Most sites have Lair coming out some time this summer. Everything else made by Sony (Heavenly Sword, Ratchet and Clank, Killzone, Uncharted, Warhawk, Hot Shots Golf and some others I can't remember) are supposedly coming out between September and Christmas.

I predict that Lair is going to be a good game (average score 8-9). I have Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, both made by Factor 5 of course. 2 was quite good but 3 was partially so horrible that I played only 2 missions and haven't touched it since, although the graphics were great for the time.

Heavenly Sword might be great (9->) game but it's just too early to tell. Hype creates enormous pressures.

 uhm.....

NO!!!

iwata was an executive

miyamoto is an executive

THEY KNOW HOW TO MAKE GAMES 

kutaragi hirai ????

ahahahahahahahhahahahah

they are only an engeenier and a manager...

Hirai joined Sony Computer Entertainment America in August 1995, with responsibility for the operational management of the company under the former president. Before that, Hirai worked in Sony Music Japan's New York office coordinating the marketing of Sony Music Japan artists in the U.S. Hirai began his career with CBS/Sony Inc. (now Sony Music Entertainment Japan) in April 1984 where he was instrumental in the marketing coordination of international music in Japan and later headed the international business affairs department.

Immediately after graduation, Kutaragi began working for Sony in their digital research labs. Although at the time it was considered a radical decision, Kutaragi felt that Sony was on the "fast track". He quickly gained a reputation as an excellent problem solver and a forward thinking engineer, earning that reputation by working on many successful projects - including early liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and digital cameras.

In the late 1980s, he was watching his daughter with a Famicom and realized the potential that existed within video games. At that particular time, Sony's executives had very little interest in video games. Thus, when Nintendo expressed the need for a wavetable sound chip for its upcoming new 16 bit system, Kutaragi immediately accepted. Working in secret, he designed and built the chip, the SPC700. When they found out, Sony's executives were furious. Only with Sony CEO Norio Ohga's help was Kutaragi able to push the project to completion and keep his job.

ALSO

Yamauchi went to retirement...

 instead

kutaragi has been "friendly fired"

Hiroshi Yamauchi  (born November 7, 1927) =80 years(from 2002 he's no more president so at age of 75...)

Ken Kutaragi ( born August 8, 1950) =57 years

so their profiles are really different... 

kutaragi like yamauchi???

ahahahahahaha

Kutaragi is an engineer. Yokoi was a toymaker. Each PlayStation console has been a great piece of technology. But starting with PS2, each PS console has been needlessly expensive for Sony, and that great expense hastened Kutaragi's downfall.

Imagine if Kutaragi had taken a Yokoi-influenced approach towards PS2, and made PS2 more like Gamecube. Not with the dumb lunchbox design, or the tiny discs, or the lack of DVD-playback... But just with the focus on efficiency over power... Gamecube was cheaper to develop, cheaper to produce, more powerful than PS2... And in the end, other than the DVD-playback, it had the same basic functionality (even though PS2 was talked up as some sort of super-duper living-room entertainment and media hub just like PS3).

And compare the Gamecube to the XBox. There's a perfect example of a console made as a toy versus a console made as a piece of cutting-edge technology when its not the market leader. The toy was profitable, the cutting-edge system would have been a financial disaster for anyone but Microsoft.

Kutaragi's persistence and ambition and dedication to his vision... His perfect positioning of both PS and PS2 to not only cause great growth in the videogame market, but to create the first worldwide dominant consoles... His ability as an engineer to make systems that excited game programmers... The new artistic movements in videogames that came largely as a result of his push for the cutting-edge, first with cinema-style and then sandbox-style games... Hopefully this is Kutaragi's legacy... Not his often misguided hardware design choices that hurt his own companies profitability and led to this dangerous showdown between PS3 and 360.

BTW, great article reverie.

You know why Heavenly Sword & Lair are the most talked about? There's nothing else to talk about.

US & Japan are also extremely different markets. Japanese people eat certain series. Lair & Heavenly Sword are brand new titles. The biggest selling games for Sony in Japan have one thing in common: Square-Enix. DQ is on Wii & DS. FF is up in the air and likely will be the crappiest FF yet because for some reason it needs to be 6 games.

Why bring up Wario? I don't even think Nintendo has released a single worthwhile Wii game. Zelda was a Gamecube port. Super Paper Mario is just another branch out from the main Mario game that never achieves the must have status of the main game. For Nintendo to be selling like it has without a triple A game? That says a lot.

remember always:

Nintendo 64: console of SUPER MARIO 64 AND LEGEND OF ZELDA:OCARINA OF TIME 

These games(Masterpieces in entire Videogames History) and this superb console made under Yamauchi "reign"...

I really can't understand people attacking THE President...

N64 must have more respect, it's is probably the best console ever made.

Their backgrounds are totally different, but they both did what was necesary to lead their respective companies into the videogame market, and in turn reinvented that market.

Yamauchi pushed Nintendo to enter what was a dead market, and to his credit, let Yokoi and Miyamoto shape the products.

Unlike Yamauchi, Kutaragi was himself a shaper of the product, but he was also the figure that pushed Sony into what was still viewed as a "fad" market and positioned the product to dethrone Nintendo.