just a lot of stuff that makes the battles look a lot like Advent Children stuff. Plus you can freely run mostly anywhere in the large stages, jump, and dodge roll on the ground or in the air.

Actually, I uploaded one of my game replays, which you can actual export directly from the game: