The PlayStation 3 Turns Two

By Paul Munn | November 17, 2008

Two years into the PS3 and the system seems to have finally gotten some respect from publishers and, surprisingly, from gamers as well. It’s been grudging respect, to be sure, but the system has seen some excellent titles launch this fall, including competitive cross-platform ones. The Trophy situation has improved markedly since the capability was added this summer — EA has basically written the book on how to patch them in with Burnout Paradise, Mercenaries 2, and Battlefield: Bad Company all getting them post-launch — and the in-game XMB support for text messaging is likely as far as Sony will go in trying to match up against XBox Live. The rest of the system’s media features continue to grow and the PlayStation Store revamp and the launch of the movie store including both the game and movie stores being available on the PS3 and PSP have all been impressive accomplishments this year.
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Social Networking Coming to Blu-ray Movies

By Paul Munn | November 15, 2008

This week’s PlayStation Store update included a trailer from Disney that frankly shocked me with the feature set they’re going to be implementing with their Blu-ray releases. It’s called the BD-Live Educational Demo on the Store and it’s talking about infusing Blu-ray releases of their classic movies — Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella seem to be showcased — with internet-enabled social networking features like a trivia game, live online chat, and video mail. BD-Live was added to the PS3 in Firmware 2.20 back in March. I’m pretty sure some of these are going to be PS3 exclusive features unless you’ve seen a standard Blu-ray player with a webcam attached to it on the market. I haven’t.

In the past we’ve seen BD-Live touted as a way to connect to websites to download movie trailers for sequels to the movie you’re watching and other things like that but it looks like Disney is going all out with this new generation of movie releases with some impressive features focused squarely on the internet generation that might be just starting to think about buying Disney movies now that the HD disc format war is over.

The proof, however, is in the final release, which reminds me: Can anyone out there recommend movie sites that do great reviews of Blu-ray releases and their feature sets? With so many older films now getting re-released on Blu-ray it’s important to know what’s worth seeing or getting on Blu-ray and what would be just fine on DVD.

Stor3d: Meet The New Capcom, Same As The Old Capcom

By Paul Munn | November 13, 2008

Hey look, a new Capcom area is coming to the PlayStation Store today. Did I forget an exclamation point there? I’m not particularly excited about this, and I griped about it a little while back over here. Today’s debut of Age Of Booty for the PSN continues a long trend for Capcom, or at least Capcom-published games since this is developed by someone else. That trend is no Trophy support.

Yep, I’m complaining about this yet again because AOB is a full month late and still, still it doesn’t have the Trophy support they say was going to be patched in. Know what else was supposed to have Trophies patched in at some point? Bionic Commando: Rearmed was, as one of the commenters on the PS Blog pointed out. See any Trophies for that? I haven’t even seen a release date for Trophies for that. Really Capcom? If you’re not going to do it, just come out and say it. We’re grownups. We can take it.

Oh well. At least the first crop of new Sackboy costumes are coming to the store today, one of which is free.

More Granular LittleBigPlanet Moderation System Coming

By Paul Munn | November 11, 2008

If you’ve listened to Aeropodcast 57 with special-great-not-special-short-bus guest Julian “Rabbit” Murdoch you can hear how we all bemoaned Media Molecule’s heavy-handed moderation tactics that have blotted out some pretty fun levels from the online portion of the game. All we could do, really, is hope that somebody put a stop to the wholesale deletion of levels and show some kind of restraint. Yes, copyright needs to be protected, but if anything that even hints at some bit of intellectual property is erased — even if it’s in admiration of the work — people will just stop trying.

Witness Richard Windsor, whose longtime disdain for all things PS3 was all but forgotten once he joyfully started creating levels celebrating our shared experiences, be it about our election a short week ago or about traversing a refridgerator. Of course his anti-Sony attitude reasserted itself when his levels were wiped out and his account blocked from re-posting them (and possibly anything else), and can you blame him? These days he’s talking about getting his ball and going home, threatening to give away his copy of LittleBigPlanet. Take heart, Richard, this story is for you.

Media Molecule is now promising a much better moderation system than the throw-it-all-to-the-lions system currently employed by the copyright cops. Instead of you logging in and finding hours upon hours of hard work and cleverness deleted and blocked from being posted again from your happy hard drive, you will apparently get a message from copyright high command pointing to what bit of your level has tripped the alarm system of the great unsleeping eye of the content police. It’ll give you a chance to clear up the roadblock to your LittleBigFame and get the level posted again for all to enjoy. Of course this is a promise without a release date, but given the uproar over user-posted content I’m hopeful it lands very soon.

From PS3Fanboy.

Ones to Watch on PS3 and PSP for November 2008

By Paul Munn | November 2, 2008

The PlayStation 3 gets just a few exclusive games this month amidst a flood of cross-platform titles, but those exclusives are all excellent titles on the system. The headliner this month is definitely going to be Resistance 2 (IGN: “Incredible” 9.5) with a strong single-player, separate 8-man co-op, and a dizzying 60-person online competitive multiplayer option. Also coming this month is something pretty rare on the PS3 these days, an RPG in the form of the Sega-published Valkyria Chronicles (IGN: “Outstanding” 9.0). Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm (IGN: “Impressive” 8.4) is another exclusive. All three of these are headed our way on November 4th, which is also Election Day in the United States.

Late-launchers on the console this month include Alone in the Dark: Inferno, which is a somewhat revised and tweaked verison of the same game that arrived on other platforms a few months ago and Age of Booty hits the PSN a month after launching on Xbox Live Arcade. Age of Booty was to get Trophies patched in after and October release but it’s not known if the delay allowed the developer to add Trophies in for this month’s debut.

The BioShock Challenge Rooms are slated to hit the PS3 on November 20th for an unknown price. I don’t believe these are headed to the Xbox 360 or PC versions of the game.

A number of other cross-platform titles this month are showing up with Trophy support.
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LittleBigPlanet Day 3: We Have Liftoff!

By Paul Munn | October 30, 2008

On Tuesday the LittleBigPlanet servers were still down, so I had the opportunity to enjoy some of the excellent create mode tutorials. Day 3 kicked off Wednesday night for me after I’d put the kids to bed and to my delight I found the servers were up, performance to be pretty good, and much fun was had by me! (Note: a new 1.03 patch for the game is now available and my experiences below are from the 1.02 version of the game.)

Update: added the latest LittleBigPlanet Episode 3 documentary video talking about the create mode of the game.
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LittleBigPlanet Day 1: Meltdown

By Paul Munn | October 28, 2008

LittleBigPlanet 2 might have been on the drawing board earlier yesterday, but I’m sure that marker board has been wiped clean and schematics showing big server problems with LittleBigPlanet has been drawn in its place.

Last night I downloaded my preorder costumes and stickers then jumped into LittleBigPlanet to go online and play some levels. I was sure I’d be able to find lots of folks online even this early given that people like me who had preordered the game were able to pick it up on Saturday. I’d spent five or six hours over the weekend jumping joyfully through a few levels of the game offline and hadn’t even opened up the level making tools yet. Just being able to voice chat and make jokes with my brother James while we work together to reach some stuff out of reach to a single sackboy would be great.

What I found was a nearly complete meltdown of the online portion of the game.
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Upgrading The Hard Drive On Your PS3

By Paul Munn | October 27, 2008

With so many great games hitting the PS3 this holiday season — some of which want to eat up more and more hard drive space with delicious downloadable levels or even just the basic installed data to speed things along — you might be running low on space on your PS3. We’ve all heard that the console can use any 2.5-inch SATA laptop drive, but how exactly does the upgrade work?

One of the best online tech video blogs came to the rescue recently with episdoe 248 of the DL.TV video podcast. They describe the complete process of upgrading your drive, from backup to swap to restore, starting at roughly 14 minutes and 50 seconds into the podcast.

Check it out here at DL.TV.

Resistance 2 Gets Impressive Marketing

By Paul Munn | October 23, 2008

What has me excited about Resistance 2, aside from the fact that it dispenses with the irritating use of a colon and subtitle? It features a rich alternate history, tight integration with the story of the first game, more high-tech weaponry to have fun with, and hints that Nathan Hale’s journey down the interstate of interspecies genetic mutation might not be as pretty as its benefits thus far of regeneration and stylish gold eyes. All of this comes courtesy of some impressive advertising on the title along with a little alternate reality game with a bit of star power. Speaking of interstates, folks in Los Angeles have been treated to a building-sized ad for the game featuring its building-sized Leviathan enemy.

The feature set is big, and exhausting all of its options could take you a good long while if you love to wring every bit of value out of your shooters. In addition to the single-player campaign you have 8-player co-op campaigns as well as various other online competitive team based modes. My brother James recently made it into the beta and he said the experience was unreal. One massive fight ended and he saw his PSN ID place in the 40’s on a scoreboard of 60 players in the match. Important note: the beta is hosting 60-man games that seem to be working well enough to actually end safely. That’s up from the 40-man games you could get going in Resistance: Fall of Man. Their network code has chops.

Update: I forgot to mention that the game has split-screen online competitive and co-op play, too. “Now you won’t have to stop leveling up your medic just because your friend is over!” Sweet.

Resistance 2 releases on election day in the US, November 4th, but you’d better go vote first before you pick up this game, you hear me? Anyway, to set the mood, check out the video shown above.

Seen on PS3Fanboy.

Song Screwup Delays LittleBigPlanet One More Time

By Paul Munn | October 17, 2008

I have this thing about songs. I listen to the lyrics when I first hear a song a few times and decide whether or not I like the song partially from the lyrics and partially from the melody. My wife doesn’t get it — she’ll happily enjoy a song that has the most stupid and nonsensical lyrics anyone could ever utter until I point out just how stupid the words are. “Don’t you hear what they’re saying?” That doesn’t mean the songs have to be meaningful, just being playful with language is often enough.

Well I’m guessing someone at Media Molecule was innocently grooving to the music and assuming the foreign language they heard was just peachy when they chose to license a pop song that turns out to have two quotes from the Qu’ran, which offended a listener. Granted these are in Arabic and not English, which seems to make it an honest mistake, but Sony has nonetheless wisely issued a worldwide recall of LittleBigPlanet, which was just a few days shy of landing in everyone’s hot little hands, what with Gamespot’s 9.0 review, IGN’s 9.5 review, and the beta energizing the game’s fans.

Sony’s announced that the game will now be “shipped to retail” during the week of October 27th. I’m guessing we might see it just a day or two shy of Halloween instead of its original October 21st street date, so I’ll stop calling my local game store I reserved it at until then.

I do have to hand it to Sony for behaving very responsibly in the face of this type of criticism, for acting very quickly to perform this recall, and for immediately posting about this finding and the resulting delay on the PlayStation Blog instead of letting rumors get out of hand. These are three unusually nimble and fast things for a very large entertainment company to do intelligently in the face of possibly inflammatory materials in their game. I’m sure Rockstar would agree.

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