So, a bunch of screens for Heavy Rain turned up on the Internet today, and depicted little beyond a semi-attractive woman in the rain.

Great. Excuse me while I do somersaults about the next big PS3 exclusive. I’ve been waiting for word on Heavy Rain since last year, when it was announced under the Sony umbrella. The game doesn’t look that interesting from the screens alone, but Leipzig should (read: will) give some context to the photorealistic motorcycle and torrential downpour.

I’m happy to announce that Play 170 (on sale 4 September) comes with a free book: 100 Greatest PlayStation Games Of All Time.

As the title suggests, the book contains what Play considers to be the ultimate PlayStation games from over 12 years of PlayStation gaming. The list was compiled after many hours of debate by the Play team and represents games that have changed the way we play, games that have made us laugh and cry and games that are simply great to play.

As way of a little taster, here a couple of the entries for you to check out… Make sure you get the next issue of Play for the full list!

**********
97. Colony Wars

Format: PSone

In the vein of the classic X-Wing PC titles, Colony Wars was a space simulator with action-packed dogfights and beautiful artistic direction. The third and first-person viewpoints were dramatically conceived, duplicating the essence of pop culture’s more recognisable space operas. Colony Wars was frenetic, fun and constantly replayable.

What we said: “Colony Wars is utterly gorgeous, totally playable space blasting. It throws you into the battle like you wouldn’t believe!”

92%

78. R-Type Delta

Format: PSone

R-Type Delta is an insultingly difficult entry in the side-scrolling shooter series, but it’s also the most beautiful and pleasing. Now using 2D on a 3D plain, the screen was more packed with enemies than ever, while the tightly-spaced levels demanded absurdly precise manoeuvres from the gamer. Boss battles were typically dazzling encounters, elevated by the technical capabilities of the PSone, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the Delta attacks; by absorbing enemies with a front-mounted power-up, a devastating multi-enemy clear-out could be unleashed upon command. This feature verified Irem’s savvy with the genre. R-Type Delta may have been based on an 80s formula, but that didn’t mean it had to lack a 90s pizzazz.

What we said: “Crafted with grace, beauty and nostalgia, R-Type Delta is pure adrenaline-pumping shooting perfection!”

90%

41. Kingdom Hearts

Format: PS2

By combining classic Disney characters and settings with significant aspects of the Final Fantasy series, Kingdom Hearts likely had Walt Disney sweating, in his cryogenic chamber. What should have been an ugly merger of the two much-loved families, though, ended up as a corking action RPG that used every character and world to its advantage. Kingdom Hearts is no slack, in its roleplaying elements– Sora can be adjusted to different play styles, thanks to the interchangeable offensive, defensive and magic abilities, while his cohorts, Donald and Goofy, add a layer of micromanagement to the way in which the game is played. As a sum of its parts, Kingdom Hearts is both startlingly deep and incredible fun, thanks to its positive use of both licences.

What we said: “It couldn’t work, it shouldn’t work but it does, and even manages to make Goofy look like a pretty tough guy.”

90%

Play’s sister publication SciFiNow has just announced a partnership with leading film marketing company Moviebeat to bring exclusive video content to its website.

The SciFiNow website has recently been host to a number of interviews for The Dark Knight and a premier report for the recent X-Files movie and, thanks to this new deal, it will soon be host to a number of exclusive behind-the-scenes featurettes, trailers and interviews for the upcoming movies The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, The Strangers and Death Race.

Check it out now!

www.scifinow.co.uk

It’s been buzzing around the internet for a few days, but Play can now confirm that the new Prince of Persia is voiced by none other than Nolan North, whose best known as the voice of Nathan Drake from Uncharted.

“Yep Nolan North is the voice actor of the prince,” said PoP’s game designer Thomas Delbuguet. “And we love him, he’s got a great humour. We see this prince as being a bit of a joker and he can be a bit of a sarcastic guy. He’s an adventurer, he’s out for goodies and he has his own motivatations.”

Sounds like Ubisoft has borrowed a bit more than Nathan Drake’s voice…

Check the next issue of Play for an extensive preview of the fantastic-looking Prince of Persia.

One of the oldest rivalries in video games is about to be reignited as Capcom’s Street Fighter IV goes up against Midway’s latest Mortal Kombat game, MK Vs DC. Both games are on show at E3 and Play caught up with MK Vs DC’s associate producer, Hector Sanchez, to get his view on the upcoming battle of the beat em ups. 

“We want to be the best beat em up of all time,” says Sanchez. “And you can’t be the best beat em up of all time unless you take on Street Fighter - i think we have a really good chance. Hopefully gamers will see something in our game that they don’t see in their game, and SF fans will probably see something in their game that don’t in ours. Still, I enjoy SFIV and I hope the Capcom guys will enjoy MK Vs DC - just as long as no one buys Soul Calibur!”

Ooh, hear that Soul Calibur fans? Looks like we’re set for an interesting battle over the coming months, but whoever comes out on top, Play is just glad that these two genre heavy weights are getting back into the ring - could a beat em up revival be around the corner?  

Check future issues of Play for a closer look at MK Vs DC and the full interview with Hector Sanchez.

So we’ve just come out of a demonstration of Bayonetta (the upcoming DMC-style action game from SEGA and Platinum Games), and it is looking pretty spectacular. In fact, from what we’ve seen, DMC5 will have a tough act to follow.

The game plays out very similar to DMC (not a surprise since Dante’s creator now heads up Platinum). In our demo we saw Bayonetta, a very curvy witch, who has the most sexualised walk ever, running around a level with very gothic architecture. “We wanted to create a female character who is sexy but also comes across as being very strong, even to males,” says producer Yasuke Hashimoto. Pretty soon a bunch demonic enemies came trundling along and the hyper-stylised combat got underway.

Bayonetta is as stylish as she is formidable, flipping into a handstand and firing in all directions with her stiletto-mounted guns. She can also perform dodge moves that segue into bullet time, allowing her to execute insane combos that conclude with a colossal, ethereal fist, punching enemies to death, or a giant foot crashing down from the heavens. There’s even “torture moves”, one of which see her roll out a full sized guillotine, stick her enemy’s head in the stock, spank him repeatedly and then decapitate him 16th century style. Impressive, but all kinds of wrong.

Although the similarity to DMC was obvious to us, Hashimoto didn’t appreciate the comparison. “This is a completely different game from DMC,” said Hashimoto. “It is in the same genre, DMC is continually evolving, but Bayonetta is an evolution of the genre - it is not inspired or an answer to DMC”

We’ll bring you a closer look at this potential ‘DMC-killer’ in our upcoming issue of Play.

We’re reaching the end of the show now, and my battery life, so it’s time to sum up.Some good news, especially with the movie downloads, the confirmation of God Of War III and some other priceand package news but on the whole there wasn’t much new. A lot of old games, really.

Time to go!

Jack’s back on stage and he’s announcing a new PS3 pack for $399, an 80GB PS3 with the same functionality as the 40GB one, so that still means no move back the backwards compatibility. No word on if this package is coming to the UK or not but where the US leads, we seem to follow. I’ll hunt down Sony’s UK PR in a minute and let you know.

More on the games now, and Jack name drops some exclusives: MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, InFamous and more. Cut to video showing exclusive and non-exclusive games. Aren’t they dodging the question here? Where are the new games?!?

At last! God Of War III and a trailer. Just. Incredible. Okay, there’s no gameplay footage but as probably the biggest GOW fan there is, I’m pretty damn excited. The trailer shows Kratos stood on Mount Olympus and a suitable gruff movie-trailer voice talks of destruction and mankind and stuff.

InFamous next, and it’s basically a super hero game in a GTA-stlye open world. Looks pretty amazing if I’m honest, certainly much more intesting than Prototype.A new game from Zipper, the makers of SOCOM, a game called: MAG, which stands from Massive Action Game. It’s an online game with over 200 players online in a battle at once. The 256 players will be broken into squads of 8, with character progression giving promotions that gives a player his standing in the squad. Typically there will be numerous objectives and battles to be won in the massive levels. Again, we’re told that this is only possible on PS3.

Right, wi-fi is back up and I can now blog a bit quicker. Ready?

PSP comes to the fore now with Resistance: Retribution announced for Sony’s handheld. It looks to be a third-person shooter, starring Nathan Hale. And, yes, it looks pretty decent. At least it’s not an FPS on PSP. Worst. Idea. Ever.Back to PS3 and more connectivity. “Life With PlayStation” is announced and will give you live news from Google on your PS3.  Apparently available at the end of the month.

Jack moves onto Sony Online Entertainment and its new MMO, DC Universe Online. Artist Jim Lee from DC Comics, and head of the game, is now on stage and, for some reason unknown to me, comes on doing one-handed press ups. He talks a little about comics and games and how he loves MMOs especially. And how he was the first Palladin (?) on his server to get some magic thing. Now we’re laughing with him.

Anyway, onto DC Universe Online. Jim asks the question, “How cool would it be to design you’re onwn DC super hero and take part in a DC-designed online world?” Pretty cool thinks the world. We see a short video showing all the DC legendary characters doing heroic/evil things in, to be honest, what looks like the blandest game world ever.

Okay, so Sony has shut off the Wi-Fi connection at the conference so this isn’t quite as live as I’d hoped it would be. Still, here are the announcements, my thoughts and reactions from what I hope will be the best conference of the show.

So far the conference looks like a Sony Centre. The walls of the stage are line with the latest Bravia models, six larger screens are showing some of the latest PS3 games: MGS4, Gran Turismo: Prologue, PixelJunk Eden, echoChrome, The Force Unleashed and SOCOM Confrontation. Here’s hoping that the show has much more in store. Of course it will.

Waiting.

There’s a hush as the sound goes down, cheering as the PS symbold cascade down the screens. Hey, I’m trying to get you in the mood here.Okay, Jack Tretton is on stage now. Here comes the intro ramble… Some words about the stress of E3 and a joke about it taking two years off his life. And now some history about the room we’re in… This is where the Ocsars and Golden Globes are held. Jack Bauer and Billy Crystal are mentioned. Okay, here’s the link - new stars like Solid Snake and Kratos (yes, that means God Of War III) will be joining the Hollywood stars of the past. Yeah, that’ll do.

Jack’s now waxing lyrical about the history of the PlayStation. Yes, let’s look at some pictures of the Psone. And Crash Bandicoot. And Tekken. If this sounds a little cynical then it comes at the end of sitting through three other press conferences. Let’s get on with it.

Finally, Jack gets onto PS3 and Sony’s ten year plan. Blu-ray has won, the Cell processor is dring IBM’s latest super computer, Foldinh@Home is has connected 1.7M users worldwide. More willy-waving with talk of PS3 being a future-proof Blu-ray player and that games like MGS4 are only possible on Blu-ray.And now games. Gran Turismo 5, MGS4 (again) and GTAIV are rolled out and held up as examples as to why people buy PS3. Cut to video of the PS3 and room turns red.We start with a “third generation” title from Insomniac, Resistance 2 and to be fair it looks pretty awesome. Nathan Hale is in New York being attacked by some 20-storey high Chimera, battling it across rooftops and walkways - this is an epic boss battle if I ever saw one. This taster ends with Hale being picked up by the beast and flung hundreds of metres through the air. And now some R2 facts. 60 players online, 8 players co-op, yes we know this already. Ted Price shows a new level, set in the US countryside, he talks of scale and how Resistance 2 is the only FPS that’ll deliver on this front this year. We shall see.

Jack’s back and I wonder how long it’ll be before we get onto LittleBigPlanet. Oh wait, the words, “user-generated content” come out of his mouth. Here we go. It’s good to see that Sony has such great games coming up but these are the games we saw last year. It’s kind of like getting an update on what’s been going on over the past two years. These are the games that should have come out six months ago.

Ah, an innovation. They’re using a specially created LBP level to do the business news. No pie charts! Okay, this is genius: Sackboy is jumping arounf the level activating various bar graphs and operating levers and switches revealing facts and figures. Refreshing. Oh, and the business news? PS3, PSP are selling well. A new classics label is announced for PS3, the RRP will be $29.99 and a range of good PS3 games are included: Resistance, Rainbow Six Vegas and Ninja Gaiden among them.

Cynicism cast aside now, that we great.

Strangely though, we’re now onto PS2. 130 games to come to PS2 in 2008, apparently, Yakuza 2, The Force Unleashed, Mercenaries 2 and more Dynasty Warriors are among them, And Madden. A new price point too: $129. More words on SingStar, Buzz! And a reminder of how PS2 is aimed at families now, Nintendo must be quaking in its boots right now.Right, back on track now with PlayStation Network. Small announcement: there will be one single PSN identity, for PS2, PS3 and for signing on and sending messages via PC. Fact: in the last month there were 20M downloads from the Store, taking the total to 180M since Nov 2006. And now… surprises!

New game: Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest For Booty. It’s a download game, shorter but a continuation of the story from their last outing on PS3. New features and new moves crown what looks like a solid platform adventure game. It’ll sell for $14.99 when it released… Well, when it’s released.

There’s a little dig at Microsoft, as Jack references the number of games it has in its store and that they may be lacking somewhat in quality. A video of new downloadable games is shown and includes the amazing PixelJunk Eden, new Pain! content, flOwer, from the makers of flOw, Siren, a new 2D kung-fu game and more.More content is announced for GT5’s GT TV, with bespoke Polyphony Digital-created content and licensed motor TV from around the world, included our beloved Top Gear. Basically, there’s a ton of content coming to GT TV and it looks great. All high-def and all free of charge starting 1 August.Jack’s now moving onto community and, I’m guessing, the PS3’s new Trophy system and how it works with Home. Jack talks about it being the ‘binding factor’ of the PSN, bringing games, films and people together. He tells us that our, and your, patience will be rewarded when it finally launches but gives no firm release date. A video now shows us some of the themed rooms they’ve been working on and some of the licensed rooms, particularly one with Nike.

Announcement: downloadable movies! Pretty much every studio is a partner in this: Sony Picutres, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner, Disney, the list goes on… You’ll be able to rent and buy both movies and TV shows and prices range between $2.99 to $14.99. Jack points out that any of this content can be ported to PSP and PC. A demo shows how easy this will be - it basically has its own section of the Store where you can browse by studio, genre and so on. Download times will vary depending on connection speed, but you’ll be able to watch almost immediately with the streaming technology. And the best news? It’s live tonight!