By Evan Ackerman

One of the biggest announcements at this year’s Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco is the Move, Sony’s new motion control system for the PlayStation. It’s generally similar to the Nintendo Wii, in that you hold a thingy, and something attached to the game console watches that thingy (in this case, it’s the PS Eye camera), and can tell where the thingy is being moved and translate that motion into in-game actions. Here’s the thingy in question:

More, including hands-on impressions and video, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Evan Ackerman

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are fun games, but after you master them, you’re left with little more than a staggeringly useless talent for pushing little plastic buttons. Game developer Seven45 Studios is aiming to change all that by partnering up with instrument manufacturer First Act to create a music game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 that uses a real, playable six string guitar as a controller. Plug it into a console, and it’s a control. Plug it into an amp, and it’s a guitar.

The game is called Power Gig: Rise of the SixString. I got a brief demo at GDC yesterday, and while they wouldn’t discuss the game itself in a ton of detail, we did get a good look at the hardware. The big draw, of course, is that it’s a real guitar that you get to play with. The only difference between the controller and a normal guitar are the additional buttons on the body (to duplicate the full functionality of a game controller) and a special string dampener that pops up to keep the strings from vibrating too much when you’re playing the game, since it would confuse the sensors. Otherwise, all of the clever stuff is internal, and the guitar can sense both string movement and finger position.

Seven45 stresses that this is not an education game: it’s not designed to teach you how to play the guitar. That said, as you get comfortable with the game, you do slowly learn the fundamentals of playing the instrument, and as you crank up the difficulty, the game will demand more real world skill from you. And it’s not just about playing the guitar, either: the game is somehow adventure based, and part of the storyline includes teaching you how to tune yourself and change your own guitar strings (spare strings will be included).

There are a lot of things still to be finalized, including song content, but as far as pricing and availability goes, look for Power Gig sometime this fall at a price that will be “competitive with other game band packages.” If the gameplay stands up to similar titles as well, the choice is going to be an easy one: why get a game that includes a fake guitar and teaches you to push plastic buttons, when you could get a game that includes a real guitar and teaches you how to play it, instead.

[ Power Gig ]

By Shane McGlaun

Today the Sony PS2 turns seven years old. Since the PS2 was introduced on October 26, 2000, Sony has sold 120 million PS2 consoles. That is only a drop in the bucket when compared to the amount of PS2 software Sony has moved at a whopping 1 billion pieces. The PS2 continues to be a popular choice for console gaming even with newer systems like the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 on the market.

The PS2 also helped establish the DVD format with its ability to play DVD movies as well as video games. Sony is trying this same trick with the PS3’s Blu-ray player with less success. Sony says it originally planned the PS2 to have a 10-year lifespan and with the way the console continues to sell, Sony says the PS2 may exceed its life expectancy. The PS2 currently has a library of almost 1500 games and that number is expected to grow with 160 titles coming for the PS2 between now and March 2008.

VIA [ Sony ]