New PlayStation 3 Games And Details Revealed At Gamer's Day

It's pretty hard these days to find a piece of news about Sony's PlayStation 3 that doesn't make their next-gen console look bad. There have already been several negative stories about it this week, but for now we'll dwell over the good ones (or at least the non-bad ones). Yesterday in San Francisco, Sony held one last pre-launch event, affectionately called Gamer's Day. At it, they revealed more about PS3's "launch window" games, about sharing downloaded games on multiple PS3s, the price for first-party games, and more.

Sadly (for Sony) it's still hard to determine just how many actual launch titles they will have from day one, because they only confirmed that there will be 21 PS3 games released after November 17, and until the end of 2006. Only 3 of those are first-party games, and the other 18 are... Well, see the list below for yourself:

Fist-party (Sony) launch titles:

- Resistance: Fall of Man

- NBA '07

- Genji: Days of the Blade

Third-party titles:

- Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII (Ubisoft)

- Call of Duty 3 (Activision)

- Fight Night Round 3 (Electronic Arts)

- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks)

- F.E.A.R. (Vivendi Games)

- Full Auto 2: Battlelines (Sega)

- Madden NFL 07 (Electronic Arts)

- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (Activision)

- Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (Namco Bandai)

- NBA 2K7 (2K Sports)

- Need For Speed Carbon (Electronic Arts)

- NHL 2K7 (2K Sports)

- Ridge Racer 7 (Namco Bandai)

- Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega)

- Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 (Electronic Arts)

- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas (Ubisoft)

- Tony Hawk's Project 8 (Activision)

- Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (Sony Online Entertainment)

Aside from these, Gamer's Day also played host to the announcement of Criminal Crackdown, planned for release in early 2007. This is the first PS3 project coming from God of War director David Jaffe, a game that will focus on "quickly tracking down criminals and returning them to a jail cell for points". Fascinating, what can I say... You can read more about it on 1UP.

In preparation for the Gamer's Day event, Sony also confirmed several arcade-style gamelings due for release as part of their online initiative (think Xbox Live Arcade). A long story made short, they are: flOw, Blast Factor, Go! Sudoku!, Criminal Crackdown (oh, so it's that kind of game...), Lemmings 2, Go! Swizzleblock2, and Cash Carnage Chaos.

As for sharing downloaded games, 1UP reports that "games or other content purchased from the online PlayStation Store could be downloaded on up to five other PS3s. Downloads are tied to a user account, so by logging in on another machine, all content that you have purchased is available for download at any time. So if you've purchased, say, a PS1 game on your PS3 and want to show it to a friend, you merely have to log in to your account on your friends machine and download it from your purchased items folder". Some good news, at last.

Finally, more prices were also announced yesterday. As you may now, first-party PS3 games were recently priced in Japan at $49.99, but it seems the same won't hold true for North America - where Sony's first-party titles will cost $59.99. An extra PS3 controller (SIXAXIS) will cost you $49.99, a Blu-Ray disc player remote controller $24.90, and a Memory Card Adapter $14.99. Yeah, I know I said no bad news in this story, but you didn't actually expect such a thing to be possible when talking about the PS3, did you?!

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)