Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Japan has been the exclusive home of the Adhoc Party software that lets gamers use their PS3 to bridge PSPs together across the internet and play adhoc-only wifi games online with a lobby system and voice chat. It looks like that’s about to change. A PS Blog post this week has two very strong hints that it’s coming our way as soon as next week.

First up the trailer for an upcoming PSP fighting game Fate/Unlimited Codes (yawn) mentions that gamers can play online with Adhoc mode (!!!). Savvy online gamers know that infrastructure mode is how you play online (requiring the “infrastructure” of a wifi router between devices) and ad hoc mode is only for local, on-the-fly wifi play. This shouldn’t appear on an official PlayStation Blog trailer by accident, and when asked point blank by a reader in comment #36 whether this means Adhoc Party is coming to the US to be used with this game soon, the writer, John Diamonon, only replied with “…”.

That tells me that yes, finally Adhoc Party is coming. Given that PS3 firmware 3.00 is supposed to hit around September 1st I’m guessing this will be in there. The greatest part about this app is that it instantly and immediately works with literally hundreds of existing Adhoc-only PSP games going way back in the system’s lifespan.

This will allow me to finally buy a Monster Hunter game and could be part of this fall’s big new PSP push. But if Monster Hunter Freedom Unite stays as expensive as it is now, I’ll probably wait for a digital download version since that’s the future of the platform.

Sources: PlayStation Blog and Kotaku (thanks to a txt from Aeropause writer emeritus James Munn).