Silly me. I thought it was going to be a slow week following the craziness of GDC, but this one was packed full of great PlayStation news. As you probably know, PS3 Firmware 2.70 was the highlight of the week, adding Text Chat, Friends List enhancements and more. Hopefully you’ve had the chance to download it and take the new FW for a spin, and if you have, let us know what you think. It’s your feedback that helps make the PS3 better and better.
Also this week, Insomniac Games dropped by for an hour of live Q&A Thursday afternoon for some very initial chatting about Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time and the new weapons contest.
But alas, life doesn’t completely revolve around us, and there is a ton of other great PlayStation news and coverage around the Web for you to peep on this gorgeous Sunday (68 degrees in San Francisco is a hot summer day for us). LittleBigPlanet’s community is over two million strong, inFamous gets great preview coverage, and Square Enix says Final Fantasy XIII uses nearly all of the PS3’s bulging muscle. Those and other links are below. But this ain’t one-sided, so share your links and we’ll see you tomorrow.
The PS Blog weekly reading list (Week of March 30, 2009)
- PlayStation 3 Outsells Wii In Japan For Second Month In A Row – Kotaku
- Congratulations, PlayStation! – Adweek’s March Madness
- Sweet Noby Noby Kicks Give Me Nightmares – Kotaku
- Sony: MAG “only possible on PS3,” is an “iteration of SOCOM” – VG247
- Argument: More Games Need To Have ‘Resistance: Retribution’’s Control Scheme – MTV Multiplayer
- Killzone Creators Talk ‘4-D Bullet’ Ad, PS3 Development – GameDaily
- Review: Burn Zombie Burn! – 1UP
- Tales of Vesperia Set for PS3 – IGN
- Exclusive: Top 10 Most Popular PS1 Games In PlayStation Store – Gamasutra
- LittleBigPlanet Community Nearly 2 Million Strong – Kotaku
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (PlayStation 3) – CNET
- Study: Video games may improve vision – GameSpot
- Magic Ball Soars to the Top of the PSN’s Sales Charts – IGN
- Square Enix: “Final Fantasy XIII Uses Nearly 100 Percent of PS3 Power” – Kotaku
- Home is the “perfect storm” for publishers – gamesindustry.biz
- inFamous GDC 2009 Preview is “electrifying” – GamePro
- PS3 Preview – ‘inFamous’ – WorthPlaying.com
- Resistance: Retribution Review – PC World
2.70 killed my ability to stream .avi and .xvid files over my network from my HP Media Vault (mv2120) server.
Long live PlayStation! :)
Thanks for featuring my custom Noby Noby Shoes guys, much appreciated! Got an Idea for my next pair, Inspired by an upcoming PSN games – thanks again!
yo this is my first post on here
i just have one question and that is will we see cross game chat before or on 3.00 fw
alot of people have been saying they want this and it seems to me that the people that post on this blog are afraid to ask about it and sayin they love 2.70 when thats not the case around the net ive seen countless threads on how people think sony is leaving us in the dark and how they just wanna know when we will see it
also i think if 3.00 fw is gonna have croos game chat u should just skip 2.80 and 2.90 and just release everything in 3.00fw so that way everyone is happy
feedback okay…
Backwards cuz the majority of people wants that the others things like messages chat and edit music are just extras that not all games need.
Voice chat. Its always more fun than text .
just put those two things the others can wait.
i know u guys(sony) see what microsoft is doing so why dont u just take some lessons from them to make psn better
i love my ps3 and everything that it does but i dont like to be BSed with small updates just to hold me off i am not a child so dont treat me like one just give me the good stuff
yo whats up with the jak & dexter psp & ps2
but no ps3?
why dont u make in-game music mandatory in all games i love burn zombie burn but i wanna listen to my own music
Problem with the word censor in the text chat. I can’t even type some of my friend’s names, it’s just too sensitive.
Ex: Tazz
Btw – any idea when the clock/battery life issue will be addressed when accessing the XMB? They overlap and is very very annoying when trying to check the time mid-game.
Lots of good gaming to be had on the PS3 these days. I know most of my friends are making the switch to the dark side ;).
That being said I hope you have your firmware devs working on getting cross game voice chat out to the community, and in the inter, I hope they are working on a on/off button for the profanity filter and increasing the character limit for the text chat because currently those 2 items make the feature worthless.
I think comment 12 nailed it, well except background transparency would be neat but isn’t all that necessary everything else would be awesome
Well that’s great news about Tales of Vesperia but where does that leave the US release? Freakin 2010? Come on Sony where are the RPGs?
108
It will be fixed in an update in 2nd/3rd Quarter of this year.
http://community.eu.playstation.com/playstationeu/board/message?board.id=62&message.id=1348052#M1348052
I agree with everyone else here, that when you say “feedback” is important that seems like complete BS. Sometimes I wonder if you guys sit around think of random features and throw darts to decide which ones to develop. PhotoGallery? text chat? really? I sincerely doubt feedback led you to develop those features and you need to stop giving yourselves pats on the back for updates when the vast majority of comments are negative
yes one of the gdc link about infamous says that the game is coming out on may 1 i just want to know when that game is coming out because they two diffent dates
Thank You
“Square Enix: “Final Fantasy XIII Uses Nearly 100 Percent of PS3 Power” – Kotaku”
Sure whatever Squeenix, I believe you, like I believed you when you sworn that FFXIII was staying exclusive for on the PS3 but threw with CopySoft a pile of [DELETED] on our heads during the E3 by blewing up the FFXIII exclusivity with one “kaboom”.
Sorry moderator, just had to say that….
RE: #101
2.70 trashed streaming of DIVX files over my network from a Linksys NAS200 server. This capability has worked fine for me in the year that I’ve had the PS3 (and was one of the reasons I bought it.)
This is a HUGE PROBLEM for me as I record TV shows OTA and stream them off of the NAS when I want to watch them. This has KILLED my PVR-like capability of the PS3!!!
Looks like this is not an isolated issue – if you have encountered this please speak up so Sony can fix this! http://www.trickery.net/vb/showthread.php?p=1051605
You know Chris all you are going to be hearing about is the features.Just take your time with everything so everything ca be done right.
Will there be cross-game VOICE chat in the (near) future?
@Onna76_NL, yeah I know that they are full of them selfs can’t stand the sound of their name anymore.
The 2.70 firmware update is a sick joke. In the realm of online functionality, we are light years behind MS. Playing online with friends is an exercise in futility and frustration. Voice chat could improve that, text chat is simply worthless.
2.70 renders many ps3 units unable to play games, dvd, and bluray with out going to a black screen and freezing. only useable features of the PS3 are websurfing, Chatting, mp3 and pictures, only allowing you to do everything your lap can do and nothing else, atleast my laptop can play movies and games!
Look, why not admit when you screw up?
As much as i hate them, M$ did admit RROD issues and by doing so it has at least earned some of the gaming communities trust.
My point is this, you’ve removed B/C, which was the biggest mistake you’ve made in the near 15 years of the playstation brands life, and something that MUST come back soon, you know you’ve lost alot of potential ps3 owners and probably ps4 owners over the removal, i’m not going to sugar coat this, you messed up and it may take 10 or more years for the playstation brand to recover, and just like the ps3, if the ps4 doesn’t have B/C many people won’t buy it at all, myself included, heck it may be too late for many now.
@ Chris go to the firware 2.7 update and see what features we want. Thanks for sounding interested, but we have heard that line way to many times to believe it. If you took percentage of the comments left on posting for 2.7 you would see that 80 to 90 percent of people want One thing. IN GAME AND CROSS GAME PRIVATE PARTY CHAT! Please let me know why this is not sony’s first priority.
@124 I hope you get that I ment Voice chat not star star star star text chat
Aside from the slow speeds atm, a FW request:
Chat macros to compliment the new text chat system (with spam block to stop repeating within a set amount of time).
Let the user edit and use their own predefined sentences, “need ammo” or whatever.
The text chat features was a good add-on but it has way too many flaws that make it feel unusable.
1. Censored. After paying $500 for a game system, I should be able to text what I want. And if the friend on the list don’t like what I put then they could leave or block me.
2. Text length. Way too short, breaking stuff up into smaller pieces is quite annoying, i could just send messages through the subject box on a regular message for all that.
3. Who has a keypad? When you are already in a game its a hassle to be texting. The keypad cost $50 thats entirely too high. When not in game, the voice chat feature is a lot easier to use. It makes text chat irrelevant when everyone has a mic.
Please fix the first two features of the text chat. I am guessing voice is on the way possibly at E3, huh sony?
this is what i read. http://fredbob3.blogspot.com/2009/04/with-xi-line-between-real-and-virtual.html
What I read is that release 2.70 SUCKS, and if you paid attention you would realize that people are starting to ditch the PS3 in favor of other devices. Besides the non-features that were released, PS3 now does not stream or play any longer videos off NAS servers or other computers on the network, task that used to work pretty well. The fact that you took that feature away shows that you are incompetent and don’t understand your market. Goodbye Sony, you lost a customer.