
The first of the PS3’s ‘platinum’ range is launching in the UK on Friday. The RRP for those games are £19.99 but there are a few places (Play.com) that are selling for less (£14.99). Some of the best games on the PS3 available for a discount price. But, there are two downsides well at least for me there is.
- The Boxes – The ‘platinum’ boxes are terrible. They’re all silver, yellow and tacky looking, not good. The ‘greatest hits’ boxes in the US look so much better. They’re just like the originals but have a nice red box.
- The drop in price – For me, not good. The price drop means that after Friday (and more than likely before) I won’t get anything for those games when trading them in. Damn!
Anyway it’s cool that Sony are looking after it’s customers.
I’ve got the full list of titles right here (or at least some of ‘em):
- Resistance: Fall Of Man
- Uncharted: Drakes Fortune
- Assasins Creed
- Ratchet & Clank: Tools Of Destruction
- MotorStorm
- Heavenly Sword
I’m surprised that not all of the ‘Greatest Hits’ games from the US have made their way to Europe. I at least WarHawk would’ve been in there.

Kaz Hirai has said that the PS3 has the best exclusives out the three consoles. Kaz says that the software out of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios is “unrivaled”. Mr. Hirai said “Our first-party product is obviously platform exclusive and is the best out there,”. Kaz obviously took the time to namecheck games like LBP and Resistance 2 as well as emphasising the power of blu-ray.
Nice to see that not all execs like to make asses out of themselves *cough* Miyamoto *cough*.
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Capcom, PS3, PSN, XBLA, Xbox 360?

The highly anticipated PSN and XBLA game Bionic Commando Rearmed has been officially dated for North America. Capcom has announced that the game will be arriving on your system of choice on August 13th for a price of $10 (800 MS Points). Very good news indeed. I hope it has trophies.
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: BIAHH Collectors Edition, Brothers In Arms: Hells Highway, FPS, PS3, Ubisoft, WWII, Xbox 360?

Ubisoft’s Brothers In Arms: Hells Highway hasn’t had the easiest road to release but it was announced that it was coming in August and now the game has slipped one month to September. Not too bad I guess but it does allow me to pick it up now without sacrificing anything in August (it’s supposed to one game a month for me).
It has been revealed that there will be a collectors edition for the game (above). This is currently only announced for American release but it’d be cool if it came out here. For an extra $10 you get a US Airbourne figurine thing, a comic book and a map of the upper Rhine. Is all of that really needed, especially the map.
Nice though.

Well it was announced at Comic Con that The Joker (along with the Green Lantern and some new additions to the MK side) would be making their way into Midway’s MK Vs. DC fighter.
Well now it’s been revealed. The image above shows how The Joker will look in the game. Hey he looks pretty cool, but more like he does in the comics and cartoons. It’d be nice if he looked more like the Heath Ledger/Dark Knight Joker. An unlockable costume perhaps? Probably not.
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: LBP, LittleBigPlanet, Media Molecule, PS3, SackBoy, Sony

Now I, like many others, can’t wait for LittleBigPlanet. Now of course because of the nature of the game there can’t be any spoilers so I really like it when new info turns up, especially stuff like this. The Kotaku guys have had a hands on with the game at Comic Con and have listed a number of things that sound really cool. Of course some of this is written in 1st person by Brian Ashcraft and not me, just to make that clear.
Character Customization
• There is a Tron suit you can wear in the game, along with a killzone helmet and mask.
• Not only that, but there are about 25 different materials and designs that you can choose to have your sackboy made out of, including 3 types of camo.
• There are held items that you can choose from, such as a wooden sword and a magic wand (a stick with a star on the top). You can’t use them as weapons, but when you slap while holding an item you hit them with said item.
Level Editor
• For those of you that don’t know, you can switch back and forth between flying and running around by pressing *down* on the d-pad.
• When everyone has a menu open, the menus auto-adjust to the top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right corners to keep the screen clear.
• LBP comes with a nice 10 premade vehicles or so(I drove a lowrider!), but as with everything else you can edit them as you like.
• Logs burn. You can make a log, or anything out of wood, really, and set it on fire. We made a floor full of burning logs and then we drove a monster truck over them.
• There are “triggers” that you can place to have events happen right when you want them to. For example, you can make it so halfway through swinging on a rope across a gap, the rope snaps and you fall down to another area.
• Anything you can think of, you can make. Just be careful when making a “Sonic” level or a “Mario” level, because that won’t fly on the servers. Name it something generic that won’t warrant deletion.
• If you want to make carpet, you can. All you have to do is take a picture of some carpet, apply the sticker to something thin and soft(sponge, for example), and save the item.
• If you made a kickass vehicle, you can make that vehicle collectible through your level. For example, you could reward players who made it past a particularly difficult portion of your level with a buggy you made, which they could use at any time throughout making their levels. This applies to items, such as carpet, as well.
• The size of your crater on the moon corresponds directly with the amount of items you can place on a level. This way you can have a minigame taking up a small crater, while a full, hour long level would take up one of the largest craters.
The Construction Yard
• This is the level I got a chance to play three times.
• Eric (the producer) was really stressing the term “Coopetition”, which is cooperating so you can compete for the collectible items and points. For example, there was a lever that would slide a girder across a gap. It requires two people(at least) to complete. One would move the girder across using a lever, the other would grab the chunk of sponge at the other side, which the first player would now bring back with the same lever. That sponge was required to reach a certain height, so you could collect more goodies. In my case, I stood on the sponge with a friend while another guy dragged it across, and right before we got there I slapped my friend off so I could have the stuff to myself. That, essentially, is coopetition.
• The developers love to hide goodies that you have to find later. I didn’t notice all the stuff I could eventually collect until the third playthrough. If you’ve ever played Portal, and you know that usually there is more than one way to beat a level, the same applies here. The more difficult task you accomplish, the more collectibles they reward you with.
• At any point, you can bring up a sticker which is basically a live image recorded from your PS Eye. When you stick the image on a surface, it takes a picture at that moment, so you can tack yourself onto the walls in a level(or whatever else you feel like doing).
Emoting
• Emoting is awesome. Using the d-pad, you can select three different degrees of sadness, anger, happiness, and fear. For example, you press up to smile, press it again to smile big, and press it again to be ecstatic with your tongue hanging out.
• If you hold R2, the right stick becomes a controller for your right hand. The same goes for L2, the left stick, and the left hand.
• The sixaxis controls which direction your head is facing, and it was surprisingly intuitive.
• If you click and hold L3, the sixaxis controls your hips instead of your head.
• Using a combination of these, I made my guy do a pretty kickass hula dance. I forced him to do it, though, so he was pretty scared at the time.
Sounds really cool, doesn’t it? Can’t wait!
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: Prince Of Peria, PS3, PSN, Puzzle Quest, Sony

Whoot! Two more games are wheeling their way onto the PlayStation Store. ‘Prince Of Persia Classic’ has been rated by the ESRB so it should be coming soon. A Bionic Commando: Rearmed-esqe remake would definitely make that a must have PSN title but it’s more likely to be a port of the Xbox Live version.
Next up it also looks like the extremely addictive Bejewled/RPG game Puzzle Quest will also be hitting the PSN in the near future. It’s been a big success on the PSP, DS and on Xbox Live. I can’t see it doing too bad on PSN either. I’m glad I held off buying the PSP version now.
I’ll try and get more news on these ASAP.
Filed under: Gaming News | Tags: Firmware 2.42, Life With PlayStation, PS3, Sony

It was announced to be coming this month and it’s apparently going to be right on time. ‘Life With PlayStation’ could potentially be released via a small firmware update (most probably) or perhaps on the various PS Stores allowing users to choose to download the service or not. I think the latter would go down much better.
Sony’s equivalent ripping off of the Wii channels hopefully will be some use. I will download it if it’s optional but it is more likely to come in the form of Firmware 2.42.
Well at least it’s content. I hope the damn thing dosen’t make Sony sacrifice real content on any of the stores.
Thursday it is then.

According to various places Buzz! is getting it’s own themed room in Home. It sounds like a great idea to me but at the moment it’s only a ‘concept’. I really can’t see why Sony wouldn’t do this and it’ll hopefully flesh out the service a little more. It seems to be a pretty smart move and one that SCEE seems to be backing.
SCEE requested concepts of the Home room for the game and obviously were asking what itd bring to the service and now that the images are out in the wild I can show ya.

The designer did say that the design was simple and it only took five weeks to make the area itself. This home room will apparently allow users to play Buzz! without actually owning the game. I’m expecting it to be a scaled down version if it’s free. The good news is that everyone seems to like it too and it will be online internally very soon.
Cool. It looks like Home’s shaping up to be more than a PS3 version of Second Life. I hope this kind of stuff continues for both 1st and 3rd party games.

Another rumor circling around the interwebs today was that the upcoming Ghostbusters game had been cancelled. Well it hasn’t. Activision have been picking and choosing which games they wanted to publish from Sierra’s list and it seems like the sort of dead certs like Crash Bandicoot were in but Ghostbusters wasn’t. Basically the Ghostbusters game is not cancelled it just dosen’t have a publisher. A spokesperson from Vivendi has come out and said “The game is not cancelled, and will not be cancelled”.
Good news then. I think it might be worth putting money on EA snapping this one up.
As always i’ll try and keep you updated with new info as I get it.