Players hoping to enjoy playing their PlayStation 3 games online on Sunday were sorely disappointed, as the PlayStation Network has experienced connection problems for many PS3 models over the day.
At around 4PM PST on Sunday, PlayStation Network users on Twitter began began to report that they were unable to connect to the online gaming service. Hours later, the problem seems to continue, to the point where Sony has begun to acknowledge the issue on its official PlayStation Blog.
According to the blog, the problem seems to only affect pre-Slim PlayStation 3 models, with PlayStation social media manager Jeff Rubenstein claiming they “have narrowed down the issue and have engineers working to restore service.”
Despite the fact that the game doesn’t have any online gameplay, many owners have reported that PSN issues have kept players from enjoying Sony’s most recent release, Heavy Rain. Any PlayStation 3 owners experiencing PSN problems today? Share your horror stories in the comment section below.
At the Arcade Operator Union Expo in Japan, Konami presented even more of the cabinet for Metal Gear Arcade, featuring a pair of goggles, a headset, and a mounted gun to operate in stealth combat with.
The sit-down unit is fitted with a pair of eyeglasses for the player to view the action through, with gun-shaped controllers to aim and attack with. The big monitor and 5.1 surround sound offer up an even more immersive environment, all the more important when you think how busy arcades are. Of course, when we say “arcades,” we mean Japanese arcades, since they don’t really exist in the U.S. any longer, and we won’t likely see this unit come stateside in a non-import capacity any time soon.
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Just a few days ago Dante’s Inferno didn’t have much more to show for itself outside of an expensive marketing campaign. But Reviews Editor Tae K. Kim found EA’s Hell-based brawler a well-structured hack-n-slash with some memorable levels, inventive enemies, and a worthwhile combat engine; it’s just too bad the story doesn’t live up to its potential.
Game design feels like one big round of “follow the leader” sometimes: when a game does something successfully, everyone else tries to put their own spin on it. Grand Theft Auto III had that effect, leading to a bevy of like-minded titles that aped the concepts that made it so great. The God of War franchise has also left its own indelible mark and it’s finally starting to show with titles like Bayonetta and Darksiders following in Kratos’ deity-sized footsteps. Dante’s Inferno is another chip off the old Grecian block but it exists somewhere in the middle of those two aforementioned titles: unlike Bayonetta, which took the formula and gave it a total glam makeover, Dante’s hews closer to the tried and true; yet, unlike Darksiders, which was a little too familiar for its own good, it actively tries to do something different.
Dante’s more or less succeeds on that latter point, at least in terms of the overall game world. The Divine Comedy might seem like an odd choice for source material, given its relatively small mass market appeal — before any of you literature lovers decide to write me angry yet elegantly worded hate mail, I’m only pointing out that it’s not something most gamers will know intimately — but Dante Aligheri’s epic poem gave the developer lots of material to work with and it actually manages to step away from Kratos’ imposing shadow. The nine circles of Hell deserve a lot of the credit for that: they’re impressively constructed and the dev team got a lot of mileage out of the unique setting.
The architecture in the Lust level, for instance, is appropriately composed of phallic structures and pulsating flesh while the Greed level shines with spilled gold, both in coin form and the molten lava in which the avaricious are constantly bathed. Unfortunately, while the environments are well done, the overall atmosphere is incredibly lacking: You are surrounded by woe but it’s all rather vague; you see disembodied souls plastered into the walls and you hear shrieks of agony, but it’s never more than ambient fluff. I expected my experience to be suffused with suffering but it’s almost an afterthought; even without reading the Divine Comedy, I’m sure Aligheri describes the horrors that he witnesses in great detail and the resulting sense of dread and foreboding is curiously absent here. The puzzle design — a definite holdover from God of War, complete with block-moving puzzles and handles you have to rotate — also doesn’t leverage each level’s theme enough; a lot more could have been done with the material but it’s mostly a rehash of the timing- and environmental-based puzzles that you’ve seen before.
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Square-Enix published a very positive financial report for the final three quarters of 2009, largely buoyed by the release of Final Fantasy XIII, as well as the company’s purchase of European developer Eidos Interactive.
In 2008, Square-Enix was creating Final Fantasy games. In 2009, they released Final Fantasy games. In 2010, they’ll release more Final Fantasy games. Those three facts are the main reasons Square-Enix reported a 50-percent increase in revenue for the last nine months of 2009 over 2008, and why the company forecasts a successful first quarter for this year.
Due in large part to the release of Final Fantasy XIII in Japan, Square-Enix reported a 48% increase in income from March to December of 2009 when compared to the same period in 2008. Eidos published Batman: Arkham Asylum during that same timeframe, which probably helped things a bit, as did the worldwide release of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. With Final Fantasy XIII and Just Cause II coming out in the US next month, the predictions for the final quarter of this fiscal year (which ends in March) are upbeat, predicting a 58% increase in revenue for the fiscal year overall over the previous one that ended last March.
A comment from the financial report pointed out Square-Enix’s methods of success. “We are pleased with the success of our Final Fantasy XIII launch in Japan” said Yoichi Wada, the President and Representative Director of Square Enix, who continued “Further, our integration activities since the acquisition of Eidos in April are progressing rapidly and allowing us to strengthen our global business framework.”
What should be interesting is seeing how the next fiscal year shapes up for Square-Enix, as the company has many relatively unestablished IPs like Nier and Supreme Commander in the works for major consoles, as well as iPhone versions of the first two Final Fantasy games.
The United States Air Force Research Laboratory has ordered 2,000 PlayStation 3s, with the intention of creating a supercomputer by harnessing the processing power of the collective group.
1UP has come across a report from the US Department of Defense-owned news source Stars and Stripes stating that the US Air Force has commissioned a supercomputer comprised of 2,000 PlayStation 3s. The $2 million project will also utilize an “off-the-shelf” graphics processor to create a supercomputer “nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today,” according to Stars and Stripes.
This isn’t the first time that a Sony video game console has been linked to a military power. About ten years ago, Sony’s PlayStation 2 was rumored to have been purchased en masse by the Iraq in order to build a supercomputer for military purposes. And you wonder why we couldn’t find “weapons of mass destruction” over there…
PlayStation 3-owning fans of the Tales series will be sad to hear that currently Namco Bandai has no plans to release the PS3 port of the 2008 Japanese role-playing game in the US. The port hit shelves in Japan last September and is about to get a combination anime/downloadable content Blu-Ray this May.
Siliconera reports today that a Tales of Vesperia anime movie called The First Strike is being bundled with downloadable content in Blu-Ray, DVD, and UMD form for a May 28 release. We asked Namco Bandai about a possible US release and were told that currently the company has no plans to bring the PlayStation 3 port stateside.
“As for First Strike, it is possible that an anime publisher in the US may pick up the license as there have been Tales anime releases in the US,” a Namco Bandai America publicist told GamePro, “but NBGA have no details regarding this issue at the moment.”
Namco Bandai previously released a PS3 port of the 2007 JRPG Eternal Sonata in the US which included new story content and playable characters. Similarly, the PS3 Tales of Vesperia features new content and a new character named Patty Fleur.
The First Strike anime serves as a prequel of the game’s story, covering the years main character Yuri Lowell spent as a knight. Siliconera warns hardcore fans who want to import the anime that “PSP/PS3 games are region free, but not Blu-ray discs or UMD movies. You’ll need a Japanese PS3 or PSP to play these.”
Lost in Nightmares, Capcom’s first of two new episodes for Resident Evil 5 takes the series back to its survival-horror roots. Along with a crazed, anchor-wielding enemy, the game takes on the look and feel of past titles of the series.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say that it felt like Resident Evil’s “pure horror” roots were ripped out of Resident Evil 5. To be fair, the game was a lot of fun and the series’ dramatic transformation into a more Gears of War-style cooperative action shooter worked for the most part. But as a fan of horror movies and Resident Evil’s survival-horror origins, I felt oddly betrayed by the game’s emphasis on explosions over suspense. When I sat down to play the first of the two new episodes coming soon for Resident Evil 5, titled Lost in Nightmares, Capcom explained that the return to horror in the episode is a direct response to fans’ reactions to RE5’s departure from the genre.
“A lot of fans thought Resident Evil 5 was too much action and not enough survival horror,” admits Capcom’s product marketing manager Matt Dahlgren. “And Lost in Nightmares (the first new episode available) is our response to that. After the original game shipped, we took a lot of fan feedback into account before creating the new episodes. There are two main ways people play Resident Evil: there’s the slow and suspenseful way, which is the more traditional Resident Evil experience, and there’s the more action-packed experience, which was featured in Resident Evil 5.”
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George Hotz — or GeoHot, if you prefer — was known as “the kid who cracked the iPhone” back when he was 17-years-old. Now, roughly three years later, he claims he’s hacked the PlayStation 3 and is linking to the exploit today.
Last week, hacker George Hotz blogged that he had hacked the PlayStation 3. He spoke with the BBC on Monday announcing his exploits — and today, he’s releasing the exploit to the public.
“In the interest of openness, I’ve decided to release the exploit,” Hotz wrote on his blog. “Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released. I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night.”
Hotz rose to prominence in 2007 when he released a hack for the iPhone. In an interview with the BBC, he said his exploits are motivated purely by curiosity. He also told the news outlet that though hacking the PS3 means users can run pirated games, he’ll have nothing to do with that aspect of hacking the PS3.
The hack gives users full access to the PS3’s memory and “therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS.”
A financial performance update reveals Ubisoft’s plans for DS development, game delays, and new games.
According to a financial performance report, Ubisoft is delaying Splinter Cell: Conviction and R.U.S.E. to April 2010 and a hazy “2010-2011″ respectively.
The also report says Ubisoft is developing new titles for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and scaling back development for Nintendo DS games. CEO Yves Guillemot revealed that the company fell short of its financial goals this year between shrinking sales in the DS and Wii casual markets and under-performing or under-selling titles like James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game.
Interestingly, the report lists the Conviction and R.U.S.E. delays as contributing factors in Ubisoft’s operating losses, suggesting that they’re not part of a financial strategy to shield the games from competition in the February release lineup. Calls to Ubisoft for comment on this matter were not immediately returned.
It’s not all bad news out of Ubisoft, however, as the report also reveals that Assassin’s Creed 2 sales topped 6 million and that the game is on-track to hit 9 million by the end of March.
Going forward, Ubisoft plans to scale back development for the DS and ramp up development on its major franchises on Xbox 360 and PS3. The report reveals that Ubisoft is already working on a new game in the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series, Driver, a fourth Raving Rabbids game and a new “episode” of Assassin’s Creed which they say will have an online multiplayer mode.
Sam is changing gears. In Conviction, he’s not hiding the shadows anymore. Now, he’s blending in with the crowd.
His daughter is dead. His status as a nonofficial cover operative for the CIA has disintegrated. And now, Sam Fisher is on the run from the NSA. Double Agent’s final “To Be Continued” message was one hell of an understatement.
Last September, Ubisoft made a widely-publicized oopsie when it posted two gigabytes of promotional material (regarding games both announced and unrevealed) on its public FTP. Double Agent hadn’t even been released, but the first hints of its sequel spread across the internet in a feverish blaze. Images of a bearded Sam Fisher, sporting long hair and civilian clothes, sparked rumor and debate overshadowed only by Double Agent’s long-awaited release the following month.
Until recently, talk of the fifth Sam Fisher game was the stuff of wonder and speculation. Now, with facts in hand, Splinter Cell: Conviction is preparing a debut under the revealing rays of the noonday sun. And we do mean revealing-Sam will be stepping into daylight this time around for what looks to be, for him, a very different take on stealth combat.
Like Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s other stealth game currently under development, Conviction will find Sam using crowds as a form of dynamically-shifting cover. In place of a ’shadow’ gauge, the game will sport a ‘danger’ gauge, serving as a visual cue to relate to the player just how much hot water they’re in at any given moment, no matter the time of day. The trick to keeping that gauge low will be to follow the ebb and flow of the crowds, moving at the same pace and in the same manner as the commoners.
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