(This is a writeup of my impressions of the fall Sony event; for a more complete look at everything, make sure you click over to the BBPS to get Jim’s take as well.)

Thanks to Jim’s meticulously groomed connections, he was able to score me a press pass to this event yesterday in Toronto. Which was indeed in a furniture store. Why? I have no idea. It served as a decent enough venue – you wouldn’t guess that this joint was originally full of patio sets. Sony had converted the space into a sort of Preview Xanadu: a half-dozen couches with big screens, probably two dozen standing kiosk-style setups, an open bar, ludicrous amounts of finger food, and PlayStation hardware all over the place. For a dork like me, this was a version of the sweet hereafter, missing only a bevy of hot chicks offering to hand-feed me olives while I played.

Here’s what I sampled: Dead Space, Resistance 2, Killzone 2, Fallout 3, Mirror’s Edge, and Prince of Persia. Impressions after the jump.

Dead Space: equal parts BioShock, Mass Effect and Resident Evil. Not a bad thing. Audio seems to play a key role in guiding you through the initial phases as the soundtrack was a bit muddled in the cacophony of the room we were in. The game is trying like hell to invoke a gothic/Aliens vibe, and mostly succeeding. Control of the main character can seem sluggish – again this reminded me of Resident Evil, although Issac Clarke* can in fact step from side to side and walk slightly while shooting his miner-oriented non-guns. The hovering interface effects are kind of cool. Aliens appropriately scary. I definitely want to see more when it drops next week. The game we played seemed to be final code.

(* is this really a blindingly obvious nod to Issac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke? Kind of… on-the-nose, don’t you think, guys?)

Resistance 2: a very mixed bag. Probably the most uneven play experience I had all day. R2 is almost a complete makeover of R1. I played the first 1.5 levels of the single player campaign. Way, way more colourful than the original. Controls have changed too – you can now sprint in Resistance, and they had that mapped to the same button as crouch by default (double tap was crouch, although this could be remapped. Which I did.) Hale seems to walk kind of slow, but roadie-runs really fast, complete with a Wipeout HD-style camera zoom that I found somewhat disorienting at first. Also the aim sensitivity, at default levels, I found to be extremely twitchy.

The first level definitely starts with a bang, and has you following another soldier right under the legs of an attacking Goliath, which looked and sounded incredible. However I also died twice for reasons I didn’t totally understand (I think I fell too far behind). Later on, when encountering a new predator-like enemy for the first time, I died several times just trying to get my footing – we’re talking 3-second lives here, as in respawn/what was that/shit I’m dead. A bit disheartening, to be honest. This was definitely beta code, with sync issues and other obvious bugs, so one cannot judge the game on this, but I was taken aback by just how different it felt from the original. I will just add that the new Bullseye effect for a tagged enemy is fantastic.

Killzone 2: Oh my god, the lighting. The lighting. Everything you’ve read about this game is true; it is quite simply the best looking (and sounding) console shooter you’ve ever seen. I do not say that lightly, but it is true – I actually gasped when I saw it in action. Happily, it’s not all aesthetics – shooting shit in Killzone 2 is just fun. The guns are super loud, the feel of character movement had a satisfying (almost Quake 3-like) inertia and sway; buildings and people come apart in surprising, delightful ways. The screen was labelled “pre-alpha code”, and we did see some freezes as well as a few totally hilarious miscalculated ragdoll casualties (one guy jumped out in front of us, did the splits 180º, and promptly died.) The first-person cover system was so straightforward that we actually didn’t know how to invoke it at first. There’s no “cover” button; rather, you simply duck behind a wall or low barrier and lean the stick forward, which causes your view to peek out, or around. This cover mechanic works so incredibly well that it makes you wish every FPS game had it. While KZ2 has been in development since the Bronze Age, I have to say in all candor, playing it right after playing R2 felt like night and day, and not in R2′s favour. This thing is going to be a monster.

Fallout 3: Ok, it does look like post-apocalyptic Oblivion. It does. Even the characters have that stilted turn-in-place movement when you rolled up on someone. I half-expected one of these mutant dudes to tell me about mud crabs. But nevermind that. F3 looks to fill two gaps in Oblivion that bothered me: it has a proper setting now, and it has good combat. As open-ended and extensive as the Elder Scrolls worlds are, the lore and art style of the place always struck me as sophomoric. And swinging swords in first-person Oblivion was, it must be said, pretty lame. Fallout 3 has a heavy atmosphere; there’s rubble all over the place, wrecked signs, flipped cars… just a crazy amount of stuff that feels more fully realized than the open countryside of the previous game, not to mention the signature Fallout series old-timey music and Vault-Tec ads. And while it’s technically “optional”, you’d have to be sort of a masochist to not use the pseudo-turn-based combat system. Targeting body parts never gets old, nor does the slow-motion animation of limb separation that results from a successful attack. I’m a bit frightened of this game, because it really could eat even more of your life than Oblivion did.

Mirror’s Edge: who would have guessed that the next game from the Battlefield guys would be first-person parkour in a dystopian Ikea city? ME was a popular draw for folks in attendance, maybe second only to Prince of Persia. It’s also a visually impressive piece of work – the vibrant colour scheme is the antithesis of your stereotypical brown-and-green console game. Environments are often sparse in detail, but not in a boring way. Somehow DICE can take a hallway that looks like the emergency exit from a theatre, and make it look interesting, using only bump maps. I had some concerns about the control scheme and “limb visibility” going into this for the first time, but I’m happy to report that it works pretty well. Yes, there are Up and Down modifiers for your movement, but all the face buttons also do things like attack or trigger “runner’s sense”. I get the feeling that you fall to your death a lot in this game, as not all paths are marked, and you don’t always know exactly what buttons to push. But I only got to spend maybe 15 minutes playing. If you are sensitive to motion sickness, you will want to steer clear of this one. I think Jim was gonna barf just watching it.

Prince of Persia: another very mixed bag, although not for the same reasons as R2. This had more to do with design decisions made in the new Prince of Persia, rather than potential beta glitches (it seemed very far along; I only noticed the occasional bit of pop-in). I declared this title to be a high point in illustrative shader techniques when I first saw screenshots, and it’s even more impressive in motion. I can’t belabour that point enough: Prince of Persia is almost horrifyingly attractive. What KZ2 does for gritty cinematic realism, Prince of Persia does for hand-drawn, painstakingly detailed graphic novel art. Even the menus and (extremely sparse) interface elements revealed a wonderfully sophisticated art direction. People have complained that it didn’t look “Persian”: it does, albeit a Persia that is very, very old. While playing PoP I encountered a bunch of new elements to the series that I didn’t quite know what to make of. Most obvious is the new female partner Elica, who follows you around everywhere and forms core parts of the gameplay. She’s, uh, “magic”. So she gets away with a lot of stuff like… teleporting. So a double-jump in the new PoP really means you jump, Elica teleports just in front of you and grabs your arm, hauls you forward, teleports away again and you land. That’s as weird as it sounds. In combat too, she gets in involved (triangle is the “Elica” button), but this was much less strange, due to some extremely clever realtime camera choreopgraphy. The enemies – or I should say, enemy, as there really is just the one – was… how shall I put this? Stupendously badass. Disgustingly awesome. I almost wish I could play as the shadow-creature, hunting the Prince and his magical fairy-woman. Suffice it to say, the combat is completely fresh and very dramatic. As for the core platforming, which is really what Prince of Persia should be about, this too was quite mixed. The new Prince can do some truly fantastic moves – scuttling along ceilings, crazy flips, all the stuff you would expect. But there are also these jump pads that you would expect to find in a Sonic game. They fire you across giant expanses of open-ended level. Sometimes, you fly both the Prince and Elica through a Magic Carper-esque wind tunnel. It’s just sort of weird. I’ll definitely have my eye on this one when it releases, but I am uncertain that the sweeping changes they’ve made to the core of the game are entirely good choices. Despite the lush visuals I really didn’t quite know what to make of it, even after grilling one of Ubisoft’s level designers on the couch for 20 minutes.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It was a bit disheartening to find some of these games completely unattended by PR people. Jim and I walked straight up to Dead Space playing all by itself on one kiosk, fiddled for about 15 minutes, and no one came by to answer questions. Same with Killzone 2 – it was just there. In this respect I think some of the Sony and EA reps may have dropped the ball a bit. Ubisoft and Insomniac really stood out in having people on-hand and eager to answer questions and get you into the games (my best “guided” demos of the day were for EndWar and Prince of Persia). Furthermore, I wanted to ask some high Sony muckety-mucks about Home availability and some other general platform questions, but really didn’t see anyone obvious to talk to about these things. This was strictly a PlayStation Fall Preview (in fact you could just say “PS3″ as the only marquee PSP titles there were Resistance: Retribution and Buzz.) It was also weird to see some very-new or almost-out games that not getting all that much attention: my beloved Wipeout HD sat unplayed in a corner all day, because who cares about a game that is out? Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, which shipped yesterday (nope, Oct.28 – not sure why I thought that), was largely ignored (possibly due to 1 of the 2 kiosks crashing uncontrollably) and even the mighty LittleBigPlanet got only moderate attention – I sensed that most of the people attending this thing had their beta keys some time ago. All in all, it was gratifying to get my hands on these games early… I just wish I could have talked to a few more people.

P.S. the swag bag consisted of a highly recycled umbrella and a 1GB memorystick. Yawn.

P.P.S. the DualShock chatpad thing is actually more workable than it looks.

P.P.P.S. while I didn’t get to try them, the GH:WT drumset looked like an unbelievably cheap piece of shit. I’m not kidding. The whole thing wobbled when someone played it, and the design looks like ass. I was surprised by this.