American Idol And Death Jr.

This year's Sony keynote, titled "Encouraging Innovation in Game Development", was delivered by Andrew House, Sony's Executive Vice President of Third-Party Relations and Marketing. Mr. House made statements about 100 million playstation consoles being sold and predicted that the next decade will see more leisure time spent on video games than on any other media such as television or movies. Most of that had been heard before however, so the real excitement started when the Sony Eyetoy was demonstrated. You may be thinking that everyone is pretty familiar with this device already, but you haven't seen the full power of the Eyetoy until you have seen William Hung of American Idol fame dancing in front of it on a story-high projector screen to Village People's YMCA. This spectacle caused the sleepy audience to wake up and start cheering loudly.

One of pop culture's stranger icons was on hand to wake up the audience.

Following Mr. Hung's energetic display, the same big screen next was used to show the PSP's capabilities. As the audience watched, now attentive, Digital Eclipse's Chris Charla was first brought up on stage to explain how easy the PSP was to develop and even stated that the PSP was "pixel per pixel more powerful than the PS2." This spectacular claim caused quite a bit of doubtful whispering all around us and we were admittedly skeptical as well. But when a game titled "Death Jr." was shown running through a PSP emulator, everyone was floored. Fairly smooth framerates and incredible 3D graphics generated a lot of Oohs and Aahs.

After the keynote the hard-working reporters at Tom's were invited to a small Q&A luncheon with Mr. House and others from Sony. Some of the simple questions from the attending press only raised more questions for us, however. Though games were said to already be in development for the new hardware, Mr. House couldn't give the system's specifications. Mr. House also could not give a projected release date. He clearly wanted to get the message across that "competitive movement is not a factor" in any of Sony's release schedules for its upcoming systems. When pressed further for a response to Xbox Next rumors, he stated "we [Sony] are not going to react to the market."

As far as interesting information from Nintendo's keynote goes - there was none. In fact there was no Nintendo keynote at all this year. We find that quite interesting in itself and let you draw your own conclusions as to what that may mean.