VideoGamer.com’s Visionary Top 5: Sony in 2008

Welcome to VideoGamer.com’s Visionary Top 5 series. 2007 has been an amazing year for gamers – some say the best ever. Will 2008 be able to match it? VideoGamer.com gazed into the crystal ball to find out what gaming’s greatest minds have in store for us next year. Today we predict what Sony, with its PS3 and PSP, will be blessing us with in 2008… Merry Christmas!

Final Fantasy XIII won’t come out in the UK till 2009

If there’s one game to get people off their bums and buying PS3s, it’s a proper next-gen Final Fantasy. We’ve seen dribs and drabs of info on FFXIII> over the course of 2007, but unfortunately we’ve also heard whispers that the game isn’t coming along as… well, quickly, as Square Enix, Sony and fans of the series would have hoped. Remember, this is Square Enix’s first really epic PS3 game and runs on the White Engine, an all-new seventh generation multiplatform game engine built by Square Enix for their future games. And us UK gamers didn’t get FFXII for just under a year after it came out in Japan (the bastards) too. So while the game might come out in Japan in 2008, we’d wager we might be in for a similar excruciating wait for FFXIII as we experienced for FFXII. Boo!

PS3 will enjoy a much better year in 2008 than it did in 2007

Sure, the PS3 finished 2007 strongly, with a price cut and some decent games, but overall it had a poor time of it in the UK, fuelled by a high launch price, rubbish exclusive games and poor 360 ports. But we reckon 2008 may well be the year the PS3 rises from the console ashes and starts to show some of its undoubted potential. There’s the PS3’s Halo-killer (Sony hopes!) Killzone 2, quirky user-created platformer LittleBigPlanet and epic espionage-athon Metal Gear Solid 4 to support a console that’s looking much better value now that it’s cheaper. And expect better quality multi-platform games too, as developers start to get to grips with the PS3’s architecture. Will the PS3 usurp the Wii as the undisputed console king? Nah, but it has a great chance of coming second.

Sony will buy Insomniac Games

Currently, US-based Insomniac Games is only making games for the PS3, including the solid Resistance: Fall of Man and the excellent Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. And the studio only has PS3 games in the pipeline too, with a sequel to Resistance rumoured. So we reckon the studio would be a perfect fit for Sony. We’re speculating of course (this is the time of year when we get to make wild predictions!) but it’s an educated one. Don’t worry, we won’t say we told you so.

Resistance 2 will come out in November 2008

While there hasn’t been an official announcement that a sequel to the solid if unspectacular PS3 launch FPS is even in the works, it’s a sure thing. And we reckon Sony has the game pencilled in for November 2008, when it will go up against Gears of War 2 on the 360 in an almighty Christmas 08 face-off. Expect stupendous graphics – when we sat down for a chat with Insomniac Games’ Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings, he told us to expect great things from the PS3. He said: “The amount of action we’re able to put on the screen at 60 frames per second really dwarfs what we were able to do a year ago at 30 frames per second. What’s most exciting is the way things are headed right now I think we’ll see just as big a leap from our second generation engine to our third as we did from the first to second.” Just don’t expect a return to Manchester Cathedral. VideoGamer.com news editor James Orry insists the game will ship with the title ‘Resistance: Rise of Man’ but we think that might be a little too cheesy.

Killzone 2 will be pretty but soulless

Guerrilla Games’ Killzone 2a>, probably the most hyped sequel to a bad game ever, will look amazing, will be remarkably close to the infamous CGI trailer released at E3 2006. But it will, at the end of the day, be just a bog standard shooter. It will be cinematic, and quite possibly immersive, but it won’t be able to escape the “it’s just not an excellent game” syndrome its predecessor suffered from. Guerilla Games has made two home console games, Killzone and Shellshock: Nam ’67, both below average shooters. We’d love to be proven wrong, but we’ve got a feeling we won’t be.