Tag: Playstation

The SEGA Virtua Stick High Grade Controller is a must buy if you’re serious about your fighting games. Originally available only in Japan, the controller is available worldwide from importer Play-Asia, so you can play with the big boys now.

In addition to Sony’s announcement of their new PlayStation Home Virtual Community for the PS3, they also showed off this cool new title called LittleBigPlanet. The game is designed to be a co-op platformer, where individuals can design their own physics-driven platform levels, then run through them with friends.

At this week’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), Sony confirmed plans for a new enhancement to the PS3’s online capabilities, simply called “Home.” The new feature will take a page out of other social networking services, enabling console users to share content and interact in new ways.

If you’ve ever tried to crack open your video game console for curiosity’s sake (or other, more devious purposes), you know how challenging it can be to find all of the right tools to get the job done without damaging your console.

A couple of years back, Immersion sued Sony for $91 million for infringing on their patents when they made their Dual Shock controllers for the PlayStation 2. The company claimed that Sony was using patented force-feedback technologies without paying royalties.

Nyko revealed their new cooling system for the Sony PlayStation 3 console this week, and all I can say is: does anyone really need this? The $25 Intercooler for PlayStation 3 features a whopping FIVE additional fans, and wraps around the back, bottom and side of your PS3, making the mammoth console just that much larger, and ruining the console’s virtually silent operation.

The guys over at Destructoid dug up this $10 beauty. It’s a cheap gaming system which looks NOTHING like Sony’s PlayStation 3, but has the audacity to package itself as a “SONY PS3.” The system actually appears to be one of those shoddy “Famiclone” systems designed to play old games from the Nintendo Entertainment System (aka “Famicom” in Japan.)

Sony has revealed that its PlayStation 3 consoles to be released in UK, Europe, Australia and other countries this Spring will no longer have the Emotion Engine chip on board. This reduces the cost to produce the console, and also will kill much of the PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility found in US and Japanese systems.

The preview footage below pretty much speaks for itself. Atari’s upcoming horror game Alone in the Dark 5 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC is looking really, really good. While the YouTube clip below doesn’t really do justice to the visuals, you can get a pretty good idea of how immersive the graphics look in this highly anticipated horror/thriller game.

The hardware geeks over at hardCOREware recently ran a battery of tests to determine which of the current generation of video game systems uses the most power. Unsurprisingly, the Nintendo Wii consumes significantly less power than the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and a typical gaming PC.

Don’t care for the clean design of the PS3’s SIXAXIS controller? Why not make it super fugly with these analog joystick covers from Japan. These oddly textured silicon caps attach to the top of the PlayStation 3’s analog sticks, supposedly protecting the thumbsticks and providing grip, all while making your controller the ugliest one on the block.

[UPDATE 2/13/07: IGN has since updated their original review, now stating that SCEA has confirmed that the title will only run in 480p. Bummer.] I was already psyched for the impending release of God of War II for the Sony PlayStation 2, but now there’s even more reason to rejoice.

While the Sony PlayStation 3 certainly hasn’t yet lived up to original expectations, there are still several million of us who did buy the console, and would like it to become part of our regular gaming regimen.

One thing sorely lacking from Sony’s SIXAXIS controller for the PS3 is the rumble sensation that’s present in pretty much all of the other major gaming systems out there. Sony claimed they left it out due because it interfered with the systems motion sensors, but conventional wisdom tells us that a legal dispute between Sony and Immersion kept the controllers rumble-free.

Since the Sony PlayStation 3 hit shelves back in November, it’s been racked with complaints about a huge bug with PS2 backwards compatibilty. Specifically, the PS3 would screw up the graphics on non-progressive scan PS2 titles (of which there are many), by creating odd artifacts on every other vertical line of images.

Rather than solving such important challenges as delivering quality games, fixing the awful PlayStation Network interface, or working out the nasty bugs in the system’s PS2 backwards compatibility, Sony has announced that they’ll be releasing an exciting new add-on for the PlayStation 3 console… drum-roll please….