Since there are so vere few good new about PS3 here at Kikizo i figured we need a PS3 focused thread to talk about the awesomnes of PS3, i will update this post as more news come.


Gran Turismo HD demo detailed...


Thanks to famitsu, set for download starting December 24 via PlayStation Store this brand new demo will feature the all new Eiger Nordwand course enabled for normal and reverse racing, but thats not half of it, the demo also delivers a hanful of cars to try, 10 cars to be exact, and none of this are left overs but high profile cars from brand such as Honda, Lotus and Nissan, the demo will aslo witness the long waited début of Ferrari in the Gran Turismo world.

• Suzuki Cappuccino ' 95
  
• Mazda Eunos Roadster ' 89
  
• Honda Integra Type R' 04
  
• Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IV GSR' 96
  
• Infinity G35 Coupe
  
• Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX GSR' 05
  
• Lotus Elise 111R' 04
  
• Nissan Sky Liner GT-R V Spec II ' 94
  
• Toyota Celica GT-FOUR Rally Car ' 95
  
• Ferrari 599' 06
  

Even tho the demo starts exclusively with the Cappuccino, clearing the time attack mode in a pre-set time, will unlock the next car, keep getting good scores and u will unlock a drift trial mode.

Kazunori Yamauchi -the producer of the series- also gave some very interesting details about the future of Polyphony Digital, among them...

-This GT HD demo will feature Polyphony' s next generation driving simulation engine.
-The demo won' t have online races, but will offer network rankings separated to the various cars.
-Replays from the top ranked players will be available for download.
-Polyphony wants to put both GTHD Premium and GTHD Classic into the new title.
-More downloadable content its ascheduled to come before GT5' s full release.
-An official announcement about Gran Turismo 5 will come before the next Tokyo Motor Show in 10/27/07.

Even tho this demos its " japan only" an USA/PAL version souldnt come as a surprice. Personally my only regret its that the Subaru Impreza racing car its MIA.



Resistance: Fall of Man Update now available...


And its quite stuffed, i´ve just downloaded the update and i marked the time, it takes exactly 3:47 minutes, then u have to quit the game and restart. The update its awesome, it fixed alot of problems they game had, some pretty obvious, others i didnt even knew where there, awesome stuff.

General

• Various bug fixes and formatting issues
  
• Fixed a rare issue where a player would become invisible to all other players in a match
  
• Added a barrier on Manchester, which was previously left out, to prevent players from leaving the playable area.
  
• In Human vs Human or Chimera vs Chimera team games, all players on a
  team will show up as the same model to help distinguish between the
  teams.
  

Balance and Tuning

• Chimeran rage damage multiplier has been reduced.
  
• Humans will now spawn with 1 frag grenade as well as the M5A2 Carbine
  
• Moved the location of the flag in several CTF maps to help prevent stalemating
  
• Chimera at max heat will now only lose health until they are at 50% health instead of going all the way down to 1% health.
  
• Suicide will now increase the waiting time until a player respawns by 10 seconds in team games.
  
• The L11-2 Dragon will now do extra damage to Chimeran players as was originally intended.
  
• Most weapon damage values have been tweaked in the interest of
  balance. In general, weapons have been tweaked to deal slightly less
  damage.
  
• The spawn selection algorithm has been modified to make players spawn
  next to enemies less often, and to spawn near teammates and squadmates
  more often
  
• Enemies will now show up on the Human map/radar if they are within
  radar range of ANYONE ON YOUR TEAM and only in the following
  circumstances: They are sprinting or in rage mode, they are
  firing/attacking, they are jumping, or they are within range of node
  radar (Breach)
  

Ranked Games

• All maps available for ranked games
  
• Map size determined by the number of players in the game
  
• Time limits added for all game types that were missing them
  
• Score limits for team deathmatch adjusted based on the number of players in a match
  

Character Sheet

• Wins/Losses are now displayed on the player stats.
  
• You will now receive a system message when you earn a new rank.
  
• Changed the requirements to earn some of the medals on the character sheet.
  
• A player’s rank wont be sometimes misrepresented as lower than it actually is.
  
• “Target Bomber” ribbon can now be achieved with the frag grenade as well as the hedgehog grenade
  
• “Return a Flag” ribbon now displays properly. All “Return a Flag” ribbons earned prior to this patch will be restored.
  
• “Multi Kill” ribbon will now be tracked. Unfortunately, no “Multi Kill” ribbons earned before this patch can be restored.
  
• We have replaced the Skeleton skin with a new skin, the Mechanic.
  We' ve determined that the Skeleton is much smaller and more difficult
  to see on many levels than any of the other skins. The skins were never
  meant to give a gameplay advantage, but to offer you the chance to
  customize your character as you see fit, and we don' t want people to be
  at a disadvantage because they didn' t pick any one particular skin.
  Never fear, the skeleton may make a return at some later date, in some
  form or other.
  

Lobby

• You can now accept a party invite if you are in a game and the party you are joining is in the same game.
  
• The results screen will now automatically rejoin the game after 30
  seconds instead of disconnecting from the game as it previously did.
  
• You can now create a deathmatch game with a time limit as the only end game condition.
  
• Fixed a bug where players joining a game in progress would sometimes
  be placed on the team that had more players instead of the team with
  less players.
  
• There is now an option to enabled “Map Vote” for custom games. If
  this option is enabled, players may press triangle when they are on the
  results screen to vote on what map they wish to play next. This option
  is enabled by default.
  

Voice Chat

• There is now an indicator in the lower right hand corner to let you know when you are transmitting on the microphone
  
• Voice chat is now “push-to-talk” by default in team games as
  well as free-for-all games. The standard button is L3 and it can be
  remapped. Open mic is active only for squad chat when you choose to
  join a named squad. In that case you still use the push-to-talk button
  to broadcast to your entire team. Other places where open mic is active
  are when observing in a limited lives game and when you are in a party
  

Interface

• Enemies are now represented as triangles on the radar and map.
  
• The flag taken message will stay on the screen longer in CTF games
  
• Squad members will show up as yellow dots on the map and radar (if it is enabled)
  
• Buddies on your team will show up as green dots on the map and radar (if it is enabled)
  
• Player names that are longer than 11 characters will no longer be truncated if they have a clan tag enabled.
  
• Players in a squad will now be given an additional option to spawn near their squad in CTF, Meltdown, and Breach.
  

Since we are talking about Resistance, here goes an interview whit the big man at Insomniac, Ted Price, im glad he talked about the size of the game, i guess the rubbish data rumor was bs. only copy/paste, i hope u dont mind.

GamePro: What will Ratchet and Clank fans immediately recognize in Resistance: Fall of Man?

Ted Price: The weapons, absolutely. We brought a load of exotic weapons over from Ratchet and Clank. But we needed to make them a little more deadly, a little more visceral for Resistance. We tried hard to make sure we had a complementary group of weapons that avoided having, say, five machine guns that did basically the same thing.

GP: Are there any particular weapons from Ratchet and Clank that made the transition to Resistance?

Price: Not off hand. There are some that have similar functionality. You could say that the Shock Raptor in Ratchet was the shotgun equivalent in Resistance.

[Insomniac' s marketing director, Ryan Schneider, adds more detail]: The Sapper in terms of explosive globules, it works as a comparison to the napalm mod in Ratchet: Deadlock. But the globules that shoot from the Sapper can stick to the ceiling and all over the walls. It' s a great example of a weapon you may have seen in a PS2 game and how we' re able to take the foundations of the principles and really expand it into something a little more...grand.

GP: What does the PS3' s Cell Processor give you that other CPUs don' t?

Price: Because the Cell has eight SPUs that are available to use for highly complex mathematical problems, we can take things like our physics system or our navigation system or our collision system and have the SPUs crunch on those all at the same time so that we are doing a lot of parallel processing. That means that you get a lot more done per frame.

When you get weapons like the Hail Storm, which fires a lot of bullets at once, every single one of those projectiles is doing physics calculations whenever it hits something. But there are a lot of them out there. This means that if we had devoted a couple of SPUs just to those bullets we still have three processors to burn, you have the main processor and the other SPUs, which are working on other things.

GP: In terms of these wide-scale calculations, would you be able to do this something of this scale on a PC or on another console? Or is it PS3-only?

Price: We designed this game specifically for the PS3 and it really takes advantage of the SPUs. That said, I think we are only scratching the surface of what the PS3 can do, and that' s what' s cool about this console. As teams become more and more proficient with the PS3, you' re going to see bigger and better stuff.

Another thing that' s important about designing for the PS3 is that Sony' s hardware always let you get very close to the hardware itself, and there' s not a lot of layers in-between what you are programming and the hardware. That' s what' s our programmers are used to because we' ve been working with the PS1 and PS2 for so long. As a result, we' ve been able to be very effective with the PS3 from the very beginning. We' ve designed this game for the PS3. [but] if we changed the design we could be on the Xbox 360 or PC. You could say that about any game.

GP: What' s it like programming for the Cell? What' s the learning curve like?

Price: Challenging, absolutely. We went from a single-processor paradigm to a multi-processor paradigm. For us as a company, we took some time to get it down. But from the very beginning because we knew what the Cell' s architecture was going to be like, we began to prepare for the big jump from PS2 to PS3. That said, we' re still uncovering ways to maximize potential for the PS3 and will be doing so for awhile.

GP: Speaking of giant generational leaps, does Resistance really use 22GB on a Blu-ray disc?

Price: No, it doesn' t. We actually cut back to 16GB. We have a lot of data to create those levels, those assets are so much more complex than anything we' ve been able to build in the past. All those assets take up space. You' ve got a lot more maps per character, characters that use significantly more polygons than previous characters. Ratchet had 20-30 animations per character and in Resistance we have 300-400 animations for some of our characters.

Sound has also gotten much bigger, and it' s also higher fidelity [and] in 7.1. HD video takes a lot of space as well. So the list kind of just goes on and on. Basically, as a developer, it' s great to have a storage medium like the Blu-ray because it' s room for us to continue to grow.

GP: Does Blu-ray offer an advantage to make one version of the game and then ship it around more efficiently?

Price: Yes. [The game is a] world-wide release which you can play in Japanese or Korean, any of the European languages. And why we are 16GB vs. 22GB is because we learned from out friends in Europe that we could play movies in NTSC, not PAL, and that freed up a lot of space. That' s really why we are 16GB. If we really wanted to be 22GB for marketing purposes we could have, it just would have been a little disingenuous at the end of the day.

GP: What kind of slashes would you have to do to squeeze a game like Resistance onto a standard DVD?

Price: [Laughs] We couldn' t. The game, as built, would simply not fit. We would have to take out entire levels of the game and that' s just not cool. The game doesn' t work if you don' t have all the levels. We built the gameplay around the story and removing a couple levels means the story falls apart and there' s no reason to play the game.

GP: Phil Harrison told me recently he thinks 50GB is sort of the new benchmark for PS3 games. What could possibly take up that much space?

Price: [You could] have more levels, more creatures, more skins, more variation in terms of the texture set that you' re using. A better example relevant to Resistance is, if you' ve got a lot of soldiers who talk all the time, you need to make sure you have varied dialogue in all the [international] languages, you' ve got to be recording a lot more lines than you used on the PS2 or other consoles. That takes up a ton of space. You can take up a lot of space with just sound.

GP: Is the game set at 720p only? No 1080i?

Price: Well, it' s native 720p, which is much better than 1080i. The funny thing is when you say " 1080i," people automatically assume it' s better than 720p because it' s a bigger number. But, 720p is smoother.

GP: What are your thoughts on the PS3 not including rumble in the Sixaxis controller? Does that move upset you?

Price: In Resistance, you' re getting hit a lot and firing all the time. If we were to use the rumble like we did in Ratchet, it would never stop rumbling. That' s one potential drawback. Me personally, I like the lighter controller. And I actually like the way the controller feels in terms of the way the dead zones between the sticks have been decreased. Nobody here really misses it.

GP: So you haven' t done a first-person shooter [since Disrupter, an early PS1 game]. What was it like to come back to the genre?

Price: This was a great chance for us to branch out as a company, and we saw a perfect opportunity to start a new franchise that would look attractive to the early adopters of the PS3 and beyond.

GP: Where did the inspiration come from to make a first-person shooter?

Price: Most of our inspiration comes from movies and book, not necessarily other first-person shooters. I mean, we play other first-person shooters, but we are very conscious about the need to separate ourselves from the others because it' s inevitable we' ll get compared to others.