VETERANS-GAMING Visits Sony’s South by Southwest PlayStation Lounge

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by Fred Stanton

As you may know, each spring heralds the arrival of the South by Southwest festival (SxSW) in Austin, Texas, which draws leading lights in the music, film, and interactive (web/handheld/gaming) industries to participate in panels, concerts, and parties. Our man Fred Stanton was on the scene for VETERANS-GAMING.

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During SxSW, Sony occupied the building across the street from the Austin Convention Center and converted it into "the PlayStation Lounge," a giant gaming-themed club complete with rooftop Jumbotron (broadcasting images of MLB 11, of course), exclusive admittance (SxSW badgeholders only), and complimentary drinks. I took a peek inside when it opened up one evening to see what was up.

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Not much, as it turns out. Scattered throughout the lounge were a dozen huge monitors arranged back-to-back, controllers sitting invitingly in front of them. Most of the twenty game stations were in use. Comfy black sofas lined the walls, and glowing colored cubes served as drink tables. Perhaps like most parties it didn't get hopping until late in the night. (As it turns out, Hollywood stars Rosario Dawson and Brittany Snow were seen at the event during the week. Dawson played InFAMOUS 2 and Snow was seen fragging in Ratchet and Clank and SOCOM 4.) For the moment, I felt like I had the run of the place and all its demos. Sony was featuring Resistance 3, SOCOM 4, Ratchet & Clank All 4 One, and Uncharted 3.

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I may be too much of an old-skool gamer to appreciate the highest of high-tech demos. Sure, it was kinda neat putting on 3D glasses to play MLB 11 and Killzone 3, and it was great fun seeing a number of games whose releases I'd completely missed, but what really warmed my heart was the side-scrolling platformer Shank -- which at over half a year since its release was probably the oldest game in the room. Surrounded as I was by games with fully three-dimensional environments and photorealistic rendering, I found its art and its gameplay strongly appealing simply because it had such style.

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In addition to the aforementioned games, Sony was showing PlayStation Home games Sodium 2 and Novus Prime. In Sodium 2, the player takes on the part of an incompetent futuristic race driver (or, if you're not me, a competent futuristic race driver) who occasionally takes time off from racing to hop in a tank and get blown up. Novus Prime is a multiplayer space combat game in which player teams cooperate in defense of their home space station, the Novus Prime of the title.

Still, as I said, the futuristic look of games like these didn't draw my eye nearly as much as the games whose art had a specific style, whether the cartoony art of the aforementioned Shank, or PixelJunk's Shooter 2: Belly of the Beast. There's nothing quite like piloting a tiny craft through the intestinal tract of an inconceivably large monster and having to solve puzzles along the way, like where to take a wash afterward (I'm not kidding -- acid sticks to your craft and you have to find water to wash it off before you dissolve!).

With so much to see at SxSW I didn't stick around long, but what I saw convinced me to take a closer look at PlayStation Home.

The games are getting numerous -- and good.

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Pics from the Event..

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Sweet

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Hell yeah...any one here got a PS3?