Some intriguing comments have been dropped by Epic Games stalwart Cliff Bleszinski about Kojima Productions' Metal Gear Sold franchise. According to the Gears of War 2 dev, they won't be following the MGS storytelling strategy which he referred to as "on the way out." What's the full score? See it in the full article and tell us what you think.

This might actually go hand-in-hand with Jack Tretton's statement about the PlayStation 3 "sacrificing the short-term challenges for long-term wins." In the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Activision CEO and chairman Robert Kotick gave his thoughts about Sony's gaming console and how some developers might be treating it.

Replying to an audience member, Robert Kotick noted that the PS3 is the most advanced gaming platform out there today. And reflecting Tretton's remark of how developers might be having a hard time working with the system (for the short-term, at least), Kotick continues, saying that "few game developers were building products that take full advantage of the console's powerful, multicore processor, [but devs' knowledge of the system could change within] the next four or five years."

So does an Activision CEO have the clout to say this? Well, it's up to you. If you're one to take a company's games library as credentials, do know that Activision has Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock up its sleeve. Both games are to be released across different platforms, and its only upon release will we find out if the devs took advantage of the PS3's system. Only time will tell, but Kotick still raises some interesting arguments.

Paulina Bozek, executive producer of the SingStar franchise at Sony's London Studio says that SingStar is the future. Kikizo expounds that this is because even drunk girls can play Sony London's SingStar.

Okay, their report was a lot more in-depth than that. They did say things about the game combining elements from YouTube, Karaoke, and making good use of the PlayStation Eye, but for some reason, this blogger just finds the bit on drunken ladies a bit too hard to ignore. Blame the testosterone.

Kidding aside, here's what to expect from SingStar:

• You'll get HD music videos to sing along to if available (since, as Ms. Bozek notes, music industry is only just getting into HD).
• You won't need to exit the game to buy songs on SingStore.
• You'll be able to download songs in the background. The average download is 40MB. Pricing is still TBA.
• It's like YouTube because you'll be able to share your SingStar home videos with the rest of the game's community.
• There'll be around 350 songs available to buy in the game. That may seem like a small number but they do say that they "always work with all the music labels" so there may be more in the future.

Basically the essence of these features is that SingStar's supposed to be easy to use, and easy to get into. You'll be able to download songs in the background while you go off to party, and when the download's done (kikizo claims they download rather fast), people can move from drinking and partying to singing their hearts out on the PS3. If the singing ends up quite good, then use the Eye Toy to be able to share videos with the rest of the community online.

Hopefully, Sony London will somehow find a way to integrate this with PlayStation Home, Sony's other attempt at implementing web 2.0 in the console space. SingStar is karaoke crossed with web 2.0, user-generated, community-oriented principles. If iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, is the future, then so is SingStar, or so Sony London claims.

Yes folks, bad singing in 1080p. Will we troll the network looking for videos of drunken girls singing Pussycat Dolls songs when the game's out? And then replay the videos on mute? You bet.

For Paulina Bozek's complete explanation on why SingStar - or iTunes meets MySpace meets YouTube - is the future, feel free to scan through the kikizo's report using our "read" link below.

 

Tandem Events recently announced that NCSoft's Richard Garriott and Microsoft XNA Group's Chris Satchell will be keynoting the event at the second Develop Conference & Expo to be held in Brighton, UK this July 24-26. With speakers such as game legends Peter Molyneux to also appear as speakers at the event, the two will tackle issues with creativity and community and the future of the MMO game.

Satchell's main speech will dive into Web 2.0 keeping two of the four key themes of the conference in mind: creativity and community. Using online social phenomena such as YouTube and MySpace as examples, Satchell will expound on how the gaming community drives Web 2.0 direction and development and how it will effect the online gaming scene.

"Lord British" Garriott will share his vision of the future massively multiplayer online game and the possibilities that can be achieved by developing for the medium. Garriott will also share his experiences in developing games and share it with the budding developers of the European community.

The organizers of the event, Tandem Events, have also announced that the conference already has an amazing line up of speakers slated, stating in the official press release that "the speaker line up is already reading like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the video game industry." Event director Andy Lane concluded the announcement, saying:

Develop is still three months away, but already we have a fantastic line up in place – of both speakers and sessions – for conference delegates, who will be travelling to Brighton this summer from all over the world. It goes without saying that we’re delighted to confirm Chris Satchell and Richard Garriott as two of our keynote speakers.

 

After having recently announced his community-driven MMO, Dave Perry, the former Shiny Entertainment boss, has announced that he has another project for the developer community. Develop Magazine reports that over at the Game Developers Conference 2007 Dave Perry has invited everyone in the games industry to submit markers to the Google Maps powered Gameindustrymap.com.

Just so you aren't left clueless, Game Industry Map is a wiki-style Map of  of the videogame industry. The map is set to include studios, colleges, outsourcing companies, freelancers, publishers, and even the gaming press. Perry calls this self-funded project a "gift to the industry." Perry had this to say about the community-powered endeavor:

This site picks up on two fast-growing trends – community and user generated content – the videogame industry is still relatively young and we already have a great community spirit which we hope to nurture for the benefit of industry as a whole. Plus we get to show the rest of the world just how widespread we are, employing creative talent all over the planet.

The result is that it immediately becomes the most accurate information available in the world, it will grow daily, and it’s shared to all. We expect to see everyone using it, job hunters, press, gamers, college students, investors, even agencies that would like to see just how prolific this industry is.

...As the Internet has proved, businesses grow when you connect people, and my goal is to simply help drive that growth. I’m not looking for any donations, not looking for any sponsorship, I am looking for teams (especially new ones) to just put themselves on the map.

The project currently has a team that has put up the first 1,000 markers. It is expected that the community itself will eventually fill in the blanks.

Ah, if only the user-generated, homebrew-ed world of those entrenched in web 2.0 could spread to the rest of the world. If only.

Anyhow, feel free to fill Perry's map in yourself if you wish. Our read-link below should lead to the the map. It's important to note that the thing is free and it's still in beta.

We don't know if you'll ever meet a guy who is claiming that the Playstation 3 browser is somewhere between that of a mobile device and a regular desktop. Well, we did - not in person, but through his online site Design215. He's Robert Giordano. His claims, if we may add, were not caused by moments of loneliness and hundreds of PS3 units stolen. Giordano has a little experiment to back them up.

First, he stated that the console uses a version of the NetFront Browser as its web browser - the very same software mainly used on mobile devices like phones and pocket PCs. He then began with a document object model. According to Giordano, he created a test page that "displays the user-agent and HTTP-accept headers sent to the server, and if JavaScript is available, loops through the list of supported mime types and plugins."

The result? The PS3 apparently does not send an HTTP-accept header to the server. It supports Javascript but he will not divulge which version. Despite that, the console reports no mime types, no plugins, and no Javascript errors. He then proceeded with a couple more of tests that concern DHTML layers, AJAX Support, as well as Flash Support.

Some worked fine, but others didn't. It was quite funny that Giordano was delighted to know YouTube works. The details of the experiment can be viewed via the Read link below. But because we love you, here's a summary of Giordano's work:

• Framesets and iframes are not supported. The browser will attempt to open some framesets in separate windows but the results are less than desirable. This is bad news for people who use hidden iframes for their Web 2.0 apps.
• CSS2 seems well supported and Standards compliant pages look good, especially if they are XHTML 1.0.
• Javascript is somewhat supported but there doesn't seem to be any AJAX support.
• Certain events are missing (as they would be on mobile devices) like "onkeydown" and so on.
• Using "for(x in y)" to loop through the properties of a Javascript object doesn't work but you can test for the existence of individual properties.
• Dynamically loading external Javascript files after the page has loaded doesn't seem to work. More bad news for Web 2.0 apps.
• When using the on-screen keypad, the browser will add a space after each word. It does this on password fields as well, which can cause a bit of frustration if you don't remove the extra space at the end before you try to log in. I discovered this trying to log in to Gmail.