E3 2007: The Sony Empire Strikes Back

A new PSP and Killzone 2 lead Sony's charge.

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Earlier this week Sony dropped the price of the PlayStation 3 in North America to $499 (a European drop is expected soon) and it introduced a new 80 GB model that will sell at the top-end price of $599. But what Sony's console needs is games, and those are coming later this year.

Echochrome for PSN

Like both other platform holders, Sony stressed the importance of third-party game makers to the company's strategy. And while the company has been on the losing end of exclusive deals until now, it did have a few surprises in store.

One of these was that Epic, the creators of Gears of War, would be bringing its frenetic shooter, Unreal Tournament III, only to the PlayStation 3 this year. The team is also going to be working with Sony to optimize the Unreal Engine 3.0 software that so many developers rely on for making their games.

Other exclusives announced at the show included Haze, a futuristic shooter from Free Radical, the creators of the original GoldenEye game on Nintendo 64, and also the biggest of them all: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Kojima shows off his new game

Konami's Hideo Kojima was a welcome guest at the event. He showed a 5-minute real-time trailer of what his next Metal Gear Solid game would look like and confirmed that the game would be coming only to PlayStation 3 in early 2008. This will also be the last game in the series.

Where Sony has made the most ground since the previous generation is in first-party games, a line-up that this year includes such eagerly awaited titles as LittleBigPlanet, the Game Republic (Genji) developed RPG Folklore, and new Ratchet & Clank entry Future Tools of Destruction.

The real fanfare was saved for Sony's biggest games. It finally showed off more of Heavenly Sword, a game that is much broader in scope than many had feared, and there was also Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, an action-packed adventure game that tells a treasure tale of the sort found in 20th century pulp fiction novels. Gran Turismo 5 made an appearance of sorts, as an early look at Gran Turismo 5 Prologue - a game that will precede the game proper.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

One of the brand new games shown off was Infamous, a game from Sucker Punch, the creators of the Sly Cooper series. This, Phil Harrison described, is Sony's go at the sandbox genre in which you play a super-powered character with important choices to make that affect the world around you.

But the heavy hitter of the day was the same game that had so many people excited about the PlayStation 3 in the first place: Killzone 2.

Killzone 2

In a few minute of real-time gameplay footage, Sony dispelled much of the talk that it wouldn't be able to match the target video footage it had wowed the world with in 2005. Killzone 2 looks grittier and more visceral than the first game.

Killzone 2 saw the show come to an ened and It seemed fitting to what was a tech-heavy and unapologetic showing of the future at Sony.

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