Did you hear the news? Sony’s Ad-hoc Party feature for the PSP is coming to North America this month! This awesome new service allows you to play Monster Hunter Freedom Unite ONLINE by enabling your PSP to play through your PS3. This is HUGE news for Monster Hunter fans as now they can play MHFU with their Monster Hunter buddies around the country! The new feature also allows you to use text or voice chat to communicate with friends, which is critical for coordinating those 4 player hunts and taking out those tougher Monsters.

Granted that Adhoc Party will actually bring lots and lots of OLD PSP games online, going back literally years with no patching needed, but it’s also letting developers off the hook to a certain extent. Keep in mind that your PS3 will have to be dedicated to this to work — no DVD, Blu-ray or Netflix use by someone else in your household while you’re online with the PSP — and that you need a hard-line ethernet connection to it so the PSP can talk to it via the built-in Wi-Fi chipset. It’s a great deal for existing PS3 owners at zero dollars and zero cents and no ongoing online service fee.

All of that said, the technical triumphs of things like the two excellent Syphon Filter PSP games from the Sony Bend Studio that included not just online play for a first-person shooter but also had voice chat proved years ago that it could be done, and done well, without having to fall back to another service. Yes, this is just like having Xbox Live to fall back on if you think about it, and yes, this might help boost sales, but there are side benefits to running your own servers.

Take Sega and what they’re planning for Phantasy Star Portable 2. The first game was adhoc only, but the sequel is adding online play. Why is this a big deal? Why not just use Adhoc Party? Maybe because they might use it to reduce used game sales by requiring you enter a code from your manual into the game to register it with their servers before you can play it online.

In the end, though, I can’t help but think this is a net positive for the little handheld that is still alive and kicking up against Nintendo’s incredible DS juggernaut. What older games do you have that you want to play online?

Well, after seeing their Xbox 360 breathern enjoy the fruits of Netflix Instant Streaming, PS3 owners are starting to see the joys of watching Netflix via their own consoles.  Everything you have seen on the Xbox 360 service is available here, albeit in a very plain interface, but Netflix works as advertised, and very quickly.  Hit the jump for a quick look at the new service along with its all of its ups and downs.  We also have screen captures of the complete interface, with the exception of adding a movie to your queue.

The first thing you need to realize is that Netflix does not happen as easy as it does on the Xbox 360.  You need a physical disc in order to use the interface.  If you have not gone about requesting an Instant Streaming disc from Netflix, you are up the creek without a paddle if you wanted to use the service tonight.  Discs do ship out fairly quickly, and if you live in the Los Angeles basin area, you will get a disc next day after requesting one.  Even after you get your disc, there is a verification process, and linking your account to the console.  For those that already have Xbox 360 streaming enabled, you will have to link your account to your PS3, but it will not affect the link to your 360 in any way.  You can stream to both devices without any issue, just not at the same time.

Selecting the Netflix icon under the Video section of the X-Media bar will get you to the abovementioned verification process, and once you have finished, you will be presented with your queue.  Verification by the way, happened rather quickly, in under 45 seconds for me.  Netflix does say it could take up to three minutes, so times may vary.  Also, I have a feeling the process might take longer this evening as a lot of people get on the site to setup their accounts.

The interface is very plain, with your queue sitting on a very plain white background.  The moves are stacked in a row horizontally, and you just use the left stick or d-pad to move either left or right through the queue.  Moving around the queue is quick and responsive, and the box art showed up rather quickly, an issue I have right now with the Xbox 360 version of Netflix.  You cannot hold down a direction to auto-scroll through the queue.  The queue will only move one position to the right or left, regardless of holding it down, requiring more use of the controller or remote to navigate the queue.  Pressing up on the queue takes you to the selection screen, where you can move between your queue, recently watched movies, and then each queue by category, each holding 100 movies.  You can add movies it looks like, through the queue, but I did not see anything I wanted to be associated with me in the movie selections.

One you select the movie, it loads up rather quickly.  Maybe a hair faster than the 360 version of the interface.  However, it seems like skipping around in the movie takes far longer to buffer and start playback again.  On the 360 side of the fence, you can jump around quite a bit before you see any heavy loading by Netlfix.

The Netflix service is far more functional than I expected, with most of the features being present and accounted for at the time of launch.  There is no party watching service, as is to be expected, since that feature part of the Xbox Live Dashboard.  it is also very drab and dull, leading to a bored experience while going through the queues.  These things can be looked past right now, but the bigger issue is that the whole application just seems twice removed from the X-Media bar.  The lack of any real integration shows, and it really brings the product down a notch.  Again, this is something that will be fixed according to Netflix and Sony in the future, but it just seems like they rushed this to get it out before Christmas, instead of releasing a final product.

As it stands, Netflix Instant Streaming on the Playstation 3 is an enjoyable, although drap experience.  One would want more, but the pure functionality of the application is enough on its own merits.  And just knowing I have 12,000+ movies at my fingertips, instead of having to pay ridiculously inflated prices on the marketplace makes this an instant win product.  Netflix Instant Streaming easily gets a 4.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts from me.  Fixing up the little nagging issues and controls will get Sony and Netflix the 5 Aeropausonaut rating that  it really deserves.

Ok here’s the thing: I don’t care about the huge military-themed, cross-platform shooter coming to the PS3 this month. It’ll get its spot of ink below, don’t worry, but I’m highlighting the three exclusive franchises returning to PlayStation platforms this month first.

The God of War Collection lands on November 17th as a new experiment: a reissue of two PlayStation 2 games in high definition on a single Blu-ray PlayStation 3 disc. The remastering of the top-selling God Of War and God Of War II includes the addition of Trophy support. Sales of this collection will be watched closely – it takes quite a bit of work to remaster games like this, but if it sells well we might see other Sony PS2 franchises reappear like this on the PS3. I’m a huge fan of the franchise, partly because of the brutally satisfying gameplay, partly because of the mostly-consistent mythological backdrop, so this is a must-buy for me. Of note: this is a $40 game.

The PlayStation Portable gets the PS3’s most recognizable mascot this month with its very own version of LittleBigPlanet. While you’ll be able to make and share your own levels in LBP on the PSP, you’re going to be playing them alone since multiplayer didn’t make it into this game. I’m being cheeky by mentioning this would be a $40 game as well since PSP games tend to debut at this price.

Also hitting the PlayStation 3 this month is Buzz! Quiz World on the 10th. I’ve become a fan of the original Buzz! Quiz TV on the PlayStation 3 and it’s just about the only game my non-gamer wife will play with me on the system. Of note: this also is a $40 game if you already have the buzzers from the first game, or $60 if you need the buzzers too. And in case you’re wondering the buzzers aren’t Bluetooth devices. They need a USB dongle to work.

What else is hitting the systems this month?

PlayStation 3

EA and Bioware are bringing a new fantasy franchise to market this month with Dragon Age: Origins on the 3rd, something some have theorized might have been a D&D game that never quite got the license. As a fully single player adventure it’s already got DLC lined up for it. As someone who’s still thoroughly enjoying Sacred 2 on the PS3 I might be interested in this game at one point, but not quite yet.

LEGO Rock Band also comes in on the 3rd, taking what should have been a filter in Rock Band 2 – the option for kid-friendly songs only – and putting it in a whole different game. Still, LEGOs are LEGOs and it could sell a few copies this holiday season. It’ll also add a whole different submenu to the already large set of PlayStation Store weekly update music game DLC menus.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed — Ultimate Sith Edition comes in on November 4th, and having spent some time with the original I’m not interested in this one. The controls and camera just felt too complex in this one, and since this only adds some additional missions as far as I can tell it’s not something I’ll be going after anytime soon.

That elephant in the room I mentioned is, of course, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game’s going to have midnight retailer openings and throngs of fans waiting to ventilate each other online, and as I said I couldn’t care less. I’m all in favor of stimulating the retail and game development economy, though, don’t get me wrong, so go ahead and buy it with abandon!

I found the story and feel of the original Assassin’s Creed game to be slow and unwieldy, and it gave me a very strong Half-Life 2 vibe which made me think I knew where the story was going very early on. I quickly lost interest, so its sequel coming on the 17th doesn’t have my interest.

A former Xbox 360 exclusive, the Scene It franchise also comes to the PS3 this month (making me wonder if it did ok over there) with Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen!. More party games are always welcome on the console but I haven’t been following this one.

PlayStation Portable

The PSP gets some new blood this month with its first proper Jak and Daxter game, Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier. High Impact Games’ take on the franchise Naughty Dog previously took 3 runs at on the PlayStation 2 already has a demo on the PlayStation Store, so feel free to scoop that up and give it a look. It lands on November 3rd on both the PSP and the PS2, of all things.

Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines takes the first game’s storyline in a new direction, apparently, and does it portably. We’ll have to see how it fares alongside its sequel bigger brother on the 17th.

Lastly, about a month later than its PS3 and Xbox 360 older brother, the PSP version of Tekken 6 comes in on November 24th. Tekken’s got a very good track record with Dark Resurrection on the PSP, so this could be a really stellar fighter.

That covers it for the big deals hitting PlayStation platforms this month. Did I miss anything you’re after? Let me know what and why in the comments below.

This makes me want TripleTags back so I can have a really great-looking Trophy card again instead of the sad-looking one available on the PSN. So why did it go under? Site owner Joshua “SectionZ” Hernandez (a guest of the Aeropodcast) posted on Facebook that he didn’t have time to maintain it any longer now that his new game software company Metamoorephosis is off to a great start with purcussONE and bitFLIP.

Will GamerDNA and Raptr get Trophy data back? I imagine they could continue to try and scrape it off of the site. I suspect this is what PlayFire is doing with the EU arm of Sony. But without an official connection it’ll be a losing battle.

Late last week, Netflix stock made a nice jump after company officials mentioned that they had a big announcement coming this weekend.  The announcement was to mention a new platform that they would be delivering instant streaming on starting in a short period of time.  Rumors started to swirl that it would be either the PS3 or the Nintendo Wii, but as of this evening, Sony and Netflix have put out a joint press release that the PS3 will have Netflix in the next month.

Basically, the service would work similar to the way it works on the Xbox 360, but instead of it being built into the actual operating system on the PS3, you would actually insert an Instant Streaming disc that would open up a Netflix front end that would allow streaming of movies.  The selection will be the same as it is for all other delivery platforms, and their will be no additional costs on the PSN, with the exception of needing a Netflix account.  Also, the Instant Streaming discs are to be offered as a free item, although the press release does make it sound like they might charge for them in the future.

So PS3 owners, are we happy, sad or indifferent over this development.  I like the idea of Netflix coming to other platforms, but I wonder if Sony could of made it easier by developing an extension to the Media bar that would support Netflix instant streaming natively, instead of using an extra disc to make the magic happen.  I can say this – I have already put in a request for a disc.

November 4, 2008: Resistance 2 brought Nathan Hale further into the grips of his chimeran mutation and increased the first-game’s large-scale multiplayer while breaking it down into goal-oriented teams. It also sported a three-class co-op component that is still popular today. Metascore: 87.

February 27, 2009: Killzone 2 opened eyes wide and garnered a very strong following from the hardcore shooter crowd. Most critics said it didn’t do anything particularly new, but what it did it did exceptionally well. Metacritic Metascore: 91.

May 26, 2009: inFAMOUS brought a brand new super-powered comic-book-styled universe to life and let gamers take the goody-protect-the-innocents or fry-em-all-let-God-sort-em-out route routes for two different story arcs and some mission variety all in a very wide open city that doubled as Cole’s giant, climbable, stunt-friendly jungle gym. Metascore: 85.

October 6, 2009: Demon’s Souls is From Software’s crushingly hard game that Sony declined to publish, leaving Atlus to pick up the pieces and, with really high praise from critics and probably an equal number of tears of frustration from reviewers, reap the rewards. Just this week they’ve had to put out new copies of the game to meet demand. Metascore: 89.

October 13, 2009: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves brought back Nathan Drake and friends with new enemies in tow on a game that takes the great characters, chemistry, and realistic animation and from the first Uncharted game and kicks it up a few notches. Throw in a surprisingly strong set of multiplayer offerings, including some 3-person co-op and it’s a gem the critics adore. Metascore: 97.

Now I’m sure I’ve missed something along the way, so please correct me in the comments below, but next week we get Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time to sew things up for the year. That doesn’t cover the PlayStation Network offerings we’ve seen, either. While it’s true that not every game is for everyone, and not everyone will enjoy every genre, gamers just joining the world of the PlayStation 3 have quite a few meaty games to at least try out demos for, if not buy outright.

What PS3 game haven’t you played yet that you’ve been meaning to get?

The DS didn’t exactly blow its doors off, though. The DS sold 524k, the PS3 sold 491k, the Wii sold 462k, the Xbox 360 sold 352k, and the PSP (pre-Go, remember) chugged along at 191K. In last place, limping along, is the PS2 with 142k units sold. The 360’s number is nothing to sneeze at, but it looks like that PS3 price cut showed that consumers still really did want a PlayStation 3 after all this time. Does Microsoft consider that along with having sold a full 110,000 units less than the Wii this time a problem?

September was also notable for stopping a long slide of months where game sales were down significantly from the previous year. This is no small feat, even if this month just meant staying on par with 2008. New consoles on the market could have been a big part of that and if the holidays are good to those new console owners it could very well be a very happy holiday for all three console makers after all.

Seen at Gamespot.

I found the gameplay pretty easy to follow and the weapon variety surprising. When your hero starts getting badly hurt, notice how they treat death. She’s knocked down and an arcade-like message flashes for her to “Fight For Your Life!” Apparently, by doing enough damage as she’s down, perhaps on her knees, on the verge of death, she’s given a second chance. I could just hear Mick barking at Rocky on the mat: “Get Up Rocky Gaddamn You!”

Hm, let me think, what else raised this kind of torch-and-pitchfork no-retail-competition gamer rage in the past? What was it? I’m having a hard time remembering now since everyone has since gone back to their homes and stoped raging against it since it’s considered a success. Oh yeah, it’s Steam!

Now do I wish the PSP Go had UMD support? Of course I do. Do I think the Go is a good choice for consumers? Not yet, and it probably won’t be for a while. We didn’t really see Steam start kicking off sales of games via frequent discounts of one kind or another until relatively recently, so I don’t quite know when the PlayStation Store will be something to gaze longingly at.

My guess is that Sony will wait out the fire and brimstone and put the PSP Go out in front of the digital distribution revolution that everyone thinks has “saved PC gaming”. Are they ahead of the curve? I’m sure they are, and it might be as big a risk as the PS3’s Blu-ray drive was, but this time Sony doesn’t have a high definition format to be victorious to fall back on.

What they do have to fall back on is that gamers — hardcore gamers that buy things like a PSP in the first place — are used to buying digital content. They’ve done it on their Wii, PS3, 360, a PSP, or even that other itty bitty digital distribution market you might have heard of called iTunes. So all Sony has to do is wait, push the digital content to all PSPs, not just the Go, and watch adoption rates climb.

It’s entirely possible the consumer isn’t ready for an all-digital gaming platform, but you know what, I’m going to bet that isn’t the case. People are already buying things like Warhawk and Burnout Paradise on the PS3 because they just don’t feel like getting up to put the disc in the drive and want to jump right in, so those gamers are being spoken to by the new PlayStation Store.

I just hope we more quickly get to the part of the story where we can get sale pricing from time to time as well as always be able to find older releases there. Until then I’ll deal with the little whirring disc in my PSP-2000.

Sources: image.

Fans of getting their patience sorely tested by dying frequently and/or cheaply (that wouldn’t be me) will want to check out Demon’s Souls (see our review) coming on the 6th. Fans of metal or Jack Black could do a whole lot worse than Double Fine’s Brutal Legend ringing in Rocktober on the 13th, a game that has many folks interested and will hopefully put the acclaimed studio on firm footing for this generation.

The latest and greatest Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time rolls in on the 27th to be the first Ratchet game bearing Trophies. Unlike Uncharted 2 this won’t have a multiplayer component but everything I’ve seen of the game looks excellent, with trailers hinting at a time-twisting plot that conveniently brings back vanquished foes from the series past. Speaking of oldies but goodies Afrika finally reaches North America with Trophies on the 6th, and the Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition comes in on the 13th now that the DLC for last fall’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece is available on the store.

The PSP gets a brand new bit of hardware on the 1st, that being the PSP Go. Trotting alongside the high-priced sliding form factor that brings 16GB of onboard storage, bluetooth audio and tethering, and a digital-only purchasing model to the same PSP hardware platform are about 100 games on the PlayStation Store. The handheld finally gets the Gran Turismo game that’s been hinted at forever as of the 1st as well, joining MotorStorm: Arctic Edge that landed on September 29th. Another new release is an old arcade favorite Thexder Neo, and don’t forget the PSP port of GTA Chinatown Wars coming in on the 20th as both a UMD and digital download.

It’s a huge month for PlayStation, and I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering how I’m going to pay for all of these wonderful toys.