Along with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, WarGames was one of my favourite movies growing up. (I guess it helped that I was am a computer geek.) In the movie, WOPR is a massive computer that learns. From a simple game of tic-tac-toe it learns that global genocide, probably killing itself in the process, is not a good idea.

Sony is also a massive entity, but one that does not seem capable of learning.

LittleBigPlanet is Sony’s version of tic-tac-toe. It played the game of creating, marketing, and selling the game. Sony created the online infrastructure for the game. It let the game loose on the world. And we all know how that went. There was hardly any marketing for the game (at least in North America), the servers were lousy, and the game was patched a bunch of times to make it work. It’s selling well in numbers now, but one can hardly consider the launch of the game a raging success.

WOPR learned from tic-tac-toe, but Sony hasn’t learned from LittleBigPlanet.

Guerilla Games created Killzone 2 for Sony, and they’ve done a good job. From all accounts (I am picking up mine later today), it is an awesome game. But then they just had to go and give the game over to Sony. I’ve seen just one ad for the game. I haven’t seen any other advertising. That’s not how you promote something, Sony. Also, just try going to Killzone.com. As of this writing, it’s down (again). If you do manage to get on, try to add a friend. It might work. But it probably won’t. (And why do we need to add friends anyway? Isn’t that what our PSN friends list is for? Edit: The game does indeed use the PSN friends list. So I don’t know what the Killzone.com friendlist is for.) Go online with Killzone 2. Join a friend’s game. There’s a good chance you won’t even be put on the same side.

Sony really needs this game. They need a launch that goes well, that gives Sony a good name. That tells people that Sony still has it, and that people need it. So far, that isn’t happening. Killzone 2 is Sony’s marquee shooter for the PS3. Let’s hope they shape up.

This game will succeed. But I have a feeling that it will be despite Sony, not because of Sony. See y’all online tonight!