As I write this this the Sony Playstation 3 keynote address is just about to start. I plan to update this news post with the highlights of the speech as it goes along. (By the way, video, camera and audio coverage was not allowed during the conference)

Sony Computer Entertainment Phil Harrison began by looking back at the Playstation 2 showing that their previous console has dominated the game console market and sold faster than their first console the PS1. Even though the PS3 is due out in November, Sony still plans to release titles for PS2 and brought out David Jaffe of their Santa Monica studios to demo the upcoming action-adventure game God of War 2. Jaffe joked that they decided to have God of War 3 on the PS2 because the PS3 still cannot handle "three way sex scenes in real time". They then showed a brief video that had gameplay from God of War 2 that had some pretty brutal scenes (Kratos chopping off a giant bird's wings while in flight was the highlight).

Harrison then talked about the PSP portable console, going through some of the new features coming for the console, including support for RSS feeds, a Flash based web browser, video and still camera add-on support coming in October and GPS support. Harrison said gameplay additions could happen with these latter two features. Harrison also announced plans to run games and software directly from a Memory Stick in October with PS1 games available via download for the PSP. The PSP will be able to be linked to the PS3 as well.

Harrison then started on the PS3 portion of the keynote. He started with showing a video (in 1080p HD) showing underwater graphics with thousands of fish on screen swimming around. He then covered what had already been announced as the features for the console; Blu-Ray disk, hard drive, backwards compatible with PS2 titles and a worldwide launch in November 2006. Final versions of their SDK kits will ship to developers in June.

A new video showed off nearly 1,000 characters in a vast field in line who were then blown up, showcasing the ragdoll physics of the PS3 combined with the Havok engine. Harrison joked that the demo was so much fun that they should ship it as a game. They then showed off a demo of a hugely detailed sports car that was being shot up with impressive damage effects. Harrison confirmed the car damage demo was from a forthcoming but unannounced PS3 action game.

Yet another PS3 game demo shown at the keynote was Warhawk, which was first briefly shown during Sony's E3 press conference in May 2005. The future flying action game looked even more impressive in the real time GDC demo with volumetric clouds, soft lighting and of course lots of future fighters and floating capital ships buzzing around. Warhawk will be playable at E3 in May.

Harrison then talked about Sony's plans for the Playstation Network Platform. The basic service will be free of charge for PS3 owners and Sony Online (Everquest) is helping to develop the network. Both first and third party servers can be connected and there will be things like friend lists, avatar and other standard stuff for online communities. Sony will offer downloadable content for a variety of formats (pay for download, subscription and micropayments) and games downloaded onto the PS3 hard drive can launch from the hard drive with no disk required. Some images of an upcoming PS3 Formula 1 racing game was shown that used video chat inside the game along with other features, including online stores to buy new content from inside the game.

Yet another playable PS3 demo was then shown. Motor Storm is a off-road racing game that was shown briefly at E3 2005. The GDC playable demo showed a dune buggy and a motorcycle with some impressive vehicle physics and more importantly a ton of particle physics for the muddy and sandy ground. The motorcycle even kicked up mud on another vehicle. Motor Storm will be shown at E3.

Ted Price of Insomniac Studios then showed off their upcoming PS3 first person shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. The demo took placed in a bombed out urban enviroment with some cool looking graphics and weapon effects as the character took out human looking enemies and insects with machine guns, shotguns and more. Again, Resistance will be in playable form at E3. A movie from another PS3 game that Insomniac was shown showing off a huge cartoony urban landscape (a al Ratchet and Crank) with tons of highly detailed flying vehicles.

Harrison then talked about how the PS3 console will allow for more revenue streams in addition to the traditional disk format, including downloadable games, episodic games, MMORPG like subscriptions, in-game advertising, mobile games, in game object sales, and merchandising. Harrison said all of these revenue streams is what he is calling the "Wheel of Fortune". Harrison then announced their plans to support distribution of games via PS3 online download and established a web site at http://us.playstation.com/beyond/ to help developers get in contact with Sony to start those distribution talks going. Harrison then showed off the music themed product Singstar that showcased music and video downloads of music artists.

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