January was a good month all-around for the gaming industry, and Sony was not exempt. The PlayStation business made $550 million in North America in January 2007. The PS3 sold 243,554 units (slightly behind the 360 and way behind the Wii) and tie ratios for the PS3 are going up. (A tie ratio refers to how many pieces of software a consumer buys per hardware unit.) PSP sales have been strong too, selling 210,719 units (slightly behind the DS). PS2 hardware sales were 299,352. With supply stabilizing, February will see the first appearance of the PS3 in weekly retailer advertisements.

All good stuff. Though I have to admit that with the recent launch of the PS3 I was hoping that it would outsell its competitors. Oh well.

Sony ‘Very Pleased’ with January Sales

I actually watched the original TMNT live action movie about a week ago. And I loved the turtles as a kid and the games where fun too. Raphael was my favorite. The new TMNT PS3 game will be based on the upcoming CGI movie. It will be released on the PC, 360, Wii, DS and PSP. That’s right it’s not coming to the PS3 sadly.

Ubisoft says the game will have explosive ninjitsu driven gameplay, tag-team moves and interesting enemies. The plot will pull right from the movie with a few twists.

Cowabunga! TMNT unleashes its 1-2 punch

IGN has an extensive interview with the Factor 5 president about Lair and shows lots of game footage that hasn’t been shown before.

From my perspective, it’s hard to know what to expect from this game. I’m not sure whether it will be amazing or merely another good game with great graphics. I haven’t played previous Factor 5 games but they are clearly an experienced team and their games have gotten strong reviews and praise.

This game looks better and better. The graphics are amazing, but we’ve seen that before. He mentions that there is a lot of sandbox style gameplay which sounds great but I can’t see any of that in the gameplay footage that they show.

The president also seems to be the ultimate PS3 fanboy, praising everything from 1080p to blu-ray to Cell to the sixaxis to HDMI. That’s a great sign, as we can expect them to exploit the PS3 hardware to the fullest.

This is definitely one of the most anticipated PS3 games of 2007. I look forward to seeing more of this title.

Lair Interview and Footage on IGN

This week we have:

• Virtua Fighter 5
• flOw
• Q*Bert

Not a bad week at all. One nice updated retro title, one artsy concept game, and one big budget big name sequel with a timed exclusive release on the PS3. I’m not really dying to play any of these personally, but it’s refreshing to see such a strong lineup of content.

I honestly haven’t seen a version of Q*Bert since the mid eighties. It’s been ported several times but not nearly as extensively as titles like Gauntlet or Pac-Man. Gauntlet is a great classic, but really, how many different systems do you want to play it on?

Next week we get:

• Go! Puzzle
• Tekken 5
• Formula One

I think the post launch drought is definitely over!

I’m interested to see how Go! Puzzle turns out. Great puzzle games are a true joy to find, but the puzzle genre is flooded with mostly mediocre content.

For those of you, like me, who have been around a while, you may remember games like Pinball Construction Set and Hard Hat Mack. Back in my good old Atari days, we used to watch companies like EPYX and EA like a hawk, to see what kind of cool games were coming out.

Gamasutra has done a nice little history of EA which makes for good reading. It brings up a lot of old memories. I know that people like to dump on EA these days, but they used to be quite a cool company. And even though they’re quite monolithic these days, they still put out some games I’m interested in.

So take a trip with Trip:

A History of Electronic Arts

This is a marketing man’s dream!

Much has been made of the similarities between the PlayStation 3 logo and the Spider-Man film franchise logo, so you can imagine the person challenged with marketing the PS3 version of the game has a small smile on their face (whilst those working on the 360 and Wii versions have a big headache).

Well now the rest of us have a reason to smile, because the game actually looks like it could deliver.

For those of you that do not know, the third Spider-Man movie is due out this May and is set to continue a the series of blockbuster movies based on the legendary comic book character of the same name. This third chapter of the story has been kept secret, but it has been revealed that the symbiotic alien life force will be introduced into the story and that Peter Parker will have to engage in a fight with this dark force.

I can’t wait for the movie, and based on this trailer, I cannot wait for the game!

MYTH: Upscaling improves video quality

It doesn’t. Scaling on the console can avoid compatibility problems with rare TV’s, but other than that, there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever. Most TVs scale internally and whether the console or TV does the scaling doesn’t affect the end results. In fact, it’s better that the console does not upscale as that can result in actual quality loss due to double scaling, where the game renders at one resolution (e.g. 720p), the console upscales to a second resolution (e.g. 1080p), and the display downscales to the physical display resolution (e.g. 1366×768). Since scaling is almost always a lossy process, this should be avoided.

And no matter what you name the scaler chip or how you try to spin this, it doesn’t change the facts.

I suspect that upscaling DVD players are slightly different in that they typically achieve small quality improvements by doing wavelet decompression and post-processing at a higher resolution rather than just doing a simple upscale.

The 360’s “secret weapon” or a strong dose of FUD?

MYTH: User created content = Hobbyist game development

Hobbyist game development is a noble effort but often takes months or years of highly skilled and well coordinated effort. I applaud the people behind Darwinia and the legendary Counterstrike, but those are rare achievements by professional quality groups. Developing anything beyond extremely simple games at the hobbyist level is often wildly impractical.

User Created Content includes uploading YouTube videos or Singstar videos or making a game level, and other more practical avenues for user content creation.

MYTH: PS3 is harder to develop for than other consoles.

Remember Oddworld: that legendary PS1 developer who was extremely outspoken in criticizing Sony’s PS2 development tools and dramatically switched to exclusive development on the Xbox? Remember how the media extensively cited this as proof of all kinds of problems with the PS2? Well, did he prove his point by delivering even more successful titles with his new dev tools of choice while the PS2 failed miserably as he predicted? Or did the PS2 achieve phenomenal success while he went on to criticize Microsoft and ultimately bitterly resigned from the industry?

Programmers are notoriously opinionated on toolsets and technology standards. Some programmers love the PS3, others hate it. Most game developers respectfully keep their political opinions to themselves, but the ones that don’t are heard the loudest.

MYTH: Cross-platform titles are more profitable than platform exclusive titles

If the investors and owners of game development studios believed this, every last third party developer would stop developing all exclusive content immediately. That is not happening.

Just to name some recently released big name platform exclusive titles that were developed by completely independent third party developers:

Gears of War, Resistance, Okami, Bully, Final Fantasy XII, Yakuza, Lost Planet

There have been huge headlines about big name exclusives going cross platform (VF5, Assassin’s Creed, Obvlivion, GRAW), and most journalists have extensively proclaimed the third party exclusive to be dead, but that doesn’t make it true.

There are plenty exclusives in active development, and while some will surely go cross platform and make big headlines, many will remain exclusive.

MYTH: Playstation games are all about graphics while Nintendo creates more original games that focus on gameplay.

Nintendo has created some amazing content and I don’t want to discredit that, but the PlayStation consoles have also delivered on more than just GTA and God of War. For example:

Quirky + Casual Katamari Damacy. LocoRoco
Music Rhythm Of course Guitar Hero I + II. Also Beatmania, SingStar, Amplitude and Frequency, Taiko Drum Master, and Parappa back from PS1
Cater to Non-Traditional Gamers or younger players Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper
Original Concepts Ico. Shadow of the Colossus

IGN Australia did a little preview of MotorStorm, and they didn’t have very many good things to say. They had lots of bad stuff to say, however. They thought the game felt slow. And there was too much lag when playing the game on a local PS3 network of 8 people.

What’s that?

Yup, they said they played the game on a local LAN network of 8 PS3’s. What I’d like to know is this: is this local network play something only used for testing PS3 games? Or can I network my PS3 with a friend’s PS3 and play games System-Link style?

Anybody know?

IGN: MotorStorm Preview