Give thanks: Sony announces Playstation 4 is coming to North America on November 15

We've known that Sony was launching the Playstation 4 this holiday season, but now know exactly when it’s coming: November 15 in North America and November 29 in Europe. The company announced the Playstation 4 release dates and a few interesting bits of Playstation game news during its Gamescom press conference today.

After showing us a quick glimpse of the PS4 user interface, Sony started its conference proper with new trailers for Gran Turismo 6, backed by a terrible opera soundtrack. While Gran Turismo is traditionally one of the titles that shows off Sony’s new console hardware, GT6 is slated only for PS3 when it releases this December.

Sony also showed off some new upcoming games for the current generation. On the PS3 side, Little Big Planet Hub is a free-to-play entry to the popular user-generated content franchise, presumably coming later this year.

Murasaki Baby is one of many visually-interesting indie games coming to Playstation Vita.

They also dedicated a hefty amount of time to the Vita handheld. Like, a lot of time. Perhaps the biggest announcement was a Vita price cut, down to $200. Sony also revealed that Borderlands 2 is heading to the Vita. We’ll have to wait and see how the console experience scales to the handheld hardware, but if successful it’s a testament to the power of the Vita.

There were also two previously unseen games for the Vita. The first, Murasaki Baby, looks like Tim Burton made a platformer: you play as a girl with a heart balloon, who has a mouth in her forehead. The other, BigFest, is some sort of game/marketing tool hybrid. Your goal in the game is to set up and manage a successful music festival. The twist—every band represented in the game is a real-world, unsigned band. Promoting games in the band will give them a better shot at making it in the real world as well.

To reinforce the “Sony cares about independent developers” narrative, we got a whole slew of news about our favorite small developers. Pretty much every eagerly-anticipated indie game is making its console debut on the PS4: Hotline Miami 2, Volume, Rogue Legacy, and N++ are all on the way.

The Chinese Room, developers of Dear Esther and the upcoming Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs also teased us with a short trailer for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, with the tagline “This story begins with the end of the world.”

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture is another striking Playstation 4 game that seems to have nothing to do with gun violence, modern military power fantasies or square-jawed and sullen male protagonists.

And Sony just kept announcing new games: a new adventure-esque game from Tequila Works titled Rime, a top-down shooter with space marines called Helldivers, a new Housemarque project called Resogun that looks somewhat like a 3D version of the arcade game Defender, and a remake/reboot of the classic Psygnosis title Shadow of the Beast.

In terms of big-budget games, Sony's Gamescom conference revealed…basically nothing. We saw new trailers for Infamous: Second Son and the new Killzone title, but nothing spectacular. They also announced the combat massively multiplayer game War Thunder is coming to the PS4.

Ubisoft showed off the PS4 and Vita’s cross-play abilities with a demo of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. In the midst of the presentation, the game was swapped from playing on the PS4’s screen to an (ostensibly) live demonstration on the Vita. Sony claims “nearly every” game developed for the system is playable on both the PS4 and Vita, though it gave no further info on what the exceptions are.

You should be able to play Assassin's Creed IV and many other Playstation 4 games on the handheld Playstation Vita console.

Watch Dogs, typically the star of the last few games conferences, underwhelmed at Gamescom with a lackluster trailer and the announcement that they’re making a movie from the franchise. Something about “counting your eggs.”

And in the growing realm of games streaming, Sony announced the PS4 will support Twitch compatibility in addition to the previously-announced Ustream partnership.

But of course, the news we all cared about came last: the PS4 will launch for $400 (or the local currency equivalent) this November in 32 markets, and has already sold a million preorder units worldwide.

North American users who preordered will receive their consoles on November 15, while Europeans will have to wait an extra two weeks until November 29.

If you haven’t already preordered, however, you’re probably out of luck. Amazon ran out of preorder units last week. I’m sure some friendly people on eBay will help you though—to the tune of a 400 percent markup.

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EU researchers get 2T bps capacity thanks to network upgrade

European Union researchers using the GEANT network will, from Wednesday, be able to access capacity of up to 2 terabits per second.

GEANT is the superfast pan-European research network that helped discover the Higgs Boson particle at the CERN Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. It was also the only Internet connection to Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring revolution in 2011, according to the European Commission.

The upgrade to the network began in September 2012 and was coordinated by DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), which leads the project consortium of 41 partners.

Using the Infinera DTN-X optical transmission platform deployed on the GEANT backbone—more than 5300 miles of fiber—and 35 Juniper MX series universal routers, testers were able to activate 2T bps of long-haul superchannel optical capacity in June. The test route was between Amsterdam and Frankfurt, as this was deemed to be one of the busiest in Europe.

This superchannel is now permanently available to users of Europe’s National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), including 32,000 universities, 22,000 primary and secondary schools, research institutes, libraries, museums, national archives and hospitals. This will allow data transfer at speeds of up to 100G bps throughout the core GEANT network. The 24 European points of presence can be configured statically or dynamically, offering bandwidth on demand.

Speeds like this will enable faster collaboration on research projects and meet the increasing demand for data transfer capacity. The amount of data that needs to be distributed, analyzed, stored and accessed is increasing exponentially as more global research projects come online, according to the Commission, which has to date provided  $402 million in funding for the GEANT network.

“We need high speed and high capacity to keep in the global research race. The data side of the research equation is almost as important as the research itself today,” said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes in a statement. “With this upgrade, this project is essentially future proofing GÉANT until 2020,” she said.

Jennifer Baker reports on the European Union: Commission, Parliament, technology policy, regulation, and competition.
More by Jennifer Baker, IDG News Service

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