Joystiq

Here's what went wrong:

• Computer this, computer that. Unless the translators really messed up, Kutaragi never said the word console. He said the word "computer" many times, however. We're not sure why it's important to impress upon the audience the possibilities of computer technology, but we're pretty sure that the crowd assembled at TGS this morning wanted to learn something about the PS3's capabilities for games. Very little game content made its way into the speech.
• What's the point? Ken told us that the internet is cool, and it that opens all sorts of possibilities, and that the next 10 years will be more exciting than the last 10, but that's all he said. Why he felt the need to pound the audience with statements of the obvious really wasn't clear. The whole keynote felt like an elaborate joke setup for a punchline that was never delivered. We thought he might have been building to an announcement about the PlayStation 3's online capabilities, or about the PlayStation 3's multiplayer opportunities, or about downloadable content, microtransactions, what have you. Though these things were mentioned, nothing specific was said.
• Lack of visual aids. The gamer is a visual animal, requiring flashy, fast-moving stimuli to hold his interest. Sony failed to cater to the gamer. Besides a few short videos and a couple of ho-hum slides, the keynote was bereft of interesting imagery. For approximately 80% of the hour, the entire visual scene consisted of a Japanese man in a suit reading at a lectern. As one PictoChatter described it, "Zzzzzz."
• Afrika. When the lights dimmed at the end of the keynote for one final video, the audience leaned forward, hoping that we might finally be treated to some video footage for a hot game we'd never seen before. Instead, Sony played a trailer for their puzzling Afrika game. The game's pretty, but like the keynote it fails to make a point. Afrika is like a plasticine rendition of a nature show, without a gravel-voiced narrator to build drama and suspense ("The cheetah, who hasn't eaten in days, creeps up on a herd of gazelle. If he doesn't kill this time, he may be too weak to hunt again and may himself become prey for a nearby pack of hyenas.") The Afrika video, like the keynote itself, was anticlimactic and disappointing.

Though we're worried about the hit to our Karma balance that will result from sharing audio of this event, we're going to try to obtain a file of the entire keynote so that you can listen (and judge) for yourself.

[Update 1: changed "press conference" to "keynote" to satisfy commenters who insist that there's nothing wrong with being boring in a keynote. We say it's not ok. We also say that Iwata's keynote at TGS 2005 was much, much better.]