I won’t lie to you; when the Sony E3 conference came and went with nary a sign of Wipeout HD, I was dialling up my best henchmen. The game had already been delayed at least once before to add features, a laudable goal to be sure, but let’s go already, you know? So the E3 disappearing act was not well-received, especially with no word on exactly what the cause was. Eurogamer managed to get a quote out of Sony that described a very tricky technical problem, one that “no region has been able to solve”.

That particular wording made it sound like the bug was possibly related to networking. As it turns out, thanks to CVG’s persistence, we now know that the sheer quantities of awesome pouring out of the screen might literally do something bad to your brain.

Snippit:

Imagine our surprise when we were told that the game had failed epilepsy tests and has to be re-engineered as a result before it can be released to the public.

CVG has been told that WipEout “fails the epilepsy tests so much that it has to be re-engineered.” All that speed and flashing lights zipping past your eyes must be too much to handle.

No further details were available, such as how long this re-working might take but we’ve contacted Sony and are still awaiting an official response on the status of WipEout HD and when we can expect to see it launch on PSN.

Obviously Sony has sent out beta code to the various dev houses in each region, to see if one of their hotshots can solve the problem – perhaps with some postprocessing or filtering – rather than go back and re-build large parts of the game.

Is it bad for me to wish I could sign a waiver and buy the seizure version?

That is, if you haven’t already made the acquaintance yourself, via other swooning reports from the show floor. This is a PlayStation Network downloadable title that came out of nowhere.

Fat Princess is a game involving 32 players online, 16 to a side. You battle other players in a large isometric scrolling map, using one of five different characters classes (such as archers and priests). Your players and your castle defences can also upgrade over the course of the game, and the main thrust is on teamwork. The goal is to rescue your princess from the other team. However each team – this is where it gets good – is force-feeding the captured enemy princess, thus rendering her extremely obese, and difficult to move. Therefore you must get as many of your players over to the other side, and through the enemy, so that you have enough muscle power to roll her corpulent mass through the charred battlefield and back to your base.

How awesome is that.

Also, while it looks a lot like (the vaporous) Castle Crashers in art style, they’ve added a Kurosawa level of blood to the proceedings. So yeah, it’s kind of a must buy.

No word yet on when Fat Princess will be available for download.

Fat Princess.

Preview @ IGN

Screenshots at VE3D

Sony’s morlocks have concocted a web interface that allows you to link your website profile with your PSN ID, enabling viewing of your friends online status (yes indeed, in a manner reminiscent of Xbox Live’s web facility).

For some reason you go to the US site to start the process but I believe it will work internationally:

http://www.us.playstation.com/

Sign in there or create a profile if you don’t have one. Then you should see a “PSN link” button in the top nav bar.

That’ll take you to a page with all your deets, with a link that says:

PlayStation Network Friends List

And then you’ll be able to stumble upon the interesting neuroses that reveal themselves in people’s choice of software consumption:

Warning: as of this writing, the Sony servers are being gang-probed by the NeoGAFfers, so it might be a touch flaky.

Now I just wait for the Mac Dashboard widget to will itself into existence.

Um, yeah. It’s in Network Update on yer PS3.

I think I’ll wait and see what others say; my 2.40 install is working fine.

It looks an awful lot like the fine folks at Insomniac are pulling out all the stops for the hype-machine supporting Resistance 2.

The magazine GamePro recently featured a series of ambiguous ads, exorting readers to “enlist for military service” over at getawarjob.com. This is essentially a signup for one of those newfangled Augmented Reality Games (ARG). You give ‘em your deets and they’ll bombard you with fun puzzles and hints to play with leading up to the release of the game in November. Rumour has it that the company putting this together is the same one that created the infamous “ilovebees” Halo viral marketing campaign.

The NeoGAFfers have already started to decipher the first pieces – there’s a phone number you can call (which plays a message; you can download here), and there was a hidden code in one of the pictures which resulted in a URL:

http://projectabraham.com/

At that website, you’ll see a short Flash video that might be from Hale’s POV as he enters a hospital after being infected with the Chimeran virus… hey, is that Starbuck? Why yes, yes it is. The morse code at the end of the video translates to “BLACKOUT”. What does it mean? I have no idea. But it’s kind of fun if you like this sort of web-based scavenger hunt.

(Oh lookie here, the next piece: projectabraham.com/blackout. Duh.)

The one thing that is clear from all of this is that Insomniac intends to elevate the Resistance brand into the upper echelon of first-person shooters, in both scope and marketing hype. I’m sure they’ll have a lot more to say – and show – at E3 in a couple of weeks. The latest Full Moon podcast did confirm that they would be demonstrating the 60-person multiplayer component at the very least.

As reported in on Kotaku and Joystiq, and decried across the Playstation community forums – Sony seems to have pulled the (in?)famous 2.40 firmware update. It is no longer available through the PS3 System Update, nor on the usual web links at Sony’s sites. No one is quite sure why yet; reports range from PS3s being stuck at the “waves” on boot, and not seeing any icons, to controller issues.

Joystiq managed to get a “we’re working on it” comment from SCEA just before the update was pulled.

If you’ve already installed it, and not experienced any issues, there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about…. we’ll update you as the drama unfolds.

Cue your pining for the good ol’ days of non-flashable consoles.

Now where have I seen this imagery before? Can’t… quite place it.

Unfortunately the video is too lo-rez to actually view Sam Roberts’ stats.

Happy Canada Day!