Three Speech is happy to announce another night of competition and exclusives at PlayStation’s 3Rooms venue in east London on September 5 from 7pm-10pm.

The night will consist of a Warhawk competition with prizes for the winners, plus some new sneak peaks at forthcoming PS3 titles such as Ratchet & Clank, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune and Heavenly Sword.

Afraid we can’t lay on free transport or accommodation this time but there will be free drinks to oil those fingers. Get an email over if you are interested in coming with ‘3Rooms Event’‚ as the subject. First 50 through the inbox get the invites.

blog@threespeech.com

Well, we’ve asked and this is what we’ve been told…

“SingStar for the PS3 is on its way. As soon as its release date is confirmed, you’ll read it here first.”

We reckon it’ll be out sometime in October.

Some confirmed/almost confirmed release dates for you…

Warhawk They’re “aiming for” for August 28 on the PSN, at what we think is a very decent price of £19.99. The retail version, bundled with a Jabra bluetooth headset, is due September 21 at £39.99.

Heavenly Sword is due September 14.

Folklore - TBC, but the plan is October 12.

Lair - Also TBC, but the plan is October 26.

Hope to be back with more news before the day’s out.

We’ve been on to SCEUK to try and get some idea of what’s going on with PSN updates, and when the content should start to flow more freely. We can’t promise when exactly, but they assure us they will get back to us with a roadmap of sorts of how the PSN will develop. So, more news when we get it…

PlayStation again shows off its enduring connections with art and culture at the newly launched [PlayStation Season] site.

It presents content gathered from PlayStation’s recent sponsorship of the Manchester International Festival, including the exploits of various ‘new creative’ teams, who developed their own projects based on how the festival inspired them. Elsewhere, there’s some very neat video content, such as stuff on Gorillaz’ Monkey musical, VJ action with Industrial Resolution and, under the banner of the Perverted By Language event, some mad/inspired animations based on Fall tracks; including one by digital fave [Joel Veitch] that’s well worth viewing.

In a press release issued by Epic Games and Gamespy today, it was announced that the Gamespy multiplayer and community technology will be incorporated in the PC and PlayStation 3 versions of the Unreal Engine 3. According to the press release, this will enable cross platform play (between PS3 and PC), communication tools and competition applications as well as the ability to store statistics enabling online player profiles. Here’s a snippet from the (very long) press release…

“By incorporating GameSpy’s online technology into Unreal Engine 3, the two companies have created an integrated one-stop solution for game developers looking to leverage the world’s most advanced multi-player technology and game engine in one package. The partnership will span both the PC and PLAYSTATION®3 platforms within Unreal Engine 3, enabling seamless PLAYSTATION®3 and PC online functionality. Functionality available to Unreal
Engine 3 licensees via Gamespy will include cross-platform gameplay, communication tools and competition applications.”

It has not been announced whether the cross platform play will be enabled on Epic’s upcoming Unreal Tournament 3 – although bear in mind the PS3 version accepts Keyboard and Mouse as controls, so it’s definitely possible. First PC mods playable on PS3 and now cross platform play – looks like Epic is really keen on sharing things between the two.

Slim pickings again, sadly, but here’s what’s due on the PSN today:

- Armored Core 4 - Demo
- Heavenly Sword - Next instalment of the ‘making of’ and ‘animation’ videos.

Erm, don’t shoot the digital messenger…

A quick random but interesting bit of info for you: according to Develop Mag, out of the Heavenly Sword Blu-ray disc, a whopping 10GB is taken up by the sound effects and music alone. That includes three and a half hours of music, and four and a half thousand lines of dialogue. Looks like when ‘Chief Design Ninja’ Tameem Antoniades said that Heavenly Sword couldn’t be done with DVD, he wasn’t joking!

[Develop Mag]

Speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Mark Rein (vice president of Epic Games) praised the inclusion of Blu-ray in the PS3, saying that the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3 may get more maps due to the extra storage space. He also gives us an insight of what the future holds. Here’s what he had to say…

“We’ll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version… Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom.”

“If you think down the road, well, maybe the next UT beyond this one, on Blu-Ray disc, we might fill the whole damn disc with all the cool stuff the mod makers make.”

We managed to get Three Speech reader/regular/contributor Tom Eccles into the SCEUK offices today to try out the E3 build of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Here’s what he thought…

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a new venture for the Naughty Dog team – previously known for the Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter series. The mysterious trailer shown off at E3 2006 intrigued many. Since then, the game’s been demonstrated at this year’s E3 - the E3 build being what we got our hands on.
Read more…