Sony has revealed new information and video about the July 2nd, 2008 Playstation 3 2.4 Firmware Update. Years ago, if you had told me that Sony had a blog that reached out to the consumer by supplying information and videos about new features I would have laughed. If you had told me that at the end of said videos they asked for feedback I would have laughed even harder. Well, it is truly a different time now – Sony is reaching out and trying to include the community in their progress. As I watched the videos I felt that they were truly confident in their work and wanted people to comment with ideas and suggestions.
In-game XMB looks great, and one can hope that it will be introduced for video playback as well.
The trophy UI in its introduction is functional, but needs some graphical improvement. Specific information about trophies and how to accomplish them appears how it should, but just doesn’t have that Sony feel to it yet. The addition of being able to view your friends trophies is nice, as well as the leveling system. There was no mention of the maximum level nor the real purpose of leveling other than bragging rights. Perhaps if Sony gave rewards to the customer for reaching certain levels (a discount off PSNStore, expanded avatar options for example) then it would be more desireable.
The following first-party games are also slated to offer Trophy support:
- BUZZ! Quiz TV
- LittleBigPlanet
- MotorStorm Pacific Rift
- NBA 09 – PS3
- PAIN
- PixelJunk Eden
- Resistance 2
- SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation
- Warhawk
To further emphasize the community aspects of this system software update, the amount of people you can add to your PSN friends list has been doubled, to 100.
The update also adds a mini-control panel that you can use while playing music and an internet search feature powered by Google that allows you to initiate search directly from the XMB (similar to what was added to the PSP recently). In addition, when you’re using the XMB or accessing the XMB from in-game, the current time and date will be displayed in the upper right hand corner. There are a few more minor enhancements included in this update, once the update is live you’ll be able to read about them here.
