A teaser trailer announcing the game Magic the Gathering Tactics.

One of the driving factors behind my early adoption of the PS3 was the fact that I could play all my PS2 games on it thanks to the Emotion Engine Chip that it had under the hood. In subsequent SKU’s, that hardware was removed, and Sony even said that they were focused on moving forward without it.

Well, that may be changing in the near future. According to Siliconera, Sony has secured a U.S. Patent for the technology that will apparently allow the Cell Processor in the PS3 to emulate the Emotion Engine of the PS2.

Couple this with the rumors of a price cut and the release of the PS3 Slim this fall, and you start to think that Sony may have a fundamental strategy shift under way.

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If you haven’t heard yet, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has threatened, in a roundabout way, to drop his company’s support for PS3 if Sony doesn’t consider a price cut.

According to MCV, Kotick said in an interview,

“I’m getting concerned about Sony – the PS3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don’t make it easy for me to support the platform. It’s expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation.

They have to cut the price, because if they don’t, the attach rates are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony. When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console — and the PSP too.”

That’s a big shot fired across Sony’s bow. So, will Sony take him seriously, and how will they respond?

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So every week for awhile the writers all over the new looking for a simple quick movie to plug into their gaming news site flocked like rabid sheep over to online game magazine The Escapist for the witty and acerbic commentary put to film by Internet personality and slapdash game designer Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. Yahtzee’s weekly poke, jab and lancing of the festering boils of gaming left no game unscathed and is still one of the more enjoyable forms of critique out there.

The Escapist choose to expand their video offerings with a few new segments, one of these – Unskippable – is a tribute to the classic overdubbing comedy of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang – except their subject matter is video game cut scenes and trailers instead of horribly bad B-movies like Ator the Fighting Eagle.

Unskippable is a little hit or miss but anyone who enjoys making fun of this wonderful hobby of ours will soon find that you’re not the the only person out there who talks back at the screen during an interminable Metal Gear Solid Expositional Cut Scene. This week the Unskippable guys take a crack at three E3 trailers.. Final Fantasy XIV Online, Edge of Twilight and long in development online FPS Huxley.

InFamous is an action packed trip into a familiar genre with an interesting twist. You start out as Cole McGrath, a poor schmuck who has a mysterious delivery package blow up in his face, leaving him with burgeoning electrical based powers and everyone else in a six block radius with a slight case of death. You emerge from your baptism by fire, crawl out of the blast zone and run for your life guided by your buddy Zeke as the police force hunts you down.

Once you reach the relative safety of your roof top penthouse, the game truly begins throwing you into a grand conspiracy masterminded by a clandestine mystical organization. As you unravel the mystery, you can either fight your reputation as the bringer of the apocalypse or revel in the new coolness that is you and start building your own evil empire.

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dragon age origins

Bioware, long the favorites of PC RPG fans are firing up the information train to release new trailer and new screens for its upcoming magnum opus – Dragon Age: Origins. While the movies all make folks drool and the screens look exciting one key question every PC gamer asks is: “Will I have to upgrade to play this beast?”

Well as of today we have the final system requirments for the game, and its likely that anyone who owns a moderately powerful modern PC will be able to play it in at least Neverwinter Nights 1, 1995 style graphic mode. As expected the requirements for Vista are a bit higher than their XP counterpart but both have a sizable hard drive footprint – 20GB! Wow! The game will also be released on the Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 console this October.

Here are the Specs:

Windows XP Minimum Specifications
OS: Windows XP with SP3
CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.4Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 1.8Ghz or greater
RAM: 1GB or more
Video: ATI Radeon X850 128MB or greater
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Windows Vista Minimum Specifications
OS: Windows Vista with SP1
CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.6Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 2.2GHZ or greater
RAM: 1.5 GB or more
Video: ATI Radeon X1550 256MB or greater
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Recommended Specifications
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz Processor or equivalent
RAM: 4 GB (Vista) or 2 GB (XP)
Video: ATI 3850 512 MB or greater
NVIDIA 8800GTS 512 MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Like many other people, I was very interested in seeing the ‘official’ unveiling of the PSP Go during Sony’s E3 press conference. Of course, we’d all seen it before the conference started, but I still wanted to see the official reveal.

My first thought was that other than the size of the unit, the PSP Go really wasn’t all that different from the PSP I already own. Over the weekend, I read an interesting article on Ars Technica, where they reached a similar conclusion. I thought I’d share it, as it tracks closely with my early impressions of the system.

The bigger news, according to Ars Technica, is the news that Sony is moving all their PSP distribution to digital, as well as on UMD. However, there’s no reason to buy the new handheld to take advantage of this move to digital. After all, with the right Memory Stick, I can download all these nifty new games onto my existing PSP. So, how will the PSP Go do at retail?

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So, you may remember that I mentioned the tumble that game sales took in May. Well, it should be no surprise that Microsoft is looking at the massive drop in Wii sales and seeing an opportunity there.

What would be surprising would be for them to attempt to capitalize on that opportunity by launching a new console. Well, according to Sam Kennedy at 1UP, that’s exactly Microsoft’s plan.

In their Listen Up podcast, Kennedy was chatting with David Ellis of Microsoft, where they were discussing the new motion-sensing Natal technology, Ellis apparently let it slip that there will be a new XBox console next fall. Yeah, you heard that right. They’re planning another console launch in 2010.

Gamers will also be able to purchase Natal as an add-on for existing 360’s, which begs the question: Why launch another console now?

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So, every week the slavishly obsessive video game public saunter over to the escapist website to line up in morbid fascination ready to hear the idiot savant ramblings of critic and “commentarian” Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw skewer and lambaste the most recent game releases. Big game or little, he usually has something particularly biting to say in his punctuation-less rants and only rarely does that amount to anything but sidways praise for a title. This week it looks like one of those rare occasions when the stars, moons and hormones align to see the personality spout true praise for a title sprinkled with minor niggling and an admission the game is worth playing.

The target of his slight admiration: Sony & Sucker Punch’s inFAMOUS. The review itself is worth watching not because I agree with him on almost every point (which I do) but because its a rare event when the Zero Punctuation master has to work to tear a game apart.

In a post on the official US PlayStation Blog, Justin Richmond, one of Uncharted 2’s Multiplayer Designers commented on the great success that the recent beta test of the upcoming games’ multiplayer mode has been. Bundled with retail copies of Sucker Punch’s inFAMOUS the competitive online game mode for the previously solo only series has benefited Naughty Dog’s team greatly and the team is preparing to implement some changes to the beta.

The Uncharted 2 Multiplayer Beta is about to enter its second week, and we’re already making some tweaks to improve your experience. We are preparing a patch for release in the next few days. Properly applying this patch requires some careful attention on your end: You must watch the screen closely while booting into the beta. As soon as you see the patch message come up in the XMB overlay, you should hit X to accept as quickly as possible.

Richmond describes the fixes included in the beta patch and goes on to announce the dates for “Play with the Developer” events during the ongoing testing cycles.

The patch  fixes include:

General

• Grenade explosions now apply damage properly

Matchmaking

• Players should no longer get hung up in matchmaking for long periods of time

Bug Fixes

• Ranks should no longer reset randomly
• Quitting the game will no longer reset the PS3
• Player collision – players should no longer get hung up on each other when moving through the environment
• Player will now be killed if stuck in falling animation for too long
• In Plunder mode, treasures will no longer disappear during matches