The Legend of Zelda.  Donkey Kong Country.  Kirby.  Mario Sports.  Nintendogs.  Even Kid Icarus and GoldenEye – no doubt about it, no matter the angle or the context, Nintendo had games, games, games at last month’s E3.  And that’s only on the stage floor; once the press conference’s lights had gone down and the crowds had dispersed, there was a second, even more potent tsunami of offerings in video and demo form:  Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Star Fox, Pilotwings, Paper Mario, Professor Layton, Resident Evil, Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid.  It’s almost literally a never-ending parade of videogame goodness, comprised of some of the biggest and best in the industry.

Sony, on the other end of the spectrum, had a plethora of PlayStation-branded initiatives.  3D gaming, motion gaming, portable gaming, premium online gaming – although some rather large and robust titles were on hand at the presser, ranging from Sorcery to The Sly Collection to, most notably, Twisted Metal, they functioned, at least in the context of the media briefing, more as living proof and demonstrations of the company’s expanded portfolio of services rather than real destinations, in and of themselves, for wayward gamers this holiday season.

The irony could not be more palpable.  For years now, Nintendo has unleashed its software library to not only prove the viability of the Wii’s motion controls, but to also expound upon them at every turn:  Link’s Crossbow Training introduced the Zapper (or is that the other way around?); Mario Kart Wii, a steering wheel peripheral; Wii Fit, the balance board; Wii Sports Resort, Wii Motion Plus.  (On tap next is the still-mysterious [and inexplicable] Vitality Sensor.)  For Nintendo to abruptly transition from this cavalcade of casual-friendly plastic add-ons to a roster of hardcore-leaning, remarkably motion-less games is stunning, to say the least.

Sony, of course and obviously, has pushed the opposite tack since its very first steps into the videogame industry.  Titles like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, and Gran Turismo, among many, many others, established the PlayStation brand, while Onimusha, Grand Theft Auto III, and Ico (again, among several others) almost immediately cemented the PS2’s status as worthy successor and, indeed, expansive expander; even the PS3 was launched with a stable of high-profile, surprisingly original (if not always critically regarded) software, ranging from Resistance to Heavenly Sword to Uncharted.  To arrive at a show where peripherals, whether they be 3D glasses or the Move and its family of motion-sensing cousins, constitute the bulk and brunt of Sony’s efforts is extremely interesting, if not outright historic.

(More interesting still is Microsoft’s dramatic submission to the sway of the casual court.  With half of its conference devoted to previously-unveiled games, little in the way of new or major announcements, and an overwhelming focus on Kinect and its ability to either engage players in Wii shovelware or users with voice-accentuated movie playback, MS unceremoniously took Nintendo’s former position of sacrificing hardcore zeal for mainstream attention.  Its briefing was, in many ways, a nadir for the company, in terms of both the Xbox as well as the 360 eras – although there is little doubt that Halo: Reach, Fable III, and Gears of War 3 will dominate, both commercially and critically, at the end of this year and the beginning of the next.)

In many ways, the market is right back to where it was 15 long years ago:  Nintendo, with the upper hand, versus Sony, with a lot to prove, locked in a hotly contested and easily decidable conflict.

It’s just that now the battle lines are more amorphous and the centers of power, reversible.

Something’s a-brewing at E3.

This would normally be nothing either new or unique, given the expo’s status as ground zero of the gaming world, but, in this particular case, it represents a long-gestating trend that promises to change the industry of our cherished pastime just as much, if not more, than Sony’s multimedia cavalcade and Nintendo’s motion-control revolution:  diversification, which is a polite way of saying a fracturing focus and splintering product line.

This year’s Microsoft presser was split neatly down the middle between the Xbox 360 and Kinect, the motion-sensing camera formerly known as Project Natal – a first for the company, despite the former and sporadic (not to mention typically lackluster) presence of Games for Windows content in shows past.  Nintendo likewise divvied up its presentation between its Wii and newly-announced 3DS systems, though this is hardly new in the big N’s case; it’s been segmenting its conferences since the first expo, 15 long years ago.

But Sony takes the cake (no pun intended, dear Gabe Newell).  Perhaps reflecting its diverse product line as an electronics manufacturer, SCEA had to contend with the PS3, PSP, and PSN even before the new additions of the PS Move, PS Plus, and PS3D (not an official appellation, but Sony may yet reconsider this excellent chance at [further] branding) were added to the E3 mix.  The console market has literally never seen the likes of this before, even with the endless iterations of both the 360 and the PS3 taken into account.  The question now facing both Sony and the industry is:  will gamers across the country – and, indeed, around the world – embrace this PlayStation saturation, or will they shrug indifferently as they cast their controllers, both traditional and motion, aside, just as they did to the Atari-led gaming blitzkrieg of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s?

The answer resides in yet another answer to yet another query.  Such a full roster – so full, in fact, that the PSP only showed up for some five minutes at the two-hour-long press briefing – is indicative of just one of two possibilities:  confidence or fear.  Either Sony is so thoroughly convinced of the ten-year lifespan of its mighty console that it is eager to keep piling reason upon reason to keep the PS3 front and center of the living room, or it is so fearful of either a weak economy or stronger-then-expected competition from its two eternal rivals that it feels the incessant, almost compulsive need to keep tweaking and fiddling.  For, make no mistake, this is a situation that can easily go either way; videogame history is paved – well, all right, occasionally paved – with examples of companies engaging in interactive excess, such as Sega’s barrage of the Sega CD, the 32X, redesigns of the Genesis and Sega CD and 32X, and the Saturn within a two-and-a-half year period.

Ultimately, however, it seems that Sony just may well end up rewriting history, and doing so successfully, yet again.  Not only do the manufacturer’s recent initiatives provide real and substantial additions to the gameplaying experience – there is a far cry from playing Killzone 3 in 3D or Socom 4 with the Move than, say, playing the DSi XL over the original DSi – but it is extremely unlikely that all consumers will feel the need to purchase all of the expanded capabilities, just as, indeed, a third-party developer will not feel compelled to release a brand-new title with 3D and Move functionality along with PS Plus-exclusive DLC.  Rather than relying upon the standard console tradition of everyone-does-everything-identically content, Sony may be trailblazing a new, expanded (forgive me for using the dreaded buzzword) structure of allowing different types of users to freely engage in different types of uses.

If this is truly the case, then be fully prepared to see the Wii Too and the Xbox 720 – not to mention, of course, the PlayStation 4 – utilizing the exact same set-up.

There is a running contest being waged amongst the console manufacturers and evaluated solely in my mind.  I call it the Ingenuity Award, and it is bestowed on the company that most shakes things up, that most pushes the console envelope, that most advances the medium of videogames.  In the 32-/64-bit generation (1995-1999), the recipient was easily Sony.

It was under Sony’s watch that cartridges were phased out, systems (slowly) became multimedia beasts, and marketing campaigns switched from the prepubescent demographic to that of the twenty-somethings; it was on the PlayStation that such endearing and enduring gameplay experiences as Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Metal Gear Solid were collected.   Despite the Nintendo 64 offering some compelling titles of its own – many of which are still considered to be the best games ever crafted in the history of the medium – there was simply no contest between the mostly regressive and reactionary Nintendo and the progressive and trailblazing Sony.

The 128-bit generation (1999-2005) saw a substantial-but-not-irrevocable slide, with Microsoft, the new newcomer, grabbing the award – there was no way Sony (or Nintendo) could compete against the onslaught of a perfectly streamlined console experience that produced Halo and resulted in Xbox Live – but it was a backtracking that carried with it a formidable dose of forewarning:  if the giant international corporation were not careful, it could and would replace Nintendo as the remote island of gameplay experiences, an oasis of Gran Turismo and Ico surrounded by miles and miles of cultural irrelevance.

It was, alas, a warning the company was too arrogant to take notice of.  The 256-bit Sony is a fumbling, Vaudevillian mess, the Jar Jar Binks of Microsoft and a resurgent Nintendo’s Rebel Alliance – one produces X-wings and Admiral Ackbars; the other, in a vain attempt to mimic his more sophisticated brethren, fabricates fart jokes in between Jerry Lewis pratfalls.   What a difference eleven years makes.

Just what happened?  There have been many mistakes, ranging from outrageous price tags to the seemingly never-ending parade of dropped features (dual HDTV outputs, USB/memory card slots, backwards compatibility, Linux support), but there is one fundamental element that lurks behind every misstep and manifests itself in every miscalculation:  passiveness.  Instead of being boldly progressive, Sony is now blindly reactionary, lurching desperately from one concept to the other in the desperate hope that something, anything will work to keep the evil bogeymen of Microsoft and Nintendo at bay.  The one thing that each of these concepts has in common?  They’re all someone else’s idea.

Sony had been in the console manufacturing business for exactly one decade when Microsoft kicked off the current generation with one of the most mystifyingly moronic decisions in all of videogame history – releasing multiple configurations of one system.  Instead of rebuking the development by summarily ignoring it, as did Nintendo (to much success), Sony instead adopted it as its own, even taking it to an extreme that can only be described as silly.  Three-and-a-half years and six iterations later, there are now more PS3 variations on the market than the number of Nintendo consoles made within the past 25 years.

But it is in Nintendo’s newfound Mecca of motion controls that Sony has most shamelessly shoplifted.   After an initial, bungled effort to incorporate motion sensitivity into its original, quasi-DualShock controller – blatantly lifted from the Wii’s press conference announcement and rushed to market before Nintendo’s system could arrive – the company has ended where it began, making much fanfare and flourish over the PlayStation Move, a Wiimote controller that makes use of a Nunchuk-esque “sub controller” and a video camera (which is itself a holdover from the PS2 days).  Sony even kicked off its marketing campaign for the device at this year’s Game Developers’ Conference by essentially brandishing the peripheral(s) as a “Wii for the HD” crowd.  One cannot get more reactionary than this.

A comparison can be made between the console manufacturers and television networks – when one is on the outs, it turns to cutting-edge material (or, simply, material that cuts edges off of production costs), making it fresh and new and rocketing it to the top of the Neilson hill.  Once it becomes dominant yet again, it becomes complacent and, thus, grows stale and conservative, plunging down the ratings ladder and starting the process all over again.  There is little doubt that Sony will manage, at some point down the road, to reinvent itself and, along the way, the rest of the industry, as well – but there is still the small, gnawing possibility that it will pull a Sega instead of a Nintendo, becoming an evolutionary dead-end instead of evolving to serve other ends.

Indeed, at the rate Sony’s going, I just might have to add another category to my mental competition:  Most Wayward Spirit (original recipient:  Sega).