Fall of Man Demo Impressions
Resistance is done... lock and load!
by Jeremy Dunham  
   
 
October 19, 2006 - Insomniac and Sony have officially finished work on Resistance: Fall of Man, and to celebrate, have created a sizeable two-level demo based off that code for today's "Gamers Day" held in San Francisco. We managed to get first dibs on that build (giving both stages a thorough play-through) and still walked away with the same feeling we've had for the last couple of months... that Resistance is going to be one of (if not THE) most appealing launch titles of November.
 
The difference between today's demo and the version that Sony had on display at TGS is minimal. Minute AI tweaks, small bug fixes, and slight visual polish is all that one usually expects at this point and that's exactly what we got. The stages used in this sample, however, are somewhat different. Level 1, for instance (aka "Viper's Nest," which is part of the Nottingham area shown off in Japan last month), has its final enemy scripting in place -- making things quite a bit more challenging (Insomniac's demo wasn't dumbed down in the least). Because of these final adjustments, this area's two main bad guys (a pair of belligerent "Titans" ) acted just like they're going to in the final game -- using lanky arms and giant plasma shots to take us out. Luckily, they arrive as bookends (one at the start, one at the finish), so we're not forced to fight them both at the same time.
 
 
Stage number two wasn't shown in Tokyo at all, and actually hasn't been seen since E3 when we played the game for the first time. This Manchester-based battlefield, known as "Outgunned," is probably the most recognizable of all the levels the public has seen thus far (you know, it's the one that looks almost entirely tan and gray and is filled to the brim with rubble and debris), but its appearance and performance now compared to E3 are definitely evident.
 
This obvious change can be found mostly in the little things. Shadows have been turned on, enemies work together more effectively, the number of cover points and onscreen allies has increased quite a bit, etc. Like the other stage, "Outgunned" is a little on the challenging side as well and pits you and a few of your NPC buddies against a large number of aggressive aliens. It'll definitely be interesting to see how this environment turns out in the full game, since the demo's version is quite the busy, quite entertaining, and quite hard.
 
During our session, we learned a couple of other tidbits that we hadn't really learned before. When using the sniper rifle, for example, you can target individual pieces of your enemies (the hoses on their back, their metal protrusions, limbs... you name it). This location-specific damage means that if you blast an opponent in the kneecap, he'll drop down to an injured kneeling position; blast a guy in the arm and it'll go limp for a moment or two leaving him open for more fire. Cool. We also discovered that your AI-controlled teammates won't be able to finish a conflict. Though they will do damage to an opponent when attacking him, it's up to you to finish the job -- think of them as strategic breathers.
 
 
Other interesting things on the discovery tip include the fact that Resistance's "skill points" work much in the same way that Insomniac's Ratchet skill system did -- rewarding players with unlockable goodies like cheats and skins for excelling in hidden ways. Also, the health system is similar to Halo's in that it regenerates over time but since your life bar is broken into a pip system, you can only regenerate lost health from within your remaining sections of the gauge. Our favorite little tidbit, though, is that players can customize their quick select wheel for weapons so they can jump to whichever guns they want in whatever order they want. It's small, but very handy.
 
There is one bit of bad news, though: Insomniac ultimately decided against going with 1080p and has kept the game at a maximum resolution of 720. But to learn more about that, head on over to this interview [Editor's note: Coming Soon] with our most recent interview with Ted Price where we talk technology, online features, and even Ratchet PS3.

Resistance: Fall of Man update! More of your questions answered!
 
Hi everyone,  
 
Today is Gamers' Day for Sony Computer Entertainment America. We have another opportunity to show off Resistance:Fall of Man to a crowd of both consumer and enthusiast journalists. Our plan is to present a cool tech demo that helps explain what the PS3's SPUs are doing in the background during some of our larger battle scenes. We’re using a Manchester, England environment where about 15 of your allies are under heavy fire from around 20 or so Chimera. There are bullets flying everywhere, explosions going off left and right - basically chaos. During gameplay I plan to pause the action in mid battle and begin stepping through the game frame by frame, moving the camera around the scene to check out lots of stuff that players will almost certainly miss when playing real time. I’ll talk about the many processes we send to the SPUs where they're all taken care of at the same time (physics, navigation, collision checks, lighting calculations, special effects processing, etc). I’ll also explain how running these processes in parallel simply allows us to do much more per frame than we could do in the past. And doing more per frame means more details and moving parts in the scene. Supporting these details in the game helps make the action more vivid and creates a greater sense of immersion.  
 
Just as important though, we’ll be showing the finished game. Yes, we've wrapped it up and it is now taking the final steps toward becoming an actual packaged game on the shelves during the launch. That's just a month away!  
 
And now that we're finished with the game I have some more updates for everyone - updates that were the result of the final weeks’ of work on the game.  
 
 
Update on disc size  
 
I'm probably adding fuel to the fire by bringing up this issue again. But the debate over Resistance's size on disc has been raging for a while and I want to give you guys the final number. Earlier I gave some very specific reasons why we were over 20Gb - all legit then and now. And I've also been careful to say publicly that this size was the current size of the game whenever I brought it up. And this week on Neogaf’s forums the topic was brought up yet again as part of the thread on an interview Phil Harrison did.  
 
As we moved into the final week of finishing up the game we made two big changes which dropped the size of the final disc to just over 16Gb – still pretty large nonetheless. What were the changes? We removed PAL movies and further improved our data compression. It turns out that the NTSC movies (not HD, but NTSC just in case Lachamania is reading this) could be converted on the fly to look really good on PAL TVs and therefore we saved space by removing them. It's something that was a pleasant surprise. Why did we bother when we had so much space to work with? It simply saved us time when burning discs. When you're making revs every day and distributing them to a large test team, saving burn time is crucial. We could have left the PAL movies on disc and not improved compression to keep the size around 20Gb but that would have been inefficient and a little disingenuous. We don’t want to pad the disc just to get it to a certain size. Whatever the game needs is what we put on the disc. Still, having a lot of space on Bluray means that we’re including things we wouldn’t have been able to include if we had had to use dual layer DVDs: higher res game assets and more of them, HD movies, higher fidelity sounds, more dialogue, all languages on one disc, etc.  
 
And of course, as others have pointed out in the many threads on this topic, the debate over disc size is a little silly. What really matters is whether your experience in the game is fun.  
 
 
720p versus 1080p  
 
We’ve gotten a few questions about whether Resistance will be running in 1080p or 720p. In fact, AssassinX01 brought this up in his comments on my last blog.  
 
Over the past few months we've told all of the enthusiast magazines and websites that we will TRY for 1080p. And indeed we did try. But when we began making our final discs we made the decision to release at 720p. Why? Native 1080p (versus 720p scaled to 1080p) uses much more VRAM than 720p. When we finished up a few of our bigger levels at the very end of the development process we realized that we would have had to steal VRAM from some of our characters and environments to run in native 1080p. Some of you who aren’t familiar with hardware in general may be asking “So didn’t you say you freed up more space?” Well yes, but VRAM and disc space are two completely separate things. VRAM/RAM is the 512Mb of dynamic memory allocated to game assets at runtime versus the 25Gb or so of permanent storage on a single-layer Blu-Ray.  
 
Anyway, we felt it was best to stay at 720p and that, at least while 1080p televisions are still relatively scarce, we should focus on implementing 1080p for our future games. Keep in mind too that Resistance still looks great on 1080p TVs even though it’s running in 720p. All 1080P TVs have a hardware scaling mechanism which scales the input signal to the TV’s native resolution. In fact, much of the non direct-feed (i.e. handheld cam) footage of Resistance floating around on the net has been of 1080p TVs using Resistance’s 720p signal.  
 
Another thing to keep in mind is that the game also looks really good on standard NTSC (480i) TVs. I think it’s easy to ignore the fact that not every consumer owns an HD TV. But we made sure to thoroughly test Resistance for text legibility and overall contrast on different types of NTSC sets.  
 
As far as the 1080p question goes, we at Insomniac realize that naysayers will have a field day with this one. Yet keep in mind that developing a launch title is a fluid process – things change all of the time. That’s what makes this kind of “on the edge” development both fun and terrifying. Ultimately what matters though is that you end up with a game that looks, sounds and plays great. And for Resistance: Fall of Man, I believe we’ve succeeded.  
 
 
What about video chat?  
 
Nope, no video chat in Resistance. I think that ninjatech on the IGN boards nailed it in this thread http://boards.ign.com/ps3_general_bo...29334745/p1/?7 . He pointed out that Kaz Hirai’s comment about video chat was not referencing Resistance but “what abilities games in general will have.” Ninjatech is exactly right. Resistance does not support video chat but undoubtedly other games on the PS3 will. Perhaps our future games will as well.  
 
 
Now for some Q&A  
 
Man, the floodgates have opened - there have been a lot of great questions from you guys. But seriously, there are a LOT of questions. There have also been some very good ones showing up on Neogaf as well regarding the multiplayer lobby - some of which I will answer below.  
 
Because I know you guys don't want to read a novel I’ll answer a limited number today. Then I’ll post another blog fairly soon to try and answer the rest. Here we go:  
 
 
totao923 posted:  
 
"question ted, whats the limit of people per rosters in a clan???"  
 
TP: Hey totao923. We have a pretty high limit on the number of people in a clan – 200. I hope there are clans that get this big!  
 
 
Arztek posted:  
 
"Great answers, Ted. I have a question for you, Do you ever see the character's physical model in first person? Better yet, do you see the character's legs or even his shadow when looking down?”  
 
TP: Sorry Arztek. We aren’t supporting this. We found though that you really don’t notice when playing. You should try it out and see what you think. But there IS a way to see the character you’re playing – play co-op with a friend! You’ll be able to see your entire character from your friend’s perspective.  
 
 
porch_monkey_15 posted:  
 
"Insomniac has made alot of excellent ground braking games past the years but i think RESISTANCE-FALL OF MAN is going to over take all of them with its great graphics and action packed story line but im still wondering if RESISTANCE is going to be made for the xbox360 too and will it be on xboxlive to play online please write back"  
 
TP: Hi porch_monkey_15 – that’s an easy one. We’ve made Resistance: Fall of Man exclusively for the PS3. That means you’ll never see it on Xbox360 and you won’t be able to play it on Xbox Live. But Resistance features a huge online multiplayer component. We’ve got 6 different online modes, most of which support 40 online players at once. And you don’t have to sign up for a service to play Resistance online – it’s free!  
 
 
daviddoel posted:  
 
Do you consider the R&C franchise a platformer, or more of an action/adventure title? I know there has been a lot of debate about this subject on these boards, and I've always considered it an Action Platformer. I would just like to know your views on this, and why you believe its a platformer or not. Thanks!  
 
TP: Hello daviddoel. That’s a question we’ve debated here over the years. And a lot of journalists have had trouble fitting the Ratchet & Clank franchise into any particular genre. Certainly the series has its roots in platforming – Ratchet jumps and glides with the best of ‘em. But the Ratchet games we’ve made so far have borrowed heavily from RPGs, shooters and more traditional adventure games. Personally, I think that because the gameplay is so varied, the Ratchet franchise fits better into the action/adventure category. This category is a lot broader in terms of its definition (though I don’t think there is an official definition for any genre).  
 
 
toxicity08 posted:  
 
Will Ratchet and Clank 5 be more like up your arsenal or will it be more liked deadlocked? Will the weapons be upgradable like in the last 3 games?  
 
TP: Hi toxicity08. Sorry, you’ll just have to wait and see. We don’t want to give out information on the game too early. If you can wait for another few months, we should have a lot to divulge.  
 
 
ANBUKaptain posted:  
 
“What do you think of the DualShock/Sixaxis setup?”  
 
TP: Hey ANBUKaptain. I’ll answer each of your questions separately. First, we’ve all been pleasantly surprised at how good the Sixaxis feels. It’s much lighter than the old DualShock and the analog sticks have a smaller deadzone. The smaller deadzone means better camera control which is crucial for a shooter like Resistance: Fall of Man.
 
“…And, which is your favorite controller that you've used?”  
 
TP: I think everyone at Insomniac would have a different answer. If you asked me this years ago, my own answer would have been the NES controller – but my hands were smaller back then :-). These days I really like the Sixaxis, followed by the dual shock. Why? I like the size – both fit comfortably and my hands never get cramped. I also think that the button layout is ingenious. They’re all within easy reach and don’t force you to take your thumbs off of the stick. Furthermore, there aren’t too many buttons to deal with. I get confused when a controller has buttons all over the place.  
 
“I was also wondering about your opinion on the lack of rumble in the Sixaxis is. I enjoy rumble, I think it helps the immersion of the game, do you agree with this? Do you think it's bad or good that it's not in the Sixaxis, or do you have no opinion?”  
 
TP: Honestly, I don’t miss it. We used the rumble feature for our Ratchet games on PS2 but it always ended up being a lot of work for little return.  
 
“And finally, I'm not even sure you've used a Wiimote, but I was wondering what your thoughts on Nintendo's new controller are. Do you think that they made a good choice, and do you think the controller will make for more intuitive games (even if you aren't developing them)?”  
 
TP: I can’t wait to try it. I didn’t get a chance to check it out at this year’s E3. But I think it’s great that Nintendo is going out on a limb and experimenting with alternate forms of user input. Whether it’s Nintendo’s controller, Eyetoy or new uses for headsets, alternate user input devices are great ways to inspire unique game concepts.  
 
 
Devon_Vice posted:  
 
“Are you (Insomniac) paying for and running the servers for this game? If so, in five years when nobody is really playing anymore, will you shut the servers down?”  
 
TP: Hi Devon_Vice. To answer your first question, Sony is running the servers. As far as whether or not they would get shut down if no one is playing the game – I hope we never have to face that scenario!  

“Also, you mention TGC and how playing people in America was a testament to the online of PS3. I would ask, if 40 people were in a game and all of their upload speeds were 95bps, would the game run smooth?”  
 
TP: If you’re talking about 95Kbps, yes, the game will run smoothly with 40 players at that upload speed.  
 
“How many times have you actually tested this in real world conditions with 40 people of varying speeds of broadband playing together?”  
 
TP: We do this every day between Insomniac and Sony. We’ve run thousands of 40 player games with varying connection speeds. Between our testers and Sony’s testers we’ve used many flavors of DSL and cable lines. And just to make sure the game will be bulletproof we consistently introduce artificial latency and packet loss during the test games. Finally we’ve tested extensively over Wi-Fi. And everything is working great!  
 
“Can we create our own rooms, or do we have to play on your servers (if individual servers is the way you go)?”  
 
TP: While everyone will be playing on the Sony servers, you can create your own customized (unranked) games. You can also mark them as private so you can have a select group of friends playing with you.  
 
 
Matrix_Peter posted:  
 
Will the final game offer Split-Screen ONLINE play, much like Ratchet&Clank:UYA?  
 
TP: Hey Matrix_Peter. Nope, no split screen online this time.  
 
 
FFObsessed86 posted:  
 
“May I ask, as the PS3 has been delayed in Europe til March, will the European version of Resistance contain any extras, bonus content etc for us poor filthy Europeans to enjoy? Or are you just gonna go hardcore on the next Ratchet?”  
 
TP: Hello FFObsessed86. Our plan is to release Resistance in Europe as it is now. Our plan from the beginning has been to create a worldwide disc – one that supports all territories. It’s already packed with a lot of content – and some great unlockables (you will hear about these soon).  
 
“Also, will Resistance be just the one game? Or is it going to be a new franchise? Personally, I'd love to see a full blown Sci-Fi one!”  
 
TP: Nope. Resistance is the first chapter in a much larger story.  
 
“Any plans to create any new IPs after the next Ratchet game?”  
 
TP: We’re always looking to create new IP. It’s what we do! But because we’re relatively small (160 people) we have to be careful about working on too many projects at once. Therefore we’ll wait until the time is right to start another franchise.  
 
 
clintar posted:  
 
“I forgot to ask something. Watching a video of you explaining the game at TGS you sure looked to be under the weather or maybe just jet-lagged/exhausted. It made me wonder. How is it for you, going through the whole TGS showing? What's that whole thing like from a developer's perspective?”  
 
TP: Hi clintar. TGS is always a lot of fun. First there’s the city itself – Tokyo is just amazing. From an American’s perspective the architecture and culture are fascinating. Someday I’d love to take a month and just wander around that city. The Tokyo Game Show itself is a madhouse. You probably saw pictures of how crowded it was. For developers it’s exhilarating to see people trying the games for the first time. And at the same time it’s challenging doing one interview after another especially with the time change. But I still consider us at Insomniac extremely fortunate to have had such great exposure in Japan – that’s thanks to Sony Japan’s support of our games. Whether it’s tiring to show our games off incessantly, it always ends up being worth it!  
 
 
Warabit0 posted:  
 
“Will I be able to take a friend into online multiplayer as a "guest" similar to Halo 2?”  
 
TP: Good question Warabit0. If you’re referring to split screen online, we don’t support that. But if you’re not playing split screen you can invite friends to join you in your online games. What you can do is first create a buddy list. This is a list of players you like playing with. The list is persistent – i.e. it’s available every time you log in. You can invite players from your buddy list to join a party you’ve created. Then you can join other games with your party. You can have up to 20 people in a party. This means that you and 20 close friends could play as a team against 20 other players in ranked or unranked matches.  
 
 
gofreak from Neogaf asked:  
 
"Can you clarify at all re. the in-game buddy list? Is that leveraging the PNP buddy list from the XMB with some Resistance-specific functionality, or is it completely independent? Also, can you comment on in-game messaging to people on your buddy list - is that possible? There's some confusion over that spawning from the Eurogamer article, and whether you can actually access the XMB buddy list anymore in-game, and communicate with friends from there. "  
 
TP: Hey gofreak. The buddy list is specific to Resistance. And we decided not to bother people in-game with messages. If you have a new message sent to you while you’re in a game, you'll see your "buddy list" tab flashing when you re-enter the lobby after playing a game. The buddy list tab is where you can access your friends, ignore list, messages, etc.  
 
 
Doom_Bringer from Neogaf asked :  
 
"I haven't played a console FPS online so please answer. How are they going to handle people who team kill and talk trash? Team killers are especially a big problem cause they keep rejoining (at least in BF 1942 server I play in). Since the servers are going to be handled by Insomniac who is going to moderate them? Is there an auto-kick or auto ban featuer built in (like if a person gets a score of -4 he is automatically kicked and if he rejoins and does it a couple more times that person gets banned...)"  
 
TP: Hi Doom_Bringer. In ranked games, friendly fire isn’t enabled. This means that there won’t be any team kills. Of course if you’re playing custom (unranked) games you can set friendly fire to “on” or “off”. If someone is really bothering you can put them on your “ignore” list as well. If you REALLY don’t like playing with strangers you can create private (unranked) games for you and a select group of friends. Down the road we also hope to release some tools that will help players self-moderate.  
 
 
Demon_Cleaner from Neogaf asked :  
 
"why the heck aren't they able to let the player join a running game? i mean you can do this in every damned pc shooter, even in quake 3 for the dc you were able to do this."  
 
TP: Hello Demon_Cleaner. I know that your question was answered by someone else in the thread but it’s a good question so I wanted to answer it here. We allow late joins for custom (unranked) games. When you set up a custom game you can choose allow or not allow late joins. But for ranked games we don’t allow it. The reason we don’t allow it is because ranked games involve matchmaking. When parties aren’t involved, the matchmaking mechanism attempts to balance the teams based on individual players’ ratings. With late joins, the teams could become uneven.  
 
But I’m sure others will ask, “what happens if someone drops out during the game? Doesn’t that mean the teams will be uneven again?” Yes, that’s true – it could happen. Yet we are doing our best to provide incentives for players to stay in the game and not quit. First, you will get no credits for kills, nodes taken, etc. unless you’re in a game through completion. If you quit early, you get nothing (this is not the case in some other online games in which you retain credits for kills even if you quit). Furthermore, everyone has a “Quits” stat which shows up on their character sheet. It’s kind of a badge of shame since everyone can see your stats.  
 
And that’s it for today. Great questions everyone. I’ll be back soon to answer more! Thanks again for your support from all of us at Insomniac Games!  
 
Ted

Lair Revisited
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
by Jeremy Dunham  
   
 
October 19, 2006 - Journalists that attended the 2006 Tokyo Game Show may be disappointed to learn that the playable version of Lair at Sony's Gamers' Day is "content identical" to what they saw there, but the company has made a few visual improvements in the weeks since. Specifically, Factor 5 has enhanced the framerate when running in 1080p (the resolution we played both levels in), and it moved along at a pace 5-10 frames faster than last month.
 
As for the levels themselves (the likes of which you can learn more about by reading our TGS preview), they were broken up into two types: a tutorial and a bridge battle. The tutorial uses PilotWings' loops to teach players how to control their dragon with the SIXAXIS (tilt left and right to bank, forward to descend, backward to rise), and eventually you'll learn the more advanced moves too -- harshly tilting left and right allows you to dodge, while slapping X beats your dragon as if he was Gerry Cooney so that he moves faster.
 
 
When locked in air combat with another winged lizard, players can then use any of the four face buttons to initiate different combo strings or solo attacks (you can use lashing motions with the gamepad as well). Once the screen turns red, this means that it's time to initiate "Killing Moves" that require you to hit a button every time there's a red flash to play out a scripted death scene (example: a rider jumps to an opponent's beast and stabs it in the head before leaping back to his own mount -- as seen in the trailers). Admittedly, the combat is a little on the simplistic side right now, but Sony reps mentioned that because of how early the build is, that a lot of the battle mechanics are still placeholder. Fleshing out the fighting techniques will come at a later date.
 
Speaking of placeholder, the only onscreen HUD right now is a morale meter similar to that of Dynasty Warriors. Your side (the Asylians, colored red) and the other side (the Mokai, colored Blue) struggle for morale dominance by killing each other's soldiers and monsters; once the bar is made up of just one team's color then the battle is over and it's on to the next area -- where it's expected to happen again. Factor 5 will eventually implement a health bar as well, but what kind of form it will take is unknown. Sony also discussed with us the possibility of your dragon taking visible model and texture damage as he's injured, but that is still a feature being discussed and it may or may not make it into the game.
 
But even without real-time lizard damage, Lair is still looking pretty impressive. Thousands of ground soldiers with high detail are displayed at once (though their animations are a little on the passive side), while dragon fire itself offers its own ambient light in real time. A number of other impressive visual effects grabbed our eye as well -- from the shadows and dragon animations, to the details of the environments and the extremely realistic-looking water. As our dragon swooped down over the water at high speed, the resulting physical effects looked fantastic.
 
 
For the sake of being completists, we also pushed Sony for some details we may not have touched on before. There are three different dragon types in this demo, for example, and they include the Flame Dragon (yours), The Ice Dragon, and the Dark Dragon. Giant bull-like creatures known as "Tauros" made appearances as well, and apparently there will be plenty of other monsters and critters revealed over the coming months.
 
Other tidbits: if you want to eat enemy soldiers to replenish health you can; tapping square shoots fireballs, while holding square down initiates fire breath; there will be some form of player progression that affects how well your dragon handles over time, and possibly also its strength; and finally, it's acoustic layout supports up to 7.1 uncompressed audio.
 
So what's the outlook? Good, so far -- though, as we mentioned earlier, the combat is still pretty basic and animations for ground soldiers are somewhat flaccid, so we'd definitely like to see an improvement there. The real trick, it seems, will be balancing the aerial brawls properly with assaults on soldiers. Even so, Lair has a lot of promise, and of all the full-on PS3 games we've played so far, is one of the most dedicated to using the tilt function of the SIXAXIS controller.

Over the past few months we've told all of the enthusiast magazines and websites that we will TRY for 1080p. And indeed we did try. But when we began making our final discs we made the decision to release at 720p.

As we moved into the final week of finishing up the game we made two big changes which dropped the size of the final disc to just over 16Gb – still pretty large nonetheless. What were the changes? We removed PAL movies and further improved our data compression. It turns out that the NTSC movies (not HD, but NTSC just in case Lachamania is reading this) could be converted on the fly to look really good on PAL TVs and therefore we saved space by removing them.

Sony Computer Entertainment America Announces Extensive Line Up of Game Titles for PLAYSTATION(R)3
Posted on : Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:00:01 GMT | Author : Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.
News Category : PressRelease  
 
FOSTER CITY, Calif., Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) today announced its debut game titles and unveiled the online strategy for its highly anticipated PLAYSTATION(R)3 (PS3(TM)) system, the company's groundbreaking computer entertainment system which will be available in North America on November 17, 2006.
 
More than 20 first- and third-party PS3 titles will be available through the holidays, resulting in the most robust software line-up ever offered by a new console at launch. The launch catalog encompasses the most popular game genres, featuring industry leading franchises as well as new intellectual properties to be released exclusively on PS3, with most titles expected to retail under $60.
 
"Our line-up of PS3 games that will be available through the holidays is unprecedented in terms of volume, variety and innovation, surpassing any previous competitive launch catalog and even our own original offerings for other PlayStation(R) platforms," said Kaz Hirai, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America. "We are pioneering a new era of true next-generation gaming through such titles as Resistance: Fall of Man, a visually arresting game that takes advantage of the large storage capacity and exceptional visual clarity offered by Blu-ray Disc(TM) (BD); and NBA 07, running at full 1080p for the highest resolution image possible, creating hyper-realistic characters and gameplay never seen before."
 
The List of Launch Window Titles Includes: SCEA Launch Titles Resistance: Fall of Man(TM) NBA 07 Genji: Days of the Blade(TM) Third Party Publisher Titles* Blazing Angels(TM) Squadrons of WWII Ubisoft Call of Duty(R)3 Activision EA Sports(TM) Fight Night Round 3 Electronic Arts The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Bethesda Softworks F.E.A.R.(TM) Vivendi Universal Games Full Auto(TM)2: Battlelines Sega Madden NFL(TM) 07 Electronic Arts MARVEL(TM):ULTIMATE ALLIANCE(TM) Activision Mobile Suit Gundam(R): CROSSFIRE(TM) NAMCO BANDAI Games NBA 2K7 2K Sports Need For Speed(TM) Carbon Electronic Arts NHL(R) 2K7 2K Sports RIDGE RACER(R) 7 NAMCO BANDAI Games Sonic the Hedgehog Sega Tiger Woods PGA Tour(R) 07 Electronic Arts Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six(R) Vegas Ubisoft Tony Hawk's Project 8(TM) Activision Untold Legends(TM) Dark Kingdom(TM) Sony Online Entertainment PLAYSTATION(R) Network Offers Unrestrained Community and Creativity
 
In addition to a wide array of software titles, SCEA today also unveiled the online and network services provided through PS3, which will offer distinctive benefits to consumers and developers alike. Consumers will be able to enjoy a wide array of PS3 network capabilities, with basic features offered absolutely free from day one. Developers will benefit from the open platform policy of SCEA, which will allow them more freedom and creativity in the development of their games and online/network services. The end result will be more than just a place to play games, but a rich online environment with strong community aspects as distinctive as the titles themselves.
 
The entry way into PLAYSTATION Network is XMB(TM) (Xross Media Bar), which is the navigation system that enables a complete suite of entertainment experiences in three key areas: gaming; network and web connectivity; and other entertainment contents such as movies and music. The intuitive XMB interface, which is already featured on more than 20 million PSP(R) (PlayStation(R) Portable) shipped worldwide, allows PS3 users to experience multiplayer games across the network; communicate with other players via chat, voice or video; browse the web; download gaming content; store/view pictures and video; download and listen to music; and shop online.
 
Through the online PLAYSTATION(R) Store, consumers can find such items as game demos, game-related content and downloadable casual games, including titles developed by Sony Computer Entertainment World Wide Studios exclusively for download and play only on PS3, such as Blast Factor. Once users create a unique, secure PlayStation profile, they cannot only communicate with other PS3 users, they can also utilize an electronic wallet to purchase content in the PLAYSTATION Store. Downloadable first party games will cost less than $15 at launch. More content will be added on a regular basis.
 
Peripherals to Accompany Comprehensive PS3 Package
 
PS3 is an incredible value for the consumer and comes standard with advanced technologies, such as the Cell Broadband Engine(TM), built-in BD player, internal hard disk drive (HDD), HDMI output standard*, Wireless Controller (SIXAXIS(TM)) and network capability -- everything required to start enjoying the PS3 right out of the box. SCEA offers a 20GB HDD PS3 system for $499 and a 60GB HDD unit for $599, which includes built-in Wi-Fi connectivity (60GB HDD model only). To further highlight the power of PS3's BD player, the Company also announced today that packed in with the first half million PS3 systems shipped in North America will be one of this summer's biggest blockbuster hits from Sony Pictures Entertainment, "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," starring Will Farrell. "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" will be sold separately in stores nationwide beginning December 12, 2006.
 
"As the industry leader, SCEA has always offered comprehensive entertainment systems that stand the test of time," said Kaz Hirai. "The PS3 system features technologies that are truly next-generation. With so much packed into our system, we are confident that the PS3 will be just as 'future-proof' as our other PlayStation products, allowing consumers to enjoy a myriad of digital entertainment content for many years to come."
 
Beyond the standard PS3 system package, SCEA also announced today the roster of peripherals that will accompany the arrival of PS3. The peripherals that will be available in North America on day one will include separately sold Wireless Controller (SIXAXIS), available for $49.99, a Memory Card Adaptor for transferring game save information from PlayStation(R) and PlayStation(R)2 Memory Cards onto the HDD of PS3 for $14.99, and coming soon, a BD Remote Control for $24.99.