In a recent interview with Joystiq’s Chris Grant and the team from PS3 Fanboy, Sony Worldwide Studios presient Shuhei Yoshida confirmed the worst: Sony’s short-lived experiment with episodic content is over. Rat Race has been cancelled.

“We really liked the concept; it’s like The Office TV series. It was kind of funny but we were not quite happy with how the game was turning out and there was some difficulty in development.”

Rat Race was planned as a sitcom style adventure game. Writers involved had written for SNL, Conan, Flight of the Conchords… The list goes on and on. A ton of them were supposed to be premiere New York comics. My guess was Judah Friedlander was somewhere in the mix, but who knows?

I’d love to hear from some of the writers involved. If anyone knows of any specific faces, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

More on the now abandoned Rat Race can be found at last year’s game announcing blog post here.

On a side note, not everybody was as excited about this as I was. As I was crafting this post, Dan sent the following gchat: “joystiq is saying that terrible rat race game for the PSN has been cancelled… thank god.” Dan, why do you hate comedy?

Pretty cool huh? Only down side is that you need the 2 previous map packs as well to download it (one is free the other is dropping in price). Here’s a look at the map and everything you need to do to be playing “Cold Storage.”

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.

Pixes full album AND Weezer… But before you get excited…. they’re off the band’s brand new (and seriously sub-par) “Red” album. But that’s a huge number of DLC goodness, and I personally will be picking off quite a few Pixies songs.

The Weezer songs are as follows:

Dreamin’ (Master)
The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Master)
Troublemaker (Master)

Not Pork ‘N’ Beans (which is the single off the album)

Last week we reviewed Live Arcade’s first stab at the numbers racket that is sudoku, Buku Sudoku. In an interview with developer Ben Moy (to be posted later this week) he was gracious enough to let us have a peek at some concept art for themes that didn’t make the cut the first time around. Complete gallery of images and relevant quote from the interview below;

We had a lot of fun coming up with different themes, and unfortunately some were cut for being different, and for space concerns. DLC is a great way for these to be finished up and released. Early mockups had a pirate ship motif I really liked. Then there were a few playables, like a beach with animated surf lapping up, and an ocean theme of underwater bubbles as cells, animated fish, and swaying seaweed.

European Rock Band releases give North America a laundry list of new tracks to feast on next week! Also good new for the EU rock band owners, the North American catalog will be hitting over there as well… it’s diplomacy through Rock Band! Is there anything the game can’t do?

All track are $1.99 and will be available Tuesday on the 360 and Thursday on PSN.

• Beetlebum as made famous by Blur (cover)
• Hier Kommt Alex by Die Toten Hosen (master)
• Countdown to Insanity by H-BlockX (master)
• Perfekte Welle by Juli (master)
• Manu Chao by Les Wampas (master)
• Hysteria by Muse (master)
• Rock N Roll Star by Oasis (master)
• New Wave by Pleymo (master)
• Monsoon by Tokio Hotel (master)

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Sony often forgets to tout the coolest features on their systems. The new PSP, for example, can hook up to your TV. If you own a PSP and a PS3, you can stream videos and certain games to your handheld unit from anywhere in the world. But the biggest feature that nobody seems to know about? You can share downloadable content on up to 5 separate PS3 units. Loosely translated this means that almost any downloadable content you purchase can be shared with 4 friends, no strings attached.

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