Gamescom 2012: Thumbs Up for Sony

Gamescom is underway now and while Joaby is over in Germany doing front flips off bicycles I am here and ready to bring you the fat dope (news) on what is going on. And right now that means Sony's press conference which took place at 3am this morning AEST. And it was leagues ahead of their E3 event - although it pretty much just had to show up to do that. Read on to see just how good it was!

Update: Many of the trailers for the games shown off during the conference have now hit our videos library, and you can check them out by clicking on the names of each game!


Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified

The PlayStation Vita got the strong showing it deserved, with several new IPs being announced. Media Molecule (of LittleBigPlanet) announced Tearaway, a 3D Platformer set in a world built out of paper in which you help papercraft hero iota deliver a message to yourself - you can read more about it here.

A new Killzone game was also announced - Killzone Mercenary, which brings the Killzone 3 engine to the PSVita for some handheld FPS madness. Players won't just fight on the side of the ISA in Mercenary - you'll have the opportunity to do missions for Helghast too - as a Mercenary your loyalty is to your paycheck. The game will feature both dual analogue controls along with touch based controls, although not much else is known as of yet. It comes out next year however - here's hoping it fares better than Resistance: Burning Skies.

Sony's press conference had some other games on show too - Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified for the PS Vita was on show, displaying 4 vs 4 online multiplayer in the popular Nuketown map. We also saw three new PlayStation 3 games - Puppeteer in which you play a boy armed with scissors who is captured by the Moon Bear King and turned into a puppet, Rain which has an invisible protagonist who you can only see the outline of when rain hits him and Until Dawn - a PlayStation Move based horror title in which you follow seven different people through a horrific night as they attempt to escape from evil.

Also on show were several already well loved franchises - Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time has been pushed back to 2013, but will be getting a PS Vita port, a new handheld Ratchet & Clank - Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault was announced for PS3 and PSVita and Sony showed off new trailers for God of War: Ascension - which will soon be entering multiplayer beta - and The Last of Us. Naturally Sony were also keen to tout the upcoming brawler PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale too - announcing several new characters joining the roster - Ratchet & Clank, Dante, Sackboy and Spike? I don't know who Spike is.

Sony also explained several new features headed to the PlayStation Vita, which will get full PlayStation Plus support in the near future with 1GB of cloud saves. The upcoming 1.80 firmware was also announced, allowing PS Vita owners to (finally) control the home screen, video and music apps with the PS Vita's control pad instead of exclusively with the touch screen. Old school gamers can rejoice, as the 1.80 update - due on August 28th - will also add PlayStation One Classic compatibility to the system.

It will also add the Cross-Controller feature, allowing compatible games to be played using the PS Vita as a controller - LittleBigPlanet 2 will be capable of doing so as soon as the firmware goes live on August 28th, with Street Fighter X Tekken following at the end of October and PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale and new Sly Cooper and Ratchet and Clank games to follow. Sony also announced the surprising new Cross-Buy initiative - wherein if you buy a PlayStation 3 title like the upcoming PlayStation All Stars, Ratchet and Clank and Sly Cooper games, you will also get their PlayStation Vita counterparts for free. As you'll notice, all of those titles are first party games - it will be interesting to see if Sony can convince any other companies to get on board with Cross-Buy.

All in all, it was a stellar output from Sony and I'm looking forward to seeing what the other companies have for us at Gamescom this year. What do you think about Sony's efforts? Is there anything that interests you in particular? Let us know in the comments below!