Next PlayStation Console Started Developing

Sony has always insisted that it has a ten-year life plan for the PlayStation 3 and the unveiling and upcoming launch of the PlayStation Move motion tracking seems to emphasize that point.



But the company is thinking about the future too, a possible PlayStation 4, and one of its main goals is to involve video game makers in the creation process from the early stages, in order to make sure that a new home console will render it as easy as possible for innovative developers to create new titles for it.

Shubei Yoshida, who is the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, told Develop, a United Kingdom-based magazine, that “When Ken Kutaragi moved on and Kaz Harai became the president of SCE, the first thing Kaz said was, 'Get World Wide Studios in on hardware development'. So he wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us.” The executive then went on to confirm that Sony was “undergoing many activities that we haven't yet been talking about in public” with some of them “future platform related activities.”

When the PlayStation 3 was initially launched, a lot of developers said that it was too hard to make video games for it, Steam refusing to create ports of their titles until recently. The console rebounded with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Killzone 2 showing off the power it really holds, and even Steam has announced that it is bringing Portal 2 to the PlayStation 3, complete with Steamworks features.

The problem is that those initial years, when big franchises sold lower on the PS3 and when the console sold significantly lower than the Xbox 360, affected Sony and the company must be eager to avoid having the same issues with its next generation of gaming gadgets.
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Dead Rising 2 delayed Till September

In February, Capcom announced that the sequel to its hit zombie-apocalypse action game Dead Rising would arrive on August 31. However, much like the lumbering undead masses players must fight in both games, Dead Rising 2's release date has fallen behind.

The Japanese publisher announced Monday that the new installment in its franchise will now arrive in North America on September 28, in Japan on September 30, in and Europe on October 1.

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OnLive - Might Be The Future Gaming

OnLive could be one of the most disruptive gaming technologies since Steam.

The much-hyped OnLive PC gaming service has soft-launched to a limited preview audience, and we've spent the past several days putting the streaming service through its paces. OnLive allows nearly any laptop or desktop to play high-end PC games, by offloading the CPU and GPU-intensive tasks of actually running the game software to a remote render farm, then beaming the gameplay back to you as a streaming video.

As unlikely as that scenario sounds, in practice the system actually works quite well, at least at these initial stages. The game selection is decent, the hardware requirements are very flexible, and the overall image quality and gameplay experience runs from acceptable to very good. The big question mark in OnLive's future is how well the system will scale for a mass audience.

For high-end PC gamers, OnLive won't replace your turbocharged, water-cooled quad-GPU gaming rig, and the insane screen resolutions it can pump out (OnLive is currently limited to 1,280x720 pixels), but for casual gamers who are interested in sampling the latest PC games, there's a lot of promise here.

My first hands-on experience with OnLive at the 2009 Game Developers Conference was a mixed bag. The online gaming service felt like an overly ambitious idea that was sluggish in execution, with plenty of unanswered questions about its technology and business model.

The final version of OnLive is finally, well, live, and Rich Brown and I have spent the past several days testing it across a wide range of laptop and desktop computers, with overall very satisfying results.

The main interface is very widgetlike, almost easier to navigate with a game pad than a mouse. One of OnLive's only onerous requirements is a hard-wired Internet connection, and the software wouldn't even install on a Wi-Fi network (OnLive says good-quality Wi-Fi connections can theoretically work, and may be implemented in the future).

The built-in game store offers recent games such as Splinter Cell: Conviction and Borderlands, alongside a handful of casual games, including World of Goo. Demos give you time-limited access to the full games, and paid access options vary by game, but generally offer three-to-five-day access for a few dollars, or the full game at its current retail price (up to $59.99).

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