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Half a country away from the droves of gamers that descended upon PAX East in Boston were another set of geeks flooding downtown Austin for South by Southwest. Gaming has become a constantly growing presence and effort from the Screenburn portion of SXSW Interactive and 2011's showing has been one of bigger showings with more game companies setting up playing demos and even Sony renting out an entire club to host a Playstation lounge showing off titles such as SOCOM 4, Resistance 3, PixelJunk Shooter, MLB: The Show 11 and their 3D tech to festival attendees.
Being I'm getting to this half-a-month after — anyone want to trade in their PAX Flu for hospital visits? — I'm going to bunch of lot of what I saw and the interviews I did multi-part journal just in the interest of time and my still recovering.
Sony's Playstation Lounge
Easily one of more notable sights downtown over the course of the event was the transformation of a local bar into the Playstation Lounge. Just in the process of scouting the Austin Convention Center the Thursday before the festival began, one could see the transformation taking place across with Sony and Playstation title logos and signs prominent where none normally occupy walls and a projection screen under construction on the rooftops.
Playstation Lounge
Inside, pretty much a little of everything, including Rosario Dawson as the Playstation Blog shows. The Move, Sharpshooter and Sony's 3D tech were all on display for the public as well as the SOCOM 4 Bomb Squad multiplayer mode that had just been shown to the public at GDC a week earlier. I spoke with Associate Producer Ara Demirijan in an interview you can hear below.
[embed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbMP8vTNtgo ]
I'm not the world's most prolific shooter multiplayer enthusiast so I won't pretend to offer any next level insight to whether the depth of the mode. But it did seem to blend some elements of protecting a VIP, mind you an armed and heavily armored VIP, with controlling key points on a map in an interesting way. A bar with blaring music is never the ideal way to play anything that requires teamwork and some communication to play at its best, so it would be very interesting to see this in action with people n more natural gaming settings.
I wish I could speak more to the 3D, but my vision doesn't lend itself very well to the technology when it requires glasses. So I can't really say much of any interest past it was there and at very least seemed to impress other attendees.
Sharpshooter for me was another case of a motion control solution that works well, but will never be my first option. As a person that has toyed with the Wii Zapper and Sharpshooter both once a piece, I'd take the Sony product 10 times out of 10. Part of that may just simply be the higher fidelity of the Move wand in itself, but in the battle of plastic peripherals I'm still not sure I'm not sure I need, I just liked the design and feel of the Sharpshooter more. It gives good feedback, I really liked the the placement of the navigation controller and general could use it little problem.
Attendee trying out the Sharpshooter
That said, I'm hard-pressed to ever think I'd ever use it over a regular controller. It still feels like I'm giving something up in terms of precision and control. It's a good accessory for someone that may feel it immersive to have light-gun accessory but I still think there's some improvement to be made before motion controllers are in any sense the equally of a dual-analog controller, let alone mouse and keyboard.
Not open to the public, however was a demo of Journey, which I got to see for the first time in person with Associate Producer Randall Lowe. My first thought was how beautiful the game looked from an artistic design perspective. Lowe, as others working on the game, talk about the desire to create a sense of scale in the game, mainly how small the player is in relation to the world the player explores which is accomplished in many ways, most prominently being the ever looming mountain in the distance to be reached.
[embed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_VCvyQbZds ]
What I personally take away from looking back on it weeks like is fluidity. Whether it be the ever-flowing movements of the waves of sand which in the right moments can be surfed or the floatiness of your character and the cloth which are so important to the progress and puzzle-solving in the game, it a world constantly in motion which in many ways is markedly counter to most depictions of deserts. So while there doesn't appear to be much of anything alive occupying the world seen, it world in itself never really felt as dead as I'd imagine a scenario so isolating.
Sony's showing was definitely the biggest spectacle of Screenburn not involving reinvigorated former heavyweight champions. But I'll revisit Mike Tyson's continued resurgence in video games later in my journal.