Cross-platform gaming is an excellent idea, but Sony’s showing off something much more impressive at E3 this year — a game that you could play on either PS3 or the PlayStation Vita handheld and immediately resume on either console. Ruin, by Idol Minds and Sony San Diego, leverages cloud storage to avoid wasting the complete game, down to the positions and actions of each nearby enemy and the structures you’ve destroyed. Then, a second or eight once you hit load on another machine, you’re right back within the exact same fight. Transferring to console to handheld and picking up exactly where you left off — yep, it is a bona fide continuous client , and we needed to give it a try. So, off to Sony’s E3 2011 booth we went, to search out Idol Minds.
With both Vita and PS3 connected to an area router, it was both as simple and as mind-blowing as you’d expect — simply save on one (it doesn’t matter what you’re doing), load at the other, and everything (save certain scripted animations) loads exceptionally quickly. If truth be told, Idol Minds VP Jeff Litchford said that while show floor conditions necessitated the local router, Ruin’s cloud resume functionality would even work over 3G, because the save files are literally fairly small, at the order of 250KB. He couldn’t let us know whether you will need to purchase two copies of the sport to make the magic happen (we’re hoping not), but he did have some excellent news at the cloud storage front: it won’t cost something to save lots of your game data, not even a subscription to PlayStation Plus .
Sean Buckley contributed to this report.
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