You keen-visioned PlayStation.Blog readers are bound to know that the LittleBigPlanet 2 Move DLC was officially announced at the E3 PlayStation press conference (huzzah!) You were no doubt left with questions around what it does, how it works and what marvels will be possible when our army of LBP creators get their hands on it.

In a nutshell, the Move Pack let’s you create levels with and for the PlayStation Move motion controller, and it includes a set of levels built by Mm to make your creative juices juicier. LBP has always been all about communities creating and sharing, so rather than show you our 200-slide marketing presentation, I’ll hand you over to Andrew, AKA Chimpanzee, creator extraordinaire and editor of the splendid Rocket Cheetah, for enlightenment…

“Back in May I was lucky enough to be invited to the hallowed grounds of Mm Towers to check out the new LittleBigPlanet 2 features they were working on and hang out with some well-known Creators to see what they could do with them. We all knew that Media Molecule were working on an update to the game, introducing brand new tools which make use of the PlayStation Move motion controller, but what we saw was so much more than LBP 2 with added ‘waggle.

15 members of the community from as far afield as the USA and France descended on Media Molecule’s Guildford studios and to kick things off we were given a brief demonstration of some of the features of the Move Pack.

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I have just been privileged enough to spend the past week sharing the journey of our 12 GT Academy winners. As you may know, GT Academy is the competition we run in conjunction with Nissan to find the fastest Gran Turismo gamers and see if we can turn one of them into a racing driver.

It turns out that it is possible – as proved by Lucas Ordoñez, the Spanish who won the first Academy in 2008. Lucas went on to race two seasons in the European GT4 Cup before Nissan gave him the chance to race in the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup this year in what’s called an LMP2 car (Le Mans Prototype 2). These are amazing looking cars with some serious power and so the stakes were high.

Well Lucas went to the Le Mans 24 Hour and with his more experienced Signatech Nissan team-mates, Franck Mailleux and Soheil Ayari, they came second in the LMP2 class. From GT gamer to the Le Mans 24 Hour podium in less than three years – incredible.

So, we decided to take the 12 GT Academy finalists – 2 each from Germany, France, Italy, UK and Holland and one each from Spain and Portugal – to watch Lucas’ story unfold and show them what they were fighting for. Le Mans was an incredible experience. Hundreds of thousands of people, an amazing race and an incredible opportunity for the boys.

On Saturday night they had a nation vs. nation endurance kart race that started in daylight and finished in the night, to give it a real Le Mans flavour. The track was right next to part of the circuit so on one side you had the real cars roaring past while our guys raced each other. The French contingent did a really good job on home soil.

After that it was a long, tired journey back to Silverstone. The guys all drove in convoy in six identical red and white Nissan 370Zs. Quite a sight.

On Monday the Academists were woken by some serious looking ex-military men with flash grenades in their dorm at Silverstone. They were then put through some punishing physical tests. It’s called ‘beasting’ in the army and I can see why. The serious side is that you need to be very fit to be a racing driver. The fitter you are the better you will concentrate, especially in 24 hour endurance racing.

Tuesday was a full day in Nissan cars at Silverstone. 370Zs and GT-Rs and they looked really good fun. Contestants recorded a benchmark lap time which was repeated at the end of Wednesday to see who had made the most progress.

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I wanted to thank everyone for the great reception we received at E3 when we announced the next installment of the Sly Cooper franchise, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, which will come to the PlayStation 3 in 2012.

In case you missed it last week, here’s a broadcast segment we did with the PlayStation.blog live from the SCEA booth on the E3 show floor. We knew Jeff Rubenstein was a big fan of the series and this was the first time he had a chance to see what we had been up to. He had a bunch of great questions for us, and a bunch more that we’ll be answering over the next few months!

Seven of us founded Sanzaru Games back at the beginning of 2007 and since then we have been hard at work, steadily increasing the size and quality of the games we work on. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time will be our third game with SCEA; last year we released The Sly Collection for the PS3. It’s been great to work with the SCEA world class production team behind Ratchet & Clank, Jak and Daxter, inFAMOUS, UNCHARTED, Resistance and, of course, The Sly Cooper series!

We realized back in 2008 when we pitched the idea of working on the next Sly Cooper that it was a pretty crazy idea, but we absolutely love the series and are glad that once people saw our hard work they responded enthusiastically.

A question I was asked several times at the show was “Isn’t it a huge amount of pressure to take on such a big franchise like Sly Cooper?” I think my answer really sums up the spirit of Sanzaru: we are infinitely more excited about the fact that we are working on something as cool and fun as Sly Cooper and this excitement feeds on itself as people are constantly coming up with cool new ideas to incorporate into the game. So while I wouldn’t describe the process of making such a big game as easy we are more excited to see how it all comes together.

So thanks again for the support and stay tuned for more cool announcements about the game over the next few months!

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Red Johnson’s Chronicles is the most recent addition to PlayStation Store from French indie Studio Lexis Numerique:

I immediately fell in love with this innovative Crime-Noir Adventure and many gaming journalists have picked up the game and came to the same conclusion I did: it is a real gem.

One of the advantages of my job is that, if I like a game, I can get in touch with the developers and talk to them to find out more background. The following interview is with Djamil Kemal from Lexis Numérique and I sure hope that you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed the game.

PSBlog: With titles like eXperience112 and In Memoriam, fans developed a specific expectation towards Lexis Numérique games. What is the gameplay like?

Djamil: Thanks for the compliment (smile). At Lexis Numérique, we always try to bring innovation because it’s in our DNA. In Memoriam (aka Missing: since January) was one of the first wide scale Alternate Reality Game and Experience112 tried something new in the adventure genre by not letting you control the main character but her environment.

With Red Johnson’s Chronicles, we didn’t try to bring a total revolution to home consoles but we believe we bring something really fresh. Red Johnson’s Chronicles’ innovation lies in two elements: the mix of existing genres (adventure, investigation, puzzle games) and also in its large ambition for a downloadable title.

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Summer is upon most of us (sorry south hemisphere folk… your turn will come soon) and I reckon it’s probably time to take your PlayStations and TV’s outside and put VidZone on loud! Maybe under an umbrella just in case it rains… and while you are out there relaxing with VidZone you should definitely check out some serious cool new stuff we have for you!

First up we have Katy Perry getting her geek on and recruiting the one and only Rebecca Black (of all people!) to help her with her coolness in her new video ‘This Friday Night (TGIF)’! Bizarre, 80′s and very funny, hence why Katy is our Artist Of The Week across all of our countries! Read on for all the other exciting coolness.

Also, we are really sorry but we are still experiencing video outages due to technical and licensing issues, please bear with us on this, I know it’s frustrating but everything will be back to normal soon.

FEATURED

Mirrors Exclusive

First of all you should all check out our video exclusive of the amazing synth pop band Mirrors called “Look at Me” which I don’t have to say is good, but I will because it damn well is! Take a look and fall in love with the band “4eva”… For everything equally as exciting coming up in the next couple of weeks, keep yourselves reading.

Hot New Videos

Hotter than that hottest potato that has just been cooked in a volcano… All new videos from the likes of… Enter Shikari ‘Quelle Surprise’, The Japanese Popstars ‘Joshua’, Justice ‘Civilization’ and Twin Atlantic ‘Time For You To Stand Up’.

The VidZone Chart

As always, VidZone has the most watched videos based on local singles charts. See what’s most popular in your country this week!
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