Ever thought to yourself, I wish the PS3 would shut itself down after it completes a work unit. Well now you can. With Folding@Home 2.1 will come a few new features. You can choose to automatically shut down your PS3 after a work unit completes and uploads the results to Stanford University. Or you can choose to have it shut down after so many hours. Pretty handy.

This holiday season you can now play music while running Folding@Home. Now you can entertain your guests and tell them your helping cure cancer at the same time.

Good to see more PS3 games and application taking advantage of using customisable soundtracks.

New Folding@Home Features Coming

[Update]

It’s now available, just run Folding@Home and you’ll be prompted to upgrade

Like ehandlr pointed out in the chat box. You can play any PS1 game downloaded or disc via remote play. Man what a stealth update! You just need to install the 2.10 Firmware on the PS3 and the 3.80 firmware on the PSP and your set.

I gotta try this out tonight. MGS & FF7 hear I come

** The Unofficial PS3/PSP Remote Play Thread **

Metal Gear Solid 4 & Metal Gear Online (MGO) will be one game. MGO will be integrated into MGS4. Online will support 16 players in the following modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Team Sneak. You can customize your character with up to three skills from a large selection. A couple examples are “Marathon” which allows you to run faster or longer (not sure), and “Narc” which reveals the location of the enemy trying to kill you. They’ll be over 100 different weapons you can use online.

The magazine includes a 2008 PlayStation calendar, nice too. There are some tips to creating custom classes in Call of Duty 4 as well.

But the biggest surprise is the photo below!

MetalProxy noticed that my Kanji Theme was in the latest issue of the Official PlayStation Magazine, Jan. 2008 with MSG4 on the front! I’m on page 11 in the bottom right. Here is a scan of it, click on the image for the full version.

The rumors were right. PS3 firmware 2.1 is released. Features:

• Blu-Ray 1.1 Support. This supports Picture-in-Picture and other enhancements
• Support for DivX and VC-1 WMV movies.
• Voice changer

From the comments:

(Sporty) Videos now properly show thumbnails.
(alisound) Xvid/.avi works. Older .wmv files don’t.

This movie can’t be released soon enough! In this “Complete” edition, characters get bloody, clothes will get ripped, and even get dirty. There is some new footage never before seen as well Coming 2008. Hopefully in January … the wait is killing me.

Last Friday at work we had our Information Systems department LAN party (the image above is the department Christmas card I made). We had three PS3’s, and one 360, all running on projectors. Sadly they are all 480i projectors, but it was still fun. After I had the PS3’s set up, I tried to get them all connected so we could have a massive Warhawk battle. I was kind of bummed that the Omega Dawn booster pack wasn’t out in time for the LAN party though.

We have a huge Ethernet hub at work. So we connected all the PS3’s up to that, but the weird thing was the PS3’s couldn’t see each other. The PS3 basically said, I need the internet, where is it? Luckily I remembered that in the office next to us, they had wireless. So I tried that and it worked, and we got all the PS3’s to connect to each other that way. But I think it’s pretty stupid that you “need” the internet just to play a LAN game … at least with Warhawk you do.

Anyway, once we had them all connected it went very smoothly. At one point we had all the PS3’s running Warhawk. We only had 7 people playing Warhawk at once, but it was possible to have a total of 12 people on three PS3’s. We had enough controllers, but not enough people. I like how you can jump in and out of Warhawk on the fly. Great feature, wish more games used it.

But the big hit of the night was surprisingly PAIN! I loaded that up on my PS3 and had a few people try the multiplayer on it. There was 3 modes: Horse, Bowling and a mode where you see how many explosive boxes you can hit. They played that for a couple hours, constantly laughing. It was a great party game! A couple people said they would buy a PS3 just for PAIN, lol.

I tried Rainbow Six Vegas & Call of Duty 4 via LAN. And you can only have one person per screen, which got old quick. But we jumped online with CoD4 and invited the other PS3’s into our party, that was fun! After a while I tried out Rock Band on the 360. I’ve never tried those games before, took some getting used to of course, but very fun. I used to play DDR a lot so the concept was similar. So I picked up on it pretty quick. A couple times in the night the 360 had trouble reading the rock band DVD, had to reset the 360 and clean it off to continue. I’ve never had that issue with the Blu-ray discs, which I like

Through out the night people tried various demos and PSN games. We started at 5:30 and went until 11:30. It was a fun night.

Apparently, a PS3 Firmware 2.1 page was reportedly spotted (thanks ehandlr) on the official Spanish PS3 site. Since then, the page has been pulled. However, the included feature list and “voice changer” screenshot seem legitimate.

Features:

• Voice Changer
• DivX + VC-1 WMV support added
• Blu-Ray 1.1 Support

Is this real? When should we see this?

Another great week of Blu-ray titles. I know a lot of people have been waiting for Blade Runner. The Simpsons Movie is a must buy for me This month alone I’ve bought 5 Blu-ray movies. Anyway, what will you buy this week to support the Blu-ray cause?

Amazon is having another great Blu-ray sale (thanks for the heads up Gary), check it out: Bluray Buy One Get One Free

* Blade Runner: Complete Collector’s Edition (Warner Bros.)
* The Simpsons Movie (20th Century Fox)
* Blade Runner: Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner Bros.)
* Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Warner Bros.)
* Shakira: Oral Fixation Tour (Sony Music)
* Underdog (Disney / Buena Vista)
* That’s Entertainment: The Complete Collection (Warner Bros.)

Next week we only have two Blu-ray movies.

* Rush Hour 3 (New Line Cinema)
* Pan’s Labyrinth (New Line Cinema)

Blu-ray.com

I’m a little late with this due to exams and assessments, but you can download the excellent D+Pad Issue 4, in either PDF or ZIP form.

Of interest to PS3 owners are:

Interview with Naughty Dog

Lair review

Nice work Graham!

Here’s a nice video that shows some of the great games my clan mates and I have been playing throughout 2007. Not all of the games that we played are showcased but I hope you enjoy it. The video handy work is down to Samus. Great stuff!

It’s been a great year for the PS3 and we’re all looking forward to what should be an incredible 2008.

Look out for PS3Blog.net’s end of year round table aswell, coming soon. It should make some interesting reading.

PS3 2007 with the YV clan