SCEE are going to release a new bundle called the ‘Pick N Mix’ later this month, January 18th to be exact.

The bundle is a 40GB PS3 plus the choice of any two of the following games:

Ratchet and Clank: Tools Of Destruction, Formula One, L.A.I.R, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Singstar PS3 (with microphones), Motorstorm, Resistance: Fall Of Man, Folklore, Warhawk (with headset) and Genji: Days of the Blade.

All for £349.99. You’re basically saving £40 - £50 depending on the games you choose.

A good deal? The only good bit about it is the wide selection of games you can choose from. Most bundles in the past forced you to pick from a crap selection of games or left with no choice at all.

I had a look around a couple of online retailers and Play.com is selling the 40GB PS3 for £289.99 and SEGA Rally for £17.99. You can also get Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune both for £34.99 each.

Amazon.co.uk are selling the 40GB PS3 for £279.99 no extras, Ratchet & Clank for £34.98 and Uncharted for £34.98.

The only advantage to the ‘new’ bundle is the wider range of games to choose from.

I still think it’s a mistake to stop selling the 60GB PS3 and removing backwards compatibility from the 40GB PS3 but what do I know.

New PS3 Bundle on it’s way

I’ve been taking a look at games that are coming out soon for the PS3, and I say that things look bleaker than nuclear fallout. The end of last year brought several good games for me to play, but this year is looking boring. The only bright spots (I hope) are Killzone 2 and LittleBigPlanet. But we haven’t heard anything about Killzone 2 in a while, and LittleBigPlanet’s been pushed to September. Home is far out too.

I know that this is because of my particular taste in games, but what can I say? So I’m here to ask about your PS3 gaming future. How does the first half of 2008 look to you?

* Awesome. Lots of great games are coming.
* Alright. I’ll be picking up a couple.
* Terrible wasteland.

Vote in the sidebar as always.

Previous poll results:

How’s the PS3 doing?

* Awesome.: 35% (201)
* Very good.: 30% (168)
* Alright.: 22% (128)
* Not so good.: 8% (43)
* Terrible.: 5% (29)

Summary

Subjectively speaking, this is the best multiplayer experience on the PS3. I’ve played multiplayer in CoD4, Battlefield 2 (PC), Team Fortress (PC), Counter-Strike (PC), R6:V, Warhawk, and Resistance, and this is easily my favorite.

If you don’t like FPS games, this definitely won’t change your mind. If you are into realistic military settings, the UT3’s generic sci-fi setting can be a turn-off. This game completely lacks a regular campaign. Also, I don’t play vanilla deathmatch, so I can’t comment on that.

However, if you like strategic multiplayer shooters (modes like capture the flag), I can’t recommend this enough. The action is fast, the strategy is perfect, and overall it’s the most balanced, tuned, and perfected multiplayer shooter on the PS3.

Pros

- Keyboard/Mouse Control. The keyboard/mouse supports works flawlessly. Anyone who is used to PC shooters will feel right at home. The PS3 sixaxis works really well too. Game hosts can choose to allow mouse users or not (mouse users have a slight advantage). Navigating all the UT3 menus works great via keyboard as well, so you don’t need to switch back to the controller.
- Vehicles. There is a wide variety of vehicles and they are all very fun to pilot and they are well balanced and integrated into the game. Some of the bigger vehicles require your team to capture and hold a control node for 60 seconds before the vehicle is available which is a nice touch.
- Hover board. The hover-board looked kind of corny in the previews, but in the game, it works really well.
- “Warfare”. This is a team-objective game mode of UT3 (there is also a more traditional capture the flag mode). Without getting into the details, it’s very well designed and implemented; it’s a huge amount of fun.
- Bots. The bots do an excellent job of simulating human opponents. Even playing an offline bot-match is tons of fun.
- User-Created Content. So far, I only tried one mod (some camera mod) which was pretty lame, but I’m excited to see completely custom levels in the future. I’m hoping to see a fraction of the creativity and diversity that was around back in the Doom/Marathon days.
- Polish! I’ve complained there being a lack of new genres in 2007. The advantage of developers staying in the same genre, is that they are able to tune their games, and gamers are able to get such highly polished experiences like this one. When you play this game, all the little details of the game feel right.

Cons

- Overcrowded Genre. As much as I love this game, this is an extremely crowded and generic genre.
- Art styling is bland.
- Techno music is really bland.
- Graphics lack visual dazzle. Technically, the graphics are great. The screenshots look technically excellent and the frame rate is good. But based on the reputation that the developers have from “Gears of War” I was expecting mind blowing eye candy, and UT3 really doesn’t do that. This game excels at gameplay and polish and customization, but not at flash.
- The “thick” look. All player models have necks the size of tree trunks. I think this looks obnoxious. However, this is really only noticeable in cut scenes. During the actual game, the player models look fairly generic, so it’s a very minor nitpick.
- Campaign. There is a single-player campaign, which is basically a linear sequence of bot matches with some atrocious narrative in between. The campaign is really just a practice mode and warm-up for the online play. But even so, they could have done better. The campaign mode should be have emulated that of a sports game or a turn-based strategy game rather than the linear narrative-driven modes of other shooters. Rather than one single “campaign” sequence of pre-configured bot-matches, they should have set up dozens of selectable replayable bot-match campaigns or use a sports-like season structure.

Here’s a little video trying to show off some of the upcoming BD-Live functionality. Unfortunately, it’s not much. But it’s all we have right now.

I’ve been playing around with DivX, MediaLink, and TVersity lately, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts. I thought it would be cool to take a home video DVD I created and turn it into a DivX that I could store on my NAS and view on my PS3. Note that I’m doing all the ripping and DVD encoding on a Mac, while the media is being served by a Mac (MediaLink) and a PC (TVersity). I used ffmpegX on the Mac, and ffmpeg is also available on the PC, so lots of this applies to PC users too.

DVD Ripping

I started with this article on transcoding a DVD to DivX. I found that the suggested ripper, DVDBackup, is crap. So I removed it and after a web search decided on MacTheRipper. It’s much better. It gives you the option of ripping only the main title, which is cool. Just follow the directions on the website, and you’re golden. This will create a VIDEO_TS folder on your Mac.

DivX Encoding

Next up is ffmegX. Download and install according to the instructions. Note that you have to make sure that the path you install to contains no spaces. So I needed to remove the space from my hard drive’s name, which by default is “Macintosh HD”. Also, the paths you choose to source the DVD from (the VIDEO_TS folder) and rip the movie to both must contain no spaces anywhere (or other strange characters). This messed me up at first.

Now it’s time for the DivX encoding: run ffmpegX. Drag and drop your VIDEO_TS folder to the left side (or choose it with the button on the top left). Then choose the filename to rip to in the second text area near the top. (Here’s the DivX ripping article I had as reference.)

DivX Options.

Go to the audio tab and on the right choose the disc’s 5.1 surround track, if you’re lucky enough to have had one on your DVD. On the left, choose 5.1 sound (default is stereo). Under audio codec, choose AAC. Next, under the filter tab, click on Autocrop. This will bring up a new window showing the movie. Just close the window. At this point I usually get an error. I just ignore it and keep going. Under the video tab, I set the size of the file to 1800MB, and then click on the nearby button that calculates the video bitrate. Next up, go to the options tab (I think…), and choose the “high quality” and “2 pass” checkboxes. Without these, I found that the video quality was pretty poor.

Now you can start the encode. On my first gen MacBook, this will take an hour or two.

Playing Back your DivX

You can just copy your new video file to your PS3, but I don’t want to do that. I want to serve it from my NAS. Unfortunately, my NAS doesn’t have any media serving software that’s decent, so I have to run something on my Mac or PC to serve the PS3 from the NAS. I was surprised that this works so well. After all, the video is coming from my NAS to my PC to my PS3 over my home network. But it works like a charm.

Last night I tried the new MediaLink by NullRiver Software. It worked somewhat well. I liked the interface. But it didn’t recognize the AAC’s I had in a folder, which TVersity saw and played just fine. As well, MediaLink didn’t support as many video formats as TVersity. So I uninstalled MediaLink on my Mac, and continued to use TVersity on my PC. It’s important to check the “transcode only when necessary” button in the options. I also set it up to show my media files only in their folder structure. That makes it a lot easier to find what I want, because my folder structure is pretty intuitive.

And that’s it! My test DVD looked great when served by TVersity to my PS3, and I had 5.1 surround sound. I’d like to hear your thoughts.

According to C&VG, LittleBigPlanet won’t be out until the Autumn:

Sony has confirmed with us this morning that LittleBigPlanet will be out in September.

An autumn release date for the quirky PS3 game was hinted at yesterday, when producer Kyle Shubel spoke about the 2008 timeline for the title in a demonstration at CES in Las Vegas.

A LittleBigPlanet demo was expected toward the end of 2007 but failed to materialise. A rep from Sony UK had no further news on a release date for the demo at this time.

More LBP Videos from CES 08

LittleBigPlanet not out until Septmember

Here are some examples of BD Live can do. The PS3 will have this updated in a firmware upgrade. Finally discs will start including a portable copy encoded for play on the PSP! The AVP game sounds fun too.

Lionsgate

Lionsgate announced today their new MOLOG, or, Movie Blog BD Live feature. This interactive feature allows a viewer to participate in online discussions regarding Lionsgate titles. This online discussion community will be accessable from a BD Live player and blogging can be done while the film is being viewed. Viewers can also access MOLOG from any web browser. Lionsgate’s BD release of Saw 4 will debut this feature next month.

Sony Pictures

Sony Pictures today showcased upcoming Blu-ray interactive features for their titles. One feature will allow viewers to send a ring tone to their phone from the movie. Additionally, PSP owners will be happy to hear that a portable copy will be available on the disc encoded specifically for the PSP. Also shown was a Men In Black network trivia game. More later.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=828

Don Eklund from Sony Pictures revealed that Sony Pictures will make available for download via BD-Live extra content. The example shown was a video from actor Will Smith regarding his film ‘Hancock’ with a sneak peak of the film specifically for CES. He did mention that he is a fan of Blu-ray.

Fox

Fox plans on aggressively jumping into the market with advanved BD Live functionality featuring networked gaming and social networking. Fox is demonstrating a working Alien Vs. Predator networked game that allows players compete for the highest kill numbers. More to come…