“You there, boy! What day is this,” asked the crotchety, excitable old games journalist. “Today? Why, ’tis Christmas Day, sir,” replied a plucky young street urchin by the name of Hideo Kojima. While it might not actually be a brisk, presents-opening morn in December, it sure feels that way, after Kojima Productions seemingly confirmed Metal Gear Solid 5 through a job listing last night.
So that’s it. The PS Vita is now on sale in the UK. Some people had been queueing since Sunday to ensure their place at the front. In the end Zohaib Ali was customer number one (that’s him up there). He snagged a Vita as well as a massive home cinema set up, a stack of games and a few other goodies for his patience.
[Update: Hideo Kojima's now hiring for his next project saying 'Big Boss wants you! The "next" MGS'. I guess that's what he meant when he begrudgingly admitted of Metal Gear Solid 5, "We'll have to make it".]
Whatever Hideo Kojima’s next game is, it seems to involve bikini soldiers. He’s been tweeting a series of pictures mentioning “experimenting” with 3D capture. Presumably it’s something to do with his new FOX Engine and the mystery Project OGRE. The technology tests also seem to involve a girl in a bikini because everyone knows it’s the only way to test full body scans.
As February’s bitter reign draws to an end, not only do you get to walk outside without having your face sandblasted off by freezing wind, you get a brand new issue of Official PlayStation Magazine, too! So it was worth surviving the winter for another year, after all. Since the new issue’s in shops now, let’s take a peek inside it.
The EU Blog have published a list of everything heading to the PSN for the PS Vita’s imminent launch. As well as free games there’s a wide range of pricing, from a fiver up to £34.99 for Uncharted. There’s also network passes, demos and a range of DLC. Network passes aside (honestly, who likes them?) It’s a pretty good Store debut all in all.
We had an exclusive chat with Lumines: Electronic Symphony producer James Mielke recently to chat about the upcoming PS Vita launch title and its various improvements, as well as how to develop for a brand new platform and how to choose a block-rocking soundtrack.
Hitman: Absolution director Tore Blystad talks about evolving the series while staying true to it’s roots; IO adapting to be a multigame studio and how they’re taking hints on making “complex games” from Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix Montreal. It’s a really interesting interview with loads on both the creative process and the new gameplay mechanics. A must read for any Hitman fan.
Guy Longworth, the SVP of PlayStation brand marketing has outed a release date for Call of Duty on the PS Vita in a recent interview saying, “For my boys who are 14 and 15, they love the first first person shooters so they’re really enjoying Unit 13 right now. And of course, in the Autumn, they’re really looking forward to Call of Duty on Vita”. If he let it slip by accident he’s the boss so he’ll have to tell himself off. When asked if he knew what flavour of COD it might be he replied “Not yet we’re still working on that”.
A report by Digital Foundry at Eurogamer has found that upgrading your PS3 to a SSD drive can improve performance, but only for certain games. What’s an SSD? Well it stands for solid state disk. Instead of a hard drive using a big metal bit that has to spin and be read using a moving arm, an SSD drive uses flash RAM. That means near instant memory recall of whatever you stick on there.
Improvements included loss of the texture pop up in Rage and cleared Skyrim lag issues. True, Rimlag seems to have been sorted with the latest Skyrim PS3 1.4 update but Digital Foundry were running pre-patched games and noticed significant improvements with an SSD drive.
EU Blog
Uncharted: Golden Abyss Opens The Black Market – To make it a little easier to collect all the Bounties, we created The Black Market.
Jak And Daxter Trilogy Retrospective With Naughty Dog – Check out this a video highlighting some of the favorite memories, trials and tribulations while working on the franchise!
Far Cry 3: A Look Behind the Scenes of a Mo-Cap Studio – Every mo-cap scene in an Ubisoft game starts on a small stage, 15 by 8 metres long, 4 metre high and with room for six to eight actors and 60(!) cameras.
A Re-Introduction To The World Of Binary Domain – The narrative focus of the game is thus: the world is a much different place in the year 2080!
Sleeping Dogs Mission Walkthrough – Here’s your undercover mission…
Official PlayStation Magazine UK
Skyrim director Todd Howard admits Bethesda knew about Skyrim’s PS3 lag problems.
Here are five PlayStation games that deserve a kickstart funded sequel
Here’s a ton of new Resident Evil 5 info and screens.
Want to find out more about the PS Vita Rooms? Here’s shots from the launch party.
Find out all about the latest open world crime shooter with this Sleeping Dogs PS3 video preview.
UK.PlayStation.com
Weekend Essentials 113 - Step inside the Octagon on PS3 this weekend, download the Mass Effect 3 demo from PlayStation Store and prepare for the coming of PlayStation Vita.
Put your questions to Shuhei Yoshida, president of SCE Worldwide Studios and win a copy of MotorStorm RC.
(This item is for the following locales only: UK, FR, DE, ES and NL)
First look: Far Cry 3 – Discover why choice is your key to surviving trouble in paradise on PlayStation 3.
Top Tips: The Darkness 2 - Master the darkness and battle the Brotherhood in style with these enlightening tips from Digital Extremes lead designer, Tom Galt.
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