Features// SPOnG's Review of 2007: March/April

Jack Thompson (to SPOnG) - Florida Attorney - 22/03/2007
Jack Thompson Cites SPOnG In Court Filing

March. Bluebells were springing up in the woods, birds were starting to sing again... the PS3 launched.

March was indeed the month of Sony.

SPOnG kicked it off with a chat with Phil Harrison, president of Sony Worldwide Studios. Among other things, Harrison told us, “Moving resources towards in-house development is absolutely the strategy”. He was vindicated when a report emerged from Screen Digest telling the world, “Sony Computer Entertainment Studios employs some 2,200 developers across 14 different studios… it has more programmers, artists, audio technicians and designers than Microsoft and Nintendo combined.” Wowser. Go Sony! We waited eagerly to see what fruits this massive studio investment would yield...

March was also the month of the Game Developers Conference over in San Francisco. Gears of War had a stonking time of it, cleaning up at the awards there. SPOnG caught up with its lovable creator, Cliffy B, for a chat.

The highlight for many, however, was the aforementioned Phil Harrison's keynote. Phil's speech marked the public birth of 'Gaming 3.0'. For those of us who don't go in for nebulous jargon, that meant – as far as GDC went – PlayStation Home and LittleBigPlanet. 'Second Life on the PS3?' we asked. Well, kind of. 3D avatars wandering around a virtual space, interacting with other avatars and getting up to other social-networky type things... Then there was LittleBigPlanet, which looks like more fun than you can fit into a week at a sex resort. Build things, share them, go 'Awwww...'

GDC wasn't the only conference in March, however. During his keynote at the South by SouthWest conference (SXSW) in Austin, Will Wright told the world, “One of my real aspirations of this is I wanna see interstellar wars between Care Bears and Klingons.” So do I!

SEGA managed to grab a couple of headlines, too, when it set our fanboy hearts a-flutter with the announcement of a new NiGHTS game for the Wii.

The fluttering was soon replaced by trembling here in the SPOnG offices, however, when the ever-loveable Jack Thompson, anti-games crusader for the masses, decided to try and take us to court along with Take Two. We'd been racketeering, apparently. Needless to say, we felt suitably ashamed. So, we asked Jack to be more specific... got into an argument over religion and we waited... we never did receive that deposition, though...

Anyway, Sony soon put our Thompson fears to rest and jumped back to the forefront of our minds when March 23rd rolled around. What was expected by many to be a bit of a sombre console launch turned into quite the party. The free £2K tellies might have had something to do with it, it's difficult to be sure...

The great, stonking-big fall-off-your-chair-if-you're-not-careful news didn't come until a few days after launch, however. After what had begun to feel like an overwhelmingly gloomy build-up to launch, the PS3 only went and smashed the record for biggest home console launch weekend. Sony sold a whopping 165,000 - 60,000 more than its closest contender, the Wii. Not too shabby, eh?

Not wanting to be left out of all the hardware madness, Microsoft also got around to announcing the Xbox 360 Elite in all its HDMI, 120GB glory.

To round off what was a pretty peachy month (litigation threats aside, obviously) we got our first taste of Grand Theft Auto IV.

With a console having launched, things picked up on the releases front, too. Obviously, you had your 23 PS3 launch titles to start off with. SPOnG's favourites (uncontroversial as they were) were MotorStorm and Resistance, reviewed here and here. Bethesda put out The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles and EA released the rather spiffy SSX Blur for the Wii.