Talk Playstation 3 News

DICE made an announcement over at the US PlayStation Blog, providing details on the exclusive beta for PS3 owners. The beta is scheduled to begin on November 19th, there will only be one map, and one mode to play on. You’ll be playing on the African Harbour map with the Rush game mode with 24 players.

For North Americans to gain access, there will be a special giveaway on the PlayStation Blog which is TBA, pre-ordering at GameStop, or gain one from giveaways on IGN or GameSpot for NA Only.

Europeans will have access to get into the beta, but nothing was announced as of yet.

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Today, SCEA announced there Ultimate Edition for God of War III. If you remember back in the beginning of the year, fans were polled on what they were most interested in seeing a collector’s edition for God of War III. With the God of War Collection being separate, this collector’s edition of the game is truly ultimate for God of War fans.

The Ultimate Edition will feature the following:

Exclusive Collectibles
• High-End Sculpted Replica of Pandora’s Box
• Limited-Edition God of War Art Book featuring exclusive art, content and interviews

Exclusive Digital Content (Available via PlayStation Network voucher codes on day of launch)
• God of War Combat Arena containing an exclusive environment and seven challenges
• Premium Kratos Skin – Dominus
• God of War: Unearthing the Legend Franchise Documentary – a full-length movie documentary depicting the history of the God of War franchise
• God of War Trilogy Soundtrack – God of War, II, and III scores from the game (mp3 digital download).
• God of War: Blood and Metal EP – a heavy metal homage featuring original music inspired by God of War (mp3 digital download).

As stated on the PlayStation Blog, that’s not all. At select retailers, you’ll also have access to the E3 God of War demo.

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Kojima, and fans of the Zone of Enders games are eager for a sequel. With a recent interview over on the EU PlayStation Blog about Peace Walker, there was talk of Zone of Enders 3.

“A lot of [people] love Zone of the Enders, and we love the title as well, especially at Kojima Productions and we always want to create one for the next gens as well,” he said.

He goes on to say that the game won’t be coming out anytime soon, due to other projects being focused on, especially with shifting of management and staffing around between projects.

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On the European PlayStation Blog, was a detailed list of Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time’s collector’s edition.

You’ll get a 3D Lenticular cover, Art Book, and a code to unlock a level within the game.

Below are the area’s available.

• UK – GAME exclusive
• France – Available everywhere
• Spain – Available everywhere
• Italy – Available everywhere
• Australia – TBC
• New Zealand – EB Games
• Belgium – Game Mania, Smartoys (CLD), PlayerOne (BEMS), Consoles Fan (Horelec), Multimedia Partner (MMS), IPG (gameshop), Supra Center, Media Markt, consoleshop.be
• Holland – Bart Smit, Intertoys, Dexcom, Rigu, Bol.com, Consoleshop.nl, Toys XL
• Norway – GameStop & Elkjøp
• Sweden – GameStop & Siba, Media Markt, CDON, Webhallen, Nextstop, Discshop
• Denmark – GameStop & Others TBC
• Finland – Available everywhere

Naughty Dog announced over at the US PlayStation Blog that the multiplayer demo for Uncharted 2 is now available for download. With the demo clocking at 1.3GB, you’ll get all the standard multiplayer features. There are 4 Competitive maps, 2 Co-op modes.

Head on over to the PlayStation Store and download it now.

In the US PlayStation Blog, Mark Valledor revealed about an all new water effects that’ll be added for LittleBigPlanet via downloadable content. No date was specified on when this pack will be released other than the near future.

Also revealed was the Create feature for the PSP version of LittleBigPlanet.

In a new Limited Edition PSP Entertainment Pack, Kristin Neirinckx, Marketing Manager for the PSP let know that on the PlayStation Blog that the new bundle will sell for $199.99.

For those of you that did not know, Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines is about Altair’s story right after the events of Assassin’s Creed as he hunts down the ascending Templars in Cyprus. It’s the only game that explains the link between Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2. And tells more about the next star, Ezio.

Ubisoft paid good attention to the Resistance franchise and made sure that there was a connectivity present between this game and the upcoming sequel to the console version. If you unlock stuff on the PSP they will also be available on the PS3 once Assassin’s Creed 2 is out. Games goes the other way around,

The pack will include the following stuff:

• White PSP-3000 system
• Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines PSP game
• UMD Movie (to be announced)
• 2GB Memory Stick PRO Duo (not much we know)

No word yet on an European price or availability.

Finally the PAL/EU region has it’s own official PlayStation Blog. And with posts starting at early as yesterday they have come prepared.

The familiar look you have on the EU Official website can be found back on the EU blog. The French, Italian, German and Spanish version of the site will be up before or around GamesCon. The EU counterpart of Jeff from the SCEA Blog seems to be Charlotte Large.

When posting, not only your PSN avatar and nick are displayed like you used to from the US Blog but also the flag of the country you live in. We hope they will implement the possibility to enter a persons online profile when clicking on their nick or avatar.

We hope this blog will be as successful as it’s SCEA counterpart or even better.

Well go and comment.

Eric Boltjes, Head of Multiplayer Design for Killzone 2, sat down with the people at the PlayStation Blog and answered some questions.

He announced Guerrilla will finally make it possible to join a friend in a game and in the same faction as well. But it comes at a cost.

The ‘Join Friend’ option has been changed so that the player can automatically join a friend’s faction and squad – even if faction balancing is on.

This might cause some trouble as clans will try to exploit this option by helping out their friends. We wonder how much the imbalance will be.
Guerilla Games has also enabled the ability to manually switch from factions if you’re in a team with more players then the other team. Switching the other way around won’t be possible. Also players who switch will hold onto their points (sound logical).

For Skirmish mode they have enabled all badges to be active so people could get use to what the different badges offer and precisely do. Many people have said this should have been available from the start to counter certain player advantages and more importantly be activated on Warzone as well. Some of the badges were also tweaked. The Assault Class for example has been made a bit weaker by dropping the Armor ability from 100 to 50 hit points.
The Tactician Badge’s secondary ability (requesting air support) has also been tweaked to make the Sentry Bot more useful. It can aim more accurately now, and its health is a little higher as well.

For the controller a new option will be added

When ‘High Precision’ is switched on, it makes the analog sticks more responsive to small movements. Turned off, the controls behave exactly as they did before the patch. It’s not a radical overhaul of the control system, so the layout and the ‘weight’ of the controls remain the same.
It’s switch it on by default for new players. Existing Killzone 2 players will have the option turned off by default after patching.

The last thing Eric Boltjes talked about was the spawn invulnerability. With custom or mission based (Capture and Hold) spawn spots you will now be vulnerable from the moment you spawn while spawning from the base spots will still give you temporary invulnerability.

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After yesterday’s Store updates, several people discovered that they could not purchase games or even worse access the Store. On the PlayStation Blog, Patrick Seybold described the incident as “experiencing difficulty accessing the PlayStation Store at this time”. One person on the European PlayStation forum claimed that he was even billed twice for a product.

But due to the hard work of the PSN engineers they managed to solve the problem before the day was over (even though something like this should never happen).

The PlayStation Store wasn’t the only one experiencing problems. Xbox Live had account managment issues.

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Jeff Rubenstein posted on the official PlayStation Blog that they want help, helping you. In other words, give your opinion and they will do their best to meet your/our demands.

The survey doesn’t consist out of questions like, are you male of female. How much do you earn. But it the likes of, Would you like to see a podcast from the PlayStation Social Media Team and would you like to see a specific regional (Europe, Asia) blog.

So head over and start filling in that survey. It’s for the future of all PlayStation owners.

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Following the latest firmware announcement for the PlayStation Portable, Eric Lempel also announced the arrival of firmware 2.60 for the PlayStation 3. In this firmware the biggest additions are guest logins onto the PlayStation store and Divx 3.11 support.

But that’s not the only thing the update will include. Also included is a new Photo Gallery application. With this SCE is really focusing on getting the media side of the console to a proper level.
Digital pictures can be organized in groups according to various criteria, including the camera used to take the photos, the event date and time, colors in the photos, as well as the number, ages, or facial expressions of the people pictured. You can also create slideshows set to music and build photo playlists with an easy-to-use interface.

To use the application you will need to install it separately from the XMB after the update, just like with PlayStation Home and Life with PlayStation.

And with this announcement the PSN ID required login has gone active but it seems it’s still having some issue. People’s original blog nickname are still being shown instead of their PSN ID. According to Eric Lempel their working on it.

We hope the firmware has more features (including the cosmetic error of the battery icon over the clock) and fixes.

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On January 6th Jeff Rubenstein announced that the official PlayStation Blog would under go chance. One of these would be to see directly if an official author has made a reply to post. And by clicking on the it, you will be brought to the first reply of this author.

The other most important feature is the implementation of the PSN login. In the near future you will be able to use you PSN ID to log onto the blog and post using your ID. So now you can more easily recognize that jerk who always shouts “first post” and shoot him down in Warhawk.

It was said that the author reply indicator would go live yesterday but it seems it has not happend. Our guess is, they will probably do it once the PSN implemention has been done.

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As this cover was already known and expected by many, TJ Consunji one of the marketing guys for Killzone 2, revealed on PlayStation Blog what box cover we can expect for one of the PlayStations 3’s biggest titles for 2009.

If you can’t get enough of the game already go over to Killzone.com to get one of the holiday themed PC wallpapers.

Are you ready for February 27th, 2009? We are.

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You read it before, but here is some more information from the Playstation Blog.

At this moment the Home servers are down (from 12 midnight PST) and the maintenance will take about 6 hours to finish.

During this maintenance, SCEE will update Home to 1.04. The update will temporarily disable the voice chat feature within Home, but your still able to use the phone feature to voice chat with your friends, while in Home.

Playstation encourages their users to make use of any keyboard or latest released Wireless Keypad for text chat.

Hopefully the heavy login problems for the people in Europe will be minimum to none after this update.

P.S If you can’t wait you can start by downloading the update now, though we don’t advise it as there might be last minute changes to the update.

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