It was like Christmas morning around here this morning. I woke up, opened my eyes, eagerly ran out to the living room and fired up the PS3 — Santa had already been, firmware 2.40 was ready for download! After a few minutes of downloading and installing I was ready to go. So now that it’s here what did I think of the long awaited two-four-O?

In-game XMB, trophies, custom soundtracks — what’s not to love? A few things actually. In-game XMB is just that – in game. Doesn’t pop up during DVD’s, blu-ray movies, or PS1/PS2 games. Just PS3 games. A weird decision that I hope they’ll rectify down the road. As well, custom soundtracks need to A) be on the PS3 HDD (no streaming from PC like on the 360) and B) be supported by each individual title. That means that custom soundtracks are a feature built into the game, rather than into the system. If a developer doesn’t want to add support for it, they’re not going to.

Now that my complaints are out of the way, let me just go on record as saying I love 2.40. Here’s why;

• I can check on my downloads in game
• there’s a clock available at all times (seriously — that’s huge to me)
• google search is available form the XMB — this will actually get me using the browser
• …and then there’s the trophies

Trophies are going to become a real problem for me. My traditionally dickish nature leads to an unacceptably competitive spirit that I have trouble keeping in check. It took me more than a year to accept that gamerscore didn’t matter, and in that year I was brutal in my attempt to be the king of my friends list. Now that I’ve kicked the habit, Sony has to go and dangle sweet lady H T in front of my face — and I’m giving in. Although I still don’t fully understand their system yet (rather than being a numerical point value to each trophy your combined successes somehow level you up), I’m looking forward to figuring it all out.

And again — the introduction of trophies has proved something that I had said long ago. The big benefit to a achievement/trophy system is that it might get you trying games you otherwise wouldn’t have played. Example: Super Stardust HD. I had purchased it quite some time ago, couldn’t really get into it, and it has sat there on my HDD gathering dust ever since. But now that it’s the only game to support trophies? I fired it up this morning and can’t stop playing — not just because of the trophies, but because I had the incentive to give this game more of a fair shake. It turns out it’s really good. I loves me my twin stick shooters (I still say Blast Factor is the best of the bunch) and this definitely ranks up there.

On a side note, who doesn’t think that sales of Super Stardust HD are going to go through the roof this week?

So, in summary — clocks, google, downloads, trophies, soundtracks, awesome.