I like that they're expanding the non-gaming apps, though I'd love it if they allowed for more general purpose Android apps to be released for Vita.For those of you who are unable to attend gamescom, we are excited to bring you the latest PS Vita news updates directly from the SCE Europe press conference in Cologne, Germany. In addition to the social features previously announced, PS Vita users will also be able to download dedicated applications for Facebook, foursquare, Skype, and Twitter free of charge directly from the PlayStation Store.
Resistance fans will be happy to hear that the signature PlayStation franchise will join the PS Vita software lineup with Resistance: Burning Skies, a new Resistance experience developed specifically for PS Vita that takes full advantage of the system’s dual analog sticks and features an all-new hero and story written by William C. Dietz, author of Resistance: The Gathering Storm and Resistance: A Hole in the Sky.
SCEE also announced a brand-new title: Escape Plan, a ‘touching adventure’ where you use touch controls to guide our newest characters “Lil” and “Laarg” through a dark labyrinth of puzzles and traps.
Our publishing partners also unveiled some big news at gamescom: Ubisoft will launch a brand-new Assassin’s Creed for PS Vita, and EA Sports is bringing FIFA, the world’s most popular sports title, to the platform. As we mentioned at E3, the biggest and best games are coming to PS Vita, and today’s announcements further confirm that promise.
Please stay tuned as we bring you more updates from gamescom in Germany, and let us know what new titles and applications for PS Vita you’re most excited about in the comments below.
Mad Blocker is coming to the Vita, which I believe was a Mini:Hi everyone! I’m the the writer and director of UNCHARTED: Golden Abyss. We’ve just released a trailer that introduces a new and important character from our story. You met Jason Dante in our E3 demo and learned a little bit about him: that he and Drake have known each other a long time, that they each know Sully, that Drake taught Dante a lot about treasure hunting, that Dante can be a little, well, greedy.
This time we’re introducing Marisa Chase. But as she tells Drake at one point, call her “Chase,” only her grandfather calls her “Marisa.” I don’t want to give too much away at this point, but I can say this: once again Nathan Drake finds himself on a quest to solve a historical mystery which he hopes will lead to a fantastic treasure. The trick is staying alive long enough to get there. No easy task. And when Drake gets between Dante and Chase, events quickly spiral out of control.
We were lucky to get some really great talent to play our key characters. Nolan North, of course, reprises his role of Nathan Drake. Nolan brings more than just acting to the story, he helps make the dialogue his own, creates funny ad libs on the spot, and helps rework scenes that might be having problems. Chase is played by the talented Christine Laken, who you might remember as Al from the television show “Step by Step.” Dante is played by the amazing Jason Spisak, who’s played almost as many characters as Mr. North. Working with these guys and watching them bring our UNCHARTED world to life was amazing. I think Amy Hennig, the writer over at Naughty Dog, once told me that good actors can make even my bad dialogue sound good. Not that I have any…![]()
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011...-the-ps-vita-trailer-everyones-talking-about/Ever since the PS Vita was unveiled in January, the handheld’s dual analog sticks have promised a proper first-person shooter experience on the go. The reveal of Resistance: Burning Skies at PlayStation’s gamescom press conference showed that the future of portable shooters will be bright from the outset.
Immediately after the conference ended, I met up with Rob Heubner from developer Nihilistic, who detailed some of what we can expect from the Vita’s first FPS foray. The next morning, Huebner and producer Frank Simon presented an extended play-by-play for international media.
Huebner said the studio’s core mission was to create a ”no-compromises experience with all the elements you’d expect from a Resistance game.” The Burning Skies demo fit neatly into the Resistance universe, but brought significant new features that evolved the game’s interactivity. As mentioned in the press conference, you’ll battle new Chimeran enemies with new weapons, all through the eyes of protagonist Tom Riley — a New York City fire fighter.
Burning Skies takes place right before Resistance 2, filling in the lost years and giving players a ground-eye view of the day the Chimera came to NYC. Huebner and Simon guided us through Ellis Island, which in the game’s alternate universe isn’t a tourist trap but a SRPA research facility. The base is under attack by the Chimera, who are dead-set on recovering something of interest. A weapon, perhaps?
A playthrough of the demo revealed a few surprises in that realm. I quickly got my hands on a Chimeran weapon referred to as the CFG (cluster fire gun). This weapon discharged short bursts of brittle ordnance that shatter on impact, a great tool for attacking soft targets such as tender Chimeran flesh. The CFG has an alt-fire mode, a Resistance staple. The manner in which it’s deployed, however, is PS Vita-only. A quick tap of the screen sets crosshairs on multiple enemies. Press fire, and they all fall in rapid succession.
This touch alt-fire method extended to the more familiar Carbine rifle. To fire off the underbarrel grenade launcher, merely touch in the direction you want to lob one, and off it goes in a fragmentational ‘splosion. Tossing a grenade works in similar fashion: When you touch the screen, an icon appears above your finger so you can see how long you’re cooking the grenade, then a “throwing” motion arcs them on their way.
The touch-sensitive screen also takes on the melee duties. An icon of a fireman’s axe (naturally) resides on-screen, just next to the Square button. Slide your thumb over when a Chimera closes in too close, and it’ll quickly be reduced to a pile of extraterrestrial giblets. Demo driver Frank Simon landed a one-hit stealth kill on an unsuspecting grunt as well.
The developers also demonstrated the weapon wheel, a feature near and dear to any Resistance fan’s heart. You can swap guns as you’re used to on the console games, or just tap the rifle you’re looking for directly on-screen.
It might sound like there’s a lot of touchscreen interaction in the game, but Nihilistic is being selective with its implementation. Heubner says they’ll only take advantage of “as many features of the PS Vita that make sense” for Burning Skies. Touch is used to keep you in the action and out of the menus.
The final new-to-Resistance feature is a first-person cover system, not unlike that found in the Killzone series. If you’re crouching behind certain structures, you’ll automatically go into cover. You’ve got the optional of tilting the Vita to see over or around cover, or you can just aim down the sights the old-fashioned way with L1. If you stand up or back away, you’re out of cover – no getting stuck.
It should be said that Resistance: Burning Skies is an attractive shooter. “We don’t have to compromise on the visual side just because it’s a mobile platform,” said Heubner. “It’s got all the special effects you’d expect on a PS3 game. And the game demo was presented seamlessly from beginning to end – not a loading screen to be found.
Back to the demo. Now equipped with a minigun, Riley ventured deep into the Ellis Island underground facility where human scientists labor to reverse engineer the Chimeran weapons. Fortunately, they left an an ammo upgrade for the minigun, which made it even more deadly.
And you’ll need all the firepower you can muster, because Resistance: Burning Skies throws a lot at you. The devs showed off the horsepower of Vita by filling a huge room with hordes of Chimeran attackers of multiple varieties. After raining liquid hot death on the enemies (and their reinforcements), the real threat reveals itself: a huge Chimera that loomed three times larger than most you’ve seen… and apparently, it’s just a mini-boss.
The demo ended there, but it not before making it clear that Resistance: Burning Skies is well on its way to delivering on the promise of becoming the first proper portable first-person shooter.
Hi everyone and guten tag from Cologne, Germany! Some of you may know me as one of the collaborative partners with SCEA Santa Monica Studios for the award-winning PlayStation Network exclusives, Fat Princess and Fat Princess: Fat Roles. I’m not only here to introduce Fun Bits Interactive to you, but to also introduce Escape Plan, as one of the upcoming titles for the PlayStation Vita. Escape Plan made its debut on Tuesday at the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe press conference and I have to express how thrilled I have been to see how well it has been received by colleagues and media alike throughout the week.
Placing bite-sized entertainment in the palm of your hands, Escape Plan features two hapless characters, Lil and Laarg, who have been captured and need your influence, skill and brainpower to escape from a dark labyrinth of irreverent puzzles and traps. Escape Plan takes advantage of the PlayStation Vita’s multi-touch display, rear touch panel and swipe interfaces. Players can swipe, squeeze, poke and slap these guys to interact and manipulate the environment and help Lil and Laarg survive each deadly room before their captor and nemesis recycles them and turns them into his minions … or sheep.
For those of you who haven’t seen anything on Escape Plan yet, watch the video above for a peek of what is in store for you next spring on PS Vita.
I hope you are excited for Escape Plan as much as we are! Lil and Laarg will be as fun to watch in victory as they will in the hilarious agony of defeat. We look forward to reaching out to our fans and will continue to keep you posted on anything related to Escape Plan, so please continue to check back here on the PlayStation.Blog for more information!
If Sony doesn't have a huge lineup at launch for both retail and downloadable games for the NA/EU launches, they will have failed with their claims of how easy it is to develop for and port to.Virtua Tennis 4 for PlayStation Vita first stepped onto the court at E3. Even at that early stage in its development, the game showed signs of ambition. It seems that Sega is taking great care to adapt the tried-and-true gameplay for PS Vita by extensively leveraging the handheld’s hardware strengths, all without dumbing down the series’s winning formula.
Now, at gamescom, I finally got to see some of these game modes in action.
Virtua Tennis 4’s core experience is nearly identical to its recently-released PS3 counterpart; you can create a character, start a career, and participate in tournaments while enhancing your skills through all kinds of bizarre tennis-related skill tests. Likewise, you can jump into the shoes of Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, or other real-world tennis stars.
What PS Vita brings to the court is a new, yet optional way to control the main serve-and-volley action, plus a series of “VT Apps.”
The core gameplay opens up considerably thanks to the PS Vita touch screen. Tap on the screen and your player will run to that spot. Once in place, you swipe in the direction you want to hit the ball, utilizing different gestures for topspin shots, lobs, backhands and more. Multitouch is employed to launch a lethal power shot – just swipe using two fingers to add an exclamation mark to a long volley.
Of course, you can still use the traditional stick-and-button controls, but here’s where it gets interesting: since both types of controls are always enabled, you can use a combination of the two. After a couple of games, I was navigating around the court with the left analog stick, and directing my shots with my right index finger on the screen. You can leverage any mix of touch and traditional controls, even in the middle of a point.
You might not always have enough time to power through a five-set marathon match, and so Virtua Tennis 4 for PS Vita includes a number of “VT apps” which are exclusive to the platform. My fave is called Touch Vs – a top-down mode for two players to compete on a single PS Vita. By turning the PS Vita on its side — air-hockey style — each player gets an analog stick and some screen real estate to shoot. It should prove to be a fun way squeeze in some two-player competition (and start a few conversations, too).
Additionally, Virtua Tennis 4 takes advantage of the Vita’s gyroscopes with the first person VR match (see the video above), and skill-building Rock the Boat, where you’re controlling your player as well as a ship you can lean back and forth. Virtua Tennis 4 also plans to take advantage of the system’s cameras through use of augmented reality, though Sega wasn’t yet ready to show that off.
Virtua Tennis 4 will be ready for launch when the PS Vita goes on sale. Tennis game aficionados should probably plan on taking it home with them the day they pick up a PlayStation Vita.