Sony's E3 Keynote Speech

So after Microsoft's epic speech yesterday, it was the turn of rival Sony to deliver their visions of the future and it needed to be pretty special to top what Microsoft had on offer.

Firstly one of the worst kept secrets in the industry was unveiled in the form of the PSP Go, a slimmed down version of the PSP. This is essentially a PSP that has no UMD drive and uses its 16GB internal flash memory to store games, music and media content downloaded via the PSN Store. Also it was shown to be running a fully blown Gran Turismo title designed specifically for the PSP which will appear late this year or early 2010. Though whoever hired the translator for the developer of Gran Turismo, who constantly looked like he was about to be sick, should be sacked as he literally just read out of a book and made very little eye contact with the audience.

Along side this announcement was the showing of Rock Band: Unplugged, Assassins Creed: Bloodline and another Final Fantasy title set within the timeline of Final Fantasy VII. To further bolster the PSP's ever increasing catalogue of A grade games, Sackboy will be filling PSP screens later this year with Little Big Planet, also Hideo Kojima's team have finally graced the hand held with a Metal Gear title, filling in the story behind Outer Haven. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker should arrive early 2010.

To the PS3 side of things, Uncharted 2 will be appearing hopefully intime for the christmas lists to santa along with MAG which was unveiled at E3 last year. MAG is the massively multiplayer FPS game which hosts battlefields of upto 256 players, these 256 players are split into squads of eight with their own objectives to accomplish in order to complete the side's primary mission. A game no doubt to keep track of due to its epic scale.

While the PSP Go was the worst kept secret of E3, Sony however did keep a couple of surprises instore for the audience. Firstly an exclusive from Rockstar North, best known for its Grand Theft Auto series, comes in the form of Agent. Details were sparse but the game is set in the 1970's where you would play as a spy, doing spy like things.

As if this wasn't big enough and also as if to say to Microsoft "We don't care you managed to get Final Fantasy XIII". Sony unveiled that Square Enix was producing Final Fantasy XIV exclusively for the PS3 system and also showed off a minute of footage from the game. If this wasn't enough to make Final Fantasy fans moist, it was also announced that come this Autumn 50 PS1 titles will be available to download via the PSN store, including Final Fantasy VII in a step to bring the Playstations back catalogue onto a single console. Pricing details were not mentioned but an educated guess of around 12-15 Pounds shouldn't be too far off the mark.

So plenty to keep the mouths watering in anticipation this coming year from Sony.