(continued from previous page) ...important being Time Warner and their infamous abandoning of HD DVD in favor of Blu-Ray at this year’s CES. This was probably one of the most monumental events of the show seeing as when Time Warner made the announcement, the HD DVD folks almost immediately informed invitees to their press conference at CES that their conference would be canceled. I didn’t really see it as waving a white flag in defeat; it was more of having white banners and airplanes with white signs flying overhead signaling defeat from the HD DVD camp. The strong push for Blu-ray at this year’s CES has even led Microsoft to come out and say that if consumers would want it they would consider incorporating Blu-ray technology as an add-on to the 360! I know many people who told me that Blu-ray would never take off now considering buying a PS3 just for its Blu-ray capabilities sounded ridiculous, incredible!

As a launch day adopter of the PlayStation 3, I have had to endure an entire year of having people question my decision-making and bother me by telling me that there are no games to play on the PS3, and I’ll be honest, those first couple of months as a PS3 owner were brutal and even had me questioning if I should’ve forked over all this money for a struggling system from an overconfident electronics company. But here we are, in 2008, and Sony’s coming off a great showing at CES and now it is PlayStation’s time. While Microsoft and Nintendo have seen their big exclusives be released for the holidays, Sony still has games such as LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear Solid 4 & Online, Killzone 2, Gran Tursimo 5 Prologue, Hot Shots Golf 2, MotorStorm 2, Resistance 2, and the release of Home, and this is just a condensed list for the sake of saving space!

Besides the incredible lineup of games, things are also finally turning around in sales as the PSP continues to make a dent in sales and catch up to the DS while the PS3 has sold more systems than the 360 at the same point in time (both compared a year after launch). It is an exciting day to be a PS3 owner and 2008 looks very promising after Sony has started the year right at CES. Hopefully we can continue to expect big announcements in a couple of months at the Game Developer’s Conference (the same conference that first unveiled Home and LittleBigPlanet) and if Sony is able to harness the power of the hype that now has been built, the PlayStation brand will leave the competition behind.

My sincerest congratulations to Sony on being the winners of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, we all look forward to the great things you will bring in 2008.

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Sarad Jackson (Journalist)

From a videogames perspective, Sony killed the CES event in which Microsoft and Nintendo were pretty much non-existent. For a considerable time, many media publications including PSU have been jumping on the idea that 2008 will be the year that PS3 makes the turn around. While the majority of us continue to believe that, I must say, that I personally will have to wait until GDC to adopt this belief myself.

While I was not able to attend this year, I stayed up late and woke up early just to catch the latest from the show floor. What will probably be one of the flagship announcements from the Sony camp at CES was the announcement of Skype on the PSP. However, I believe that I fall into the category of the few people that does not find this feature interesting. I mean, maybe this would have been ground breaking back in 1990 for the Nintendo Game Boy, but today’s world where most people owns a cell phone, this is pretty much obsolete.

Think about it - if you can afford/own a PSP, then you probably already own some type of cell phone. So the Skype feature really doesn’t catch my interest. What is good, however, is that the calls made between ... (continued on next page)