Tokyo Game Show: PS3 to cure cancer

David Kidd reports live from the Tokyo game show about what Ken Kutaragi did, and didn't say.

If you've been following the Tokyo Game Show reports, you'd know that the 20GB PS3 now comes with HDMI as standard, the price has dropped around 20 percent for the Japanese launch, and there's a stack of launch titles just around the corner. You'll also know that Australia is still facing a delay, and as far as we know, the price drop on the 20GB version will stay in Japan.

What you probably didn't get much detail on was Ken Kutaragi's keynote. The keynote is the mark on the event -- whomever has the privilege gets the loudest voice and the most coverage. The marketing machine works out the hook, decides how many sentences are being devoted to a particular topic, and ultimately creates a carefully crafted spiel that says everything it's supposed to, and nothing it's not. I dig keynotes, and with the Kutaragi's baby going through a weekly keel-hauling for the past 12 months, there's a lot to say.

And say a lot he did. The address opened with some trailers of Ridge Racer 7, Virtua Fighter 5, and Final Fantasy XIII. But with the candy out of the way, Kutaragi just seemed to open up his mind and everything came out at once -- and not in a good way. Moving from such revolutionary topics as user-generated content, emulation and something called the Internet, Kutaragi seemed to be describing the last five years of game consoles, rather than the next. Furthermore, instead of focusing on how Sony is using these technologies, we're left to fill in the blanks ourselves and ponder how the PS3 will pan out. Here's some of the nuggets that Kutaragi dropped.

* One of the most intriguing comments was the use of GPS data. Kutaragi spoke of users uploading location-tagged data, and developers using it to create geographically realistic environments. Polyphony apparently used it extensively for GT4. From a user's perspective, the specifics are a mystery, but Kutaragi really wanted us to know that it would factor heavily into the PS3's future.

* In fact, downloadable and uploadable content in general will be huge. The PS3 will let you download PSX and PS2 games, starting with smaller titles that don't squeeze the bandwidth too much, and scaling up as broadband connections get faster.

* On the magic Cell itself, Kutaragi had something pretty cool to say and even gave us some specifics. If the PS3 is sitting there barely breaking a sweat as a fire up your old version of Fantavision, it'll put the cycles into Folding@home. I don't know if it's an optional client download, or whether you can select other projects instead, but having a million Cell processors ripping up proteins is nicely noble in a petaFLOP kind of way.



So, despite not giving us any names, new features, or demonstrations, you can build up a picture of what to expect -- that Sony's built a massive client/server system and the PS3 is far more capable that just pumping out 1080 lines of graphics. What that actually means is debatable, and what Sony can offer over and above what other more established systems will only be revealed when we start seeing the magic.

* Disclosure: I flew to Tokyo as a guest of Sony.