13w ago - Following up on their first promotional video teaser, today Sony Social Media Manager Sid Shuman speaks to fans on PlayStation Evolution: The Beginning in a new video below.

To quote: PlayStation's arrival to the world of gaming signaled a change in the status quo and a sign of things to come. The original PlayStation system emerged in 1994 in Japan as a dark horse challenger, a seemingly outgunned newcomer entering a crowded field dominated by legends of the 16-bit era.

PlayStation's advanced technology and innovative controller design won raves with critics and gamers, and in 1995, the system expanded to North America, Europe, and Australia.

Accompanied by a powerful salvo of titles including WipEout, Crash Bandicoot, and Gran Turismo, PlayStation's rapid rise marked the end of one era of videogames and the dawn of another. The world was never the same.





Be sure to visit our YouTube page in the coming days as we present the evolution of PlayStation and recap our greatest moments.

24w ago - Mass Effect Trilogy External Producer Ryan Warden has gone back to the beginning on bringing Mass Effect to PlayStation 3 today.

To quote: I'm Ryan Warden, the External Producer for Mass Effect Trilogy. I've been with BioWare for almost nine years now - lately I've been working to help bring you Mass Effect Trilogy for PlayStation 3, and today I'm honored to be able to write a post for PlayStation.Blog!

We began work on Mass Effect Trilogy in earnest last April, shortly after Mass Effect 3 had shipped. The trilogy was complete, but there was a slight complication - there were people who had missed out on one (or more) titles in the series. Clearly this included PS3 owners, who had never had the chance to play the original Mass Effect. Mass Effect Trilogy was a great opportunity to rectify that!

We partnered with Edge of Reality, an external team with whom we've worked on many previous projects. Edge of Reality has a deep understanding of how PS3 works, under the hood, so we thought the project would be a perfect fit.

We had a huge head start because of the work we had done with Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 for PS3, but we still wanted to maintain the look and feel - the classic experience - of the original Mass Effect.

49w ago - Today PlayStation 3 developer ThatOtherDev has made available what he calls the beginning of an untitled Pokemon PS3 homebrew game version 0.1 with details outlined below.

Download: The Beginning of an Untitled Pokemon PS3 Homebrew Game v0.1 / The Beginning of an Untitled Pokemon PS3 Homebrew Game v0.1 (Mirror)

To quote from his blog (linked above): The beginning of an untitled Pokemon game - PS3

I’m not a fan of fan games or reusing other peoples sprites or other art assets like this (especially from mainstream commercial games) but I’m also an inconsistent hypocrite. So this is what I did yesterday (and finished up today).

I went and found a complete map of the over world from the original Red/Blue Pokemon games, made a sprite sheet consisting of (nearly) all of the tiles used in it, wrote a simple program (using C++ and SDL) that matched each 16x16 section of the map to one of the tiles and saved the map as a nice small usable 2D char array of tiles, got confused when it didn’t work properly, re saved the map and the sprite sheet images with the same limited color table (why were the RGB values differing...

213w ago - Microsoft is gearing up to debut what it referred to as major improvements for Windows 8, designed to take file access in branch offices to the next level.

Even if Windows 7 is still in pre-RC stage, with the Escrow for the Win 7 Release Candidate, Build 7077, out the door, Microsoft has already confirmed that it is looking past the next iteration of Windows.

The focus on branch office scenarios related to file access simply comes to offer official confirmation that the Redmond company's strategy for Windows client and server platforms stretches well over Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, even though the two operating system releases are yet to be finalized.

"For the upcoming version of Windows, new critical features are being worked on including cluster support and support for one way replication. The core engine is also being reworked to provide dramatic performance improvements.

We will also soon be starting major improvements for Windows 8 where we will be including innovative features which will revolutionize file access in branch offices," the Redmond company revealed in a job posting (via ActiveWin).

The innovative features cooking for Windows 8 are related to the Distributed...

254w ago - Out of the ten million WoW players, less than five percent are interested or even aware of end-game content. Most players know that level 70 is the highest level that you can achieve; however, many of them don't know that level 70 is where the most interesting part of WoW begins.

Instead of gaining more experience to level, players work extremely hard to acquire better gear and items. This requires hours of dedication inside dungeons and on raids (a.k.a., much larger dungeons). Raids must be run well by leaders; otherwise, they fail.

Many people just think that end-game content takes too long to get; the end-game is just too hard, takes too much effort.

On top of that, the gear that drops comes in small amounts, meaning only a few members of the party will get anything for all the effort expended in any particular raid. Party members must show up on assigned raid times and follow organized, detailed instructions.

A single mess up from any member of the party can kill the entire group and force everyone to start over. This is just too frustrating for a lot of players, and is even frustrating for existing, hardcore players. Those existing players often call WoW more a job than a game.

Blizzard is toying with the idea of making the end-game easier through The Wrath of...