Ever wanted great games for your PS3 at rock bottom prices? Japan certainly does. A Japanese online retailer recently posted listings for the first set of titles that'll fall under the PlayStation 3 budget lineup for Japan, known as "PlayStation 3 the Best." More on this interesting development after the jump!

 

Just when you thought that the Sony PlayStation 3's Ridge Racer 7 couldn't get more 3D than it already is, Namco Bandai just made it even more so. The Japanese game maker ported the game from the PS3 to the arcade platform in just a week and improved it with some Xpol technology and a new kind of 3D eyewear.

Essentially, what other people may see on the arcade screen will be a blurred version of the game's graphics with two images seemingly overlaying on each other. With special glasses which look like shades when put on, however, testers say that the cars look ready to fly off the display.

Added depth and sharpness of the visuals at 1080p resolution moving at 60 frames a tick are doing all the magic here, says Namco Bandai. They'll be putting this cutting edge demonstration on the limelight when the CEATEC Japan show hits come early October. Let's hope people react positively so the idea can be marketed, making for a possible leap in graphics innovation.

We usually find wondrous things in our email inbox here in QJ. Today, we got word on what's new in the PlayStation Store in Sony's PlayStation Network. Having said that, we'll cover the free stuff first before we give you the new stuff you can buy.

Okay, the free swag includes three tutorial videos for MLB 07 The Show, a Trailer for the new culinary adventure from Pixar - Ratatouille,  a trailer for the August 3rd movie - Hot Rod, and additional content in the form of Decals and Events for Ridge Racer 7.

As for the things you have to pay for, Championship Sprint is the new racing game up in the PlayStation Store. Championship Sprint should sell for around US$ 4.99 and is rated E (hey it's a small racing game, what do you expect?). Background music for Ridge Racer 7 is also available and the tunes are selling at 99 cents each.

As for that new Resistance: Fall of Man stuff, we'll have to wait for the June 7 update.

Presuming you're either standing in a launch line now and reading this off a mobile browsing solution (PSP, smartphone, or laptop), or you're at home waiting for a preorder to arrive: Three Speech has revealed what downloadable content will be available at the Euro-launch window PlayStation Network/Store.

Note we said "Euro-launch window". The first two in this list will be available at launch, while the rest will be released over April and May.

Genji: Days of the Blade

• Add more excitement to your medieval Japanese swordplay experience with different sets of battle dress for your four playable characters. Equip Yoshitsune with the armour of his adversaries the Heishi clan or opt for a set of Western-style metal armour. If those don’t suffice, the third pack will clothe your mighty warriors in… school uniform?

Ridge Racer 7

• Make your machine look as good as it drives with a total of 14 downloadable decal packs arriving throughout March and April. Will your machine bear the Katamari Damacy livery or the classic PAC-MAN and XEVIOUS decals? This is your chance to customise your machine in the most distinctive way and show it off online!
• Or will you enter a special downloadable race event? Test your skills against a jet-black ANGELUS in a Quad Battle event at Seaside Route 765, take on the Xevious army in a special race event at Downtown Rave City, or get behind the wheel of a fully-customised ABEILLE for a Duel event at Laketop Parkway. With 25 special event packs available in April and May, a visit to PSN is a must for serious drift race-heads.

MotorStorm

• Any PS3 owner playing MotorStorm online will receive Time Trial Mode automatically – you won’t even need to download this one from the PLAYSTATION Store. Take any vehicle out on the track of your choice and go hell for leather to lay down the quickest lap time. You can race against ghost vehicles of your previous efforts, other players’ times and the best attempts from the MotorStorm development team – and then upload your best times to the global online rankings. In addition, more tracks, vehicles and game modes will be available later in the month, and thereafter on a regular basis.

Resistance: Fall of Man

• Download two new playable maps: Westmorland and Camborn. Take the battle against the Chimera to new areas of England: create carnage in the autumn splendour of Camborn with bullets, then leave blood trails in the fresh snowfall of hilly, sniper-friendly Westmorland. All multiplayer game types are fully playable on these stunning new landscapes.

Keep your Thursday free, because Sony has got some downloadable goodies for all you guys out there. The bigwig has announced that three new titles will be up and available for your download. The said titles are the following:

• flOw (US$ 7.99)
• Q*Bert (US$ 4.99)
• Ridge Racer 7 demo (free)

Now, there really wasn't any specific time mentioned as to the release of these DLs, so if you'd want to camp out waiting for it, then it's all up to you. For our end, we've already informed you about it. Although it would have been so much better if they were all for free, we're pretty sure you're gonna get your money's worth.

Japan. Land of the Rising Sun. And also known as the Land of the "We get it first." Namco Bandai is set to release more free downloadable content for Ridge Racer 7 on January 18 and for now it seems as if it will be only available in Japan. Time to get your fingers sticky and give West Coast Customs a run for their money.

The themed stickers will host a couple of number of games and anime straight from the Namco Bandai labs. Check out the pics and see if you can recognize some of them. For game-related icons, there's .hack//GU, Ace Combat 5, and Doko Demo Issho; while the anime franchises have Eureka Seven, Cod Geass, and Sousei no Aquarion.

You might think that they're nothing but very sneakily-placed ads from Namco Bandai, but when you think about it, those cars still look gorgeous on the track. Definitely wouldn't mind making a stickie note to remind myself to wait for these stickers once it becomes available in the Land of the "We get it after Japan."

Click the "Full Article" sticker link below for the rest of the images.

If there's one other thing we can add to the list of reasons for the lack of WoW players in Japan, it's probably got to be the virtual girls. One of the most famous of virtual spokesmodels, discounting the ones on pornographic UMDs, has to be Reiko Nagase, the race girl for the Ridge Racer series. Well, it seems she's going to be playing a bigger part in both Japanese gamers' lives and the life of one Sony fanboycat.

IGN notes that, beginning January 18 in Japan (which is right now, actually, if you lived there), Reiko Nagase will be making an appearance of sorts on Sony's downloadable Mainichi Issho (Together Everyday) game. A new download will allow Toro (the white cat above) to pick up a Reiko Nagase poster, which he will then hang on the wall and stare at in fits of fanboyish glee. It seems to be a fun partnership between Namco Bandai and Sony, because they're also offering a Ridge Racer 7 poster along with Nagase's pin-up.

Best of all, the downloadable game and those two posters are free of charge. Even if you don't want to get any other add-ons for Mainichi Issho, you may find yourself wanting to join Toro-kun in his fanboyish delight over Reiko-chan. Just pick these freebies up at the game's Toro Station.

That is, of course, if you can access this game from your location.

  

Namco Bandai has announced that they will be releasing free downloadable content for Ridge Racer 7to the Japanese PlayStation Store on the night day before Christmas. These screens and that bit of news popped up in Jeux-France and Gamefront.de, though there is no mention of a U.S. release in either report. It's likely that the same content will be made available either at the same time or the week after, but we're still waiting for an official announcement.

Either way, here are the screenshots from of the new content which would now allow racers to customize their cars with Taiko Drum Master and Katamari decals. In addition, three new competitions have been thrown in: UFRA Special Event 01, 04, and 07, though Jeux-France says that we will "discover seven new tests" with this download pack, but Gamefront.de only identifies the UFRA Special Events listed above.

A silly thought just occurred to us: we could just imagine the driver of the car with the King of All Cosmos decals beset by that guy's ceaseless nagging. "This is much too slow. We need faster, yes." Friggin' back-seat Katamari drivers...

See the screenshots after the jump - click on the "Full Article" link below.

Three Speech recently had a field day over at Sony's Liverpool Studios and was lucky enough to corner two of this generation's racing gurus of gaming: Formula One Championship's game director Graeme (Graham) Ankers and Ridge Racer 7's associate director Hideo Teromoto.

The video starts with an interview with Ankers and he talks about the game's AI engine. The whole strategy behind racing seems to be a big factor in winning some the game's circuits. Ankers also tackles the weather engine and how they maximized the PS3's HD capabilities. Much to say, the game's looking pretty realistic, the way he puts it.

Now, although the interview with Teromoto is a tad bit shorter than that of Ankers', we're still treated to a run-down of the features in Namco Bandai's game: y'know, 40 types of cars and roughly 370,000 possibilities in customization. Whether you're one of the car-savvy types or not, this game is just too overwhelming for words to describe.

Check out the video below. It's just going to take less than 7MB of your time.

Download: [F1 Championship/Ridge Racer 7 interview]

Nope, we're not Sony haters (we'll show you how much we love the PS3 in a couple of hours when we "undress" our own unit) but it just so happen that we came across this little piece of information or shall we say, pictures. And if you are a fan of racing games and are planning to pick up a Ridge Racer 7 title later on or tomorrow, please take a look:

Now, these images were not accompanied by any explanation whatsoever. Please don't be so quick to conclude that we're blaming Sony for this as it can be attributed to a number of things. Looking at the matter from an objective point of view, graphical errors sometimes occur when a game is badly coded. In short, it could be a software problem. On the other hand, such instances can also be connected to hardware issues like a bad RAM or GPU overheating. Heck, we even recognize the possibility that these images are fake.

We are not quite technical people ourselves and our knowledge regarding this is limited. We are then reserving our analysis and comments as we are just saying that such instance had occurred.