Long waits at E3, but what exactly was on show? Photograph: David McNew/Getty
The amazing specs, the astonishing demos, the total lack of involvement from Elijah Wood - Sony sure knows how to launch a new console. And if you believe eveything you've read on the over-excited American news sites and games forums, the company has already won this round in the PlayStation vs Xbox face-off.
But increasingly, questions are being asked about the footage on show at Sony's pre-E3 conference, especially the breathtaking Killzone demo. In its write up on the event, IGN has cast doubts on the real-time authenticty of the footage, and later revisted the controversy by speculating over the true source of the video sequence.
And on the same site's Voodoo Extreme forum, a post purporting to be from Epic Games' Mark Rein states: "the Epic and EA presentations were the only third party portions actually running on the PS3 in real-time."
Meanwhile, I've heard rumours that Microsoft has been using dev kits to run its E3 demos, but these are running at much lower than their full capacity. So this fight may be a lot closer than it appears.
But does that really matter anymore?
To be fair, Sony has not explicitly claimed that the Killzone trailer is 100% real-time footage, created on a PS3 dev kit. And, these days, the term "real-time demo" is rather ambiguous - it does not necessarily mean that the footage shows a player interacting with the game as the consumer would see it.
It could just as easily refer to a fully scripted sequence where every movement, every explosion and every fight sequence has been perfectly pre-choreographed - in this context, real-time merely refers to the fact that the scene is rendered in real-time, rather than, say, overnight on a render farm, a la Pixar. Real-time is relative.
But of course consideration of such intricacies hasn't made it into the mainstream coverage of PS3 - and that's the vital point. It's as though, befuddled by having to decode the Xbox 360 specs a few days before, many commentators simply gave up and fell back on empty-headed hype.
By far the worst offender was yesterday's Metro. Here's a sample sentence from the freebie paper's page three story on PS3, accompanied by clearly not in-game images of Madden 2006 and Need For Speed.
"PS3 is ten times more powerful than a home computer".
Has a more arbitary phrase ever been committed to the printed page? What is the reader expected to garner from such a vague assertion? I mean, surely even the most novice PC user knows that there is an enormous difference in performance between a £400 Dell starter machine and a two grand Alienware games monster? But it gets better:
"Digital tricks have allowed engineers to render games in near movie-like quality."
Just take a moment to read that again. It is absolutely empty of meaning - a rice cake of a sentence. "Digital tricks"? "Movie-like quality"? And who are these mysterious engineers?
Sony Computer Entertainment is a master of pre-release hype. A. Master. It knows that, while gamers endlessly debate the reality or unreality of screenshots and trailers, this doubt never filters out toward the average consumer.
I was surprised by just how many news reports of both Xbox 360 and PS3 mentioned the fact that they could play CDs and DVDs - to me it's like reporting that the latest Panasonic TV lets you change channels, or that a new Smeg fridge has a light that comes on when you open the door. But CD and DVD playing capabilities obviously still impress the mainstream consumer. No wonder they're suckered by a "movie-like" screenshot.
The hyper-real boast-fest that is E3 is no place to assess new hardware. It is no place to really assess anything. This is the kingdom of immediate impressions and bursts of confused excitement. When the dust settles and it becomes clear that Guerrilla, a small developer from Amsterdam, possibly couldn't have harnessed the full power of PS3 in a matter of months, then we shall be able to analyse. But by then the hype will have worked its magic.
And somewhere there will be a global marketing manager, in a big leather chair, stroking a white cat, laughing quietly to himself.
