Final PS3 Dev Kit Tidbits

There hasn't been a lot of information released about the PS3 development kits, controllers or even the menu system for the new console, but soon that could possibly change. At yesterday's SEGA PS3 day, we were treated to a demo of Full Auto 2: Battlelines on the latest development kit, which had recently been sent to Pseudo Interactive and other designers. Initially, we were concerned that the kits would still run extremely hot and be very loud (in fact, some people have likened the whine of the dev kit fans to that of a jet turbine), but we were pleasantly surprised to note the distinct lack of noise and heat coming from the system.

We were also told that the dev kit seemed to be extremely adaptive and easy to program for. In fact, Pseudo talked about how they hadn't put in their planned tilt sensitivity, but had literally dropped in the wireless support for the controllers on Tuesday. The controllers, which feel much lighter thanks to the removal of the rumble feature, nevertheless were solid and extremely responsive. While those weren't the finalized controllers for the PS3 itself, they felt much better than the ones that were at E3 (and were extremely easy to toggle between wired and wireless play). By unplugging the cable and pressing the PlayStation button on the controller for a second or two, we were able to engage the wireless feature. In fact, we also discovered during our multiplayer session that each controller was "smart" enough to recognize which system and what player it was initially connected to, regardless of the number of other controllers or systems in the room. This bodes well for massive LAN party play or co-op play with multiple controllers on the same system.

Speaking of LAN play, all eight dev kits were connected over the PlayStation Network in real time, which exhibited no lag whatsoever. Part of that could've been due to the massive storage capacity of each system streaming game information in tandem: each dev kit held 80 gigabytes of storage, so the multiplayer match had approximately almost a terabyte of storage synched up over the Network to stream the alpha build and accurately model the multiplayer destruction of Full Auto 2. As for the PS3 menu, it was easy to pull up in-game by quickly pressing the PlayStation button, which popped up an overlaid menu on top of the screen. The PS3 menu seems to have taken a lot of its cues from the PSP, with user features, settings, friends and game menu items. The menu appears to be a lot cleaner and sharper than the PSP but has fewer icons on it. Granted, that could also be because it was still relatively early, but it doesn't mean that, like the PSP, other features could be added to it at a later point.

We contacted Sony for additional details about the dev kits, but as of press time, representatives were unavailable for comment.