Winning the Night

Microsoft's decision to pursue the floating vote and arguably underplayed appeal to its core was all the more marked because of the vast difference in approach at Sony's conference. Predictably, contrition over the recent PSN debacle - which will loom large over Sony for months if not years to come - was a cornerstone of the presentation, but it would be interesting to know how much it changed the script for the event overall.

I say that, because this turned out to be one of the most core-friendly Sony events in recent memory. Sony is no stranger to mass market appeal - this is the company that did EyeToy and SingStar before Nintendo ever sold a game console to a retirement home - but this year it barely even gave a nod to the wider audience. Whether appealing to the core audience was the strategy from the outset, or came about as a result of the need to win back consumer opinion in the wake of the PSN hack, it's exactly the strategy Sony pursued - and in the wake of Microsoft's Kinect love-in, it won them significant plaudits from the watching audience.

In a clear shot across the bows of both Nintendo and Apple, Sony is pricing PlayStation Vita extremely competitively

It helps that Sony's sitting on a line-up of seriously good software, and that the new handheld hardware it brought to the show also looks great. PlayStation Move made a few appearances, but probably wisely, Sony mostly presented it as being an optional extra control method for core titles (and got Ken Levine to sell that idea for them), rather than the future of interaction. 3DTV, too, was in evidence, but also muted, with Sony talking in terms of building a market rather than acting like this will be a defining technology for gaming any time in the coming year or three.

Instead, Sony focused on the games - most of them core games. Admittedly, praise for the company's efforts is somewhat curtailed by the fact that while it showed off a lot of solid software, it failed to find a genuinely jaw-dropping blockbuster - a surprise title that would set tongues wagging throughout E3 and help to define the discussion around the show. Uncharted 3 looked absolutely stunning, of course, but the surprise would have been if it was anything other than stunning. (In fact, in software terms, it's the wonderful Tomb Raider demo from Microsoft's conference that seems to have generated most interest.)

Instead, the bombshell from Sony's conference was the final revelation of a price point for the NGP, now sporting the probably-an-acquired-taste moniker PlayStation Vita. In a clear shot across the bows of both Nintendo and Apple, and a welcome repositioning of a firm that's been happy to be seen as very expensive for the past five years, Sony is pricing the device extremely competitively. The WiFi model will ship for the same price as a 3DS and less than a mid-range iPod Touch - far less than many commentators had expected given the hardware's prowess.

If Sony's welcome pricing left a good taste in the mouth after the first day's conferences, though, it was Nintendo's event the next day that commanded most people's attention. The first home console unveiling in over half a decade was always going to be exciting, of course, but had I been laying bets on the word that would best describe Nintendo's Project Cafe reveal, I doubt I'd have put any money on "confusing".