Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Xbox 360 owners have some conveniences that by and large PS3 owners are envious of. From the always-on voice chat to a unified buddy list and invitation system to the ability to play your own music independently of the game you’re playing, it’s got some crowd-pleasing features.

On the flipside of the coin just about anyone who has used a PS3 for a while gets the distinct impression that there’s a lot of power under the hood and a lot of potential for the system. It’s up to developers — be they Sony’s firmware developers or game developers — to tease it out and make the system go from a purr to a roar.

An interview with a couple of Sony’s firmware developers last month shows how what they’ve done so far follows in that vein. Sony relies on developers to extract the power from the PS3, giving them software development kits (SDKs) that let them do some things with the PS3 that Xbox 360 end-users can already do and some things that Xbox 360 users can’t do with their system.

One of the surprises in the interview was that the PS3 firmware supports custom soundtracks, but it has been done in such a way that developers need to use a software development kit (SDK) to add it to a game. I’d prefer the way the 360 does it, letting you bring it up independently of a game, but if developers adopt external soundtracks across the board it would basically becomes a non-issue. Again, Sony’s philosophy of giving developers tools to define how they do things — be it online play or music playlists — shows through this tactic. Could Sony make the XMB work the way the 360′s blade-like interface does, always being available? Sure. We’ll have to see.

Another surprise is that Remote Play isn’t just for remote-controlling your XMB and playing media and music via your PSP. You can actually play full games through it — if a developer writes it into their game. Once again it’s done via an SDK. Developers can write software for the PS3 that will let some of the game, maybe a mini-game, be played via the PSP. This has lots of potential, but we’ll have to see if anyone uses it.

One last feature centers around the 3.50 PSP Firmware and the matching 1.80 firmware’s ability to remotely run a PS3 across an internet connection. The developers pretty much imply that the ability to turn a PS3 on from its standby state (or something like it) is in the cards for future firmwares.

Such wake-on-lan functionality for the PS3 coupled with games using Remote Play sounds like a very interesting combination. Even though they’ve delivered on downloadable PS1 games for the PSP, you can’t help but wonder what kinds of gaming innovations talented developers could pull off with cross-internet gameplay using PSPs.

How about an MMO running on the PS3 while you’re away from home using your PSP as a kind of terminal to play the game? Of course we’d probably see Sony do something like this first, with early access to the firmware, but that doesn’t mean they’d do it best.

One of the most telling parts of the interview was actually in an offhand comment from one of the developers. We can extend the firmware further and further, as long as there’s hard drive space available, he said with a chuckle, it’s a matter of prioritizing what they do next and how to do so without unduly taxing the processors in the system.

Sounds like yet another way for PS3 owners to ask Sony to give us your best shot.

Via Kotaku who linked to Neowin.