SE-NSE Forums:

In my last piece I gave some initial impressions of the Xperia Play from the launch event in Barcelona, but I want to go intoa bit more detail with regards to the software side of things.

We saw a few of the titles that will be available for launch on Sunday night and on the whole they were good. I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I genuinely had fun playing around with them on the Xperia Play (so much so that I had to be asked to give someone else a shot at one point).

Asphalt 6, an arcade racer, was my title of choice for the evening and as I said it was pretty fun. The graphics were good,not at the absolute cutting edge I’d say, but that was to be expected. I heard a few people compare the graphics with the PS2 so take from that what you will. The controls worked great and really got you into the game rather than feeling like this was just another smartphone that has a couple of games on it. The analogue pads in particular were appreciated.

There will be five games pre-installed at launch; Asphalt 6 as I mentioned, Sims 3, Fifa 10, Star Battalion and Bruce Lee (yes it is named just Bruce Lee). They were all good enough fun to play and some of them looked pretty decent too in terms of graphics, but I have to admit to feeling a little underwhelmed at the choice of titles. For example, why Fifa 10 and not 11? That was a sentiment I heard repeated from others on the night, the feeling that even though what was on offer was good enough there should have been some major title on show that really pushed the device and could show off just what it was capable of.

That might sound like me being picky, but the success of the Xperia Play and the platform in general is going to hinge on attracting gamers to the device and you aren’t going to do that without a consistent stable of major titles. As I was leaving

Barcelona I heard from a few sources that more announcements on publishers and games would be made ’soon’, maybe some this week and maybe some within the next few weeks.

One aspect of the games that was drawing a lot of praise was multi-player support, which seems to be device agnostic in the sense that it isn’t limited to Xperia Plays. You can be playing Fifa 10 on your Xbox and your mate can join in from his Xperia play. Pretty sweet. Many of the 50 or so launch titles should support multi-player options.

It’s also interesting to note that Crash Bandicoot is a PS1 title. That should mean we can look forward to more PS1 titles appearing in due course and perhaps titles from other devices (PSP anyone?).

In terms of game pricing Nathan Vautier, the head of Sony Ericsson UK, indicated titles being in the £5-£10 range. He did, however, seem to suggest that we might expect to see titles below the £5 mark although he didn’t say whether this would be at launch or something that might come in later.

The Xperia Play feels like it’s been around forever given the amount of leaks we’ve seen over the past few months. With that in mind I attended Sunday’s launch in Barcelona expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed. I was pleasantly surprised to the contrary …

The first thing to say about the Xperia Play is that there are two very distinct aspects to it, the hardware and the software. The hardware of course has been public knowledge, unofficially at least, for months now, indeed it’s probably one of the most leaked handsets to have ever seen the light of day. Sunday threw up nothing new in terms of the physical handset itself, but that’s fine because the hardware is actually solid.

As a handheld device it’s pretty good. The device feels great in the hand, not too heavy, not too light, but just right. It’s well balanced so that gaming with it doesn’t feel awkward or strained, all in all it felt like what it is being pitched as, a gaming device.

I’ll get into the finer points of the hardware in a later article, but suffice to say for now that the handset feels fantastic and that it very much comes across as a dedicated gaming device physically and not just a phone with some gaming controls tacked on.

On the other side of the coin we had the software, the actual games themselves. Now before I get into this let me state the following caveat: this is a new platform for Sony Ericsson, indeed Android gaming in general is pretty much still in its infancy so bear that in mind.

The games on the demo units were ok and I use that word deliberately because they were by no means bad, but at the same time I couldn’t help but get the feeling that, for the event at least, they could have made an effort to have a real stand out title available that showcased what this platform could do. A major title, Grand Theft Auto, for example, might have attracted more attention and ‘wowed’ the crowd a bit more.

I’m not trying to be critical for the sake of finding fault, but doing the rounds of the room on the night there seemed to be a consensus amongst many that whilst the device was great to play with and the games on offer were, in all fairness, good fun, there was just that sense of the games not being ‘grade A’ … yet. The sort of titles on offer were Sims 3 and Fifa 10 (10, not 11).

Granted that the games we saw represented only a small number of the 50 titles that will be present at launch and let me underscore that the games I tried were genuinely fun, but they do also need a lot more big titles to really draw in the gaming crowd. To be fair they are making an effort to get the industry onboard and they already have 20 games publishers signed up.

I was actually surprised by how little was said about the software side of things, it wasn’t really mentioned to any great extent during the presentation itself. That’s strange given how big this could become given Android’s scope, but we’ll get into that in a future article.

The bottom line is the device itself is pretty awesome, it looks the part, it feels the part, and despite some comments about it not being multi-core, etc it seems to deliver the goods in terms of performance. It has enormous potential, but note that word ‘potential’, it’s by no means a done deal yet. They need more publishers onboard, they need big name titles, they need to get other manufacturers using the platform. The thing is all that is doable if Sony Ericsson (and Sony) want it to happen.

For the first time in God knows how long Sony Ericsson is ahead of an emerging trend and it has a product out that is actually desirable and perhaps more importantly for Sony Ericsson a product that is being talked about in terms other than disparaging. This could be the one that heralds the return of the Sony Ericsson we love, they just have to want it badly enough.

I’ll be looking at the hardware and the software in more detail soon …