On Thursday 13th October from 8AM BST PlayStation Home will be briefly offline for scheduled maintenance. Here is what to expect after the update…

This week PlayStation Home gears up for the release of Uncharted 3 with a brand new space and game – Fortune Hunter! Set in the sun-baked streets of Yemen, Fortune Hunter challenges you to step into the shoes of Nathan Drake and explore your war-torn surroundings while collecting hidden treasures. You must survive wave after wave of incoming attacks from enemies who are out to stop you from grabbing the loot. Ruthless gunmen, toppling crates and collapsing walls are all dangers to watch out for, so do Nathan Drake proud and keep your eyes peeled at all times.

To help you on your quest are loads of hidden weapons – there’s a pistol, a machine gun and even grenades to get your hands on if you’re wily enough to spot them. Use your ammo to take down enemies and complete objectives, hunt out all of the treasure and battle fierce bosses.
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Recently, Ubisoft invited us to sample the first few hours of Assassin’s Creed Revelations for PS3. I learned a lot during that play session:

• The control scheme has been revised, pushing Eagle Vision to L3. This frees up the Triangle button for secondary weapons such as daggers.
• Altair comes into play via flashbacks following the thrilling Masyaf key retrieval missions, which are the successors to Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’s Lairs of Romulus.
• The game map now has a Google Maps-style satellite view that I enjoyed while skipping around the sprawling city of Constantinople/Istanbul.
• The Den Defense mission brought tower defense-style sequences that are completely unlike anything I’ve seen in the Assassin’s Creed universe.
• I saw someone actually *use* the Apple of Eden.
• I noticed some different UI in the Animus, and started to wonder why the interface was different (and no, Ubisoft wouldn’t tell me).
• I saw Ezio stab a dude with a guitar – I think they called them “lutes” back then.

And I saw it all in 3D – those leaps of faith are now even more impressive. But it’s not about what I wanted to see; I went in to Ubisoft aiming to get answers to some of your questions. Read on to learn more about the dangerous world of Assassin’s Creed Revelations.

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Hey everybody, I’m Lucas Pope, lead programmer at Ratloop Asia. Our upcoming PSN game, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, got a few upgrades on the way to PS3, and I’d like to dive into some of the technical details of that transition. Hardboiled Chicken is a vastly expanded and improved game based on our earlier Flash release, Rocketbirds: Revolution. In going from Flash to the PS3, we added better controls, more screens, more chapters, more weapons, more enemies, and more gameplay modes. And we seriously upgraded the visuals. In this article, I’ll talk about some of those visual upgrades and how we did ‘em.

Rocketbirds

If you haven’t seen or played Rocketbirds, it’s a non-scrolling 2D game with a strong visual style. Think of classic 2D action-adventure games like Flashback, Oddworld, or Blackthorne. It could be considered a platformer, but there’s no scrolling and each screen is revealed whole-hog when you walk off the edge.

2D Like We Mean It

For the original Rocketbirds: Revolution, we kept things simple. Each screen had a static foreground image and a static background image that were composited together at runtime to make the final image. This is about the limit of what Flash can do quickly at 720p, but it all worked swimmingly and looked good enough for an IGF nomination.

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PlayStation Store (via PS3, PSP and Media Go)

Hello everybody, today we have some games and downloadable content I hope you will enjoy including Castlevania: Harmony Of Despair, Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and much more, see below for the full content list.

Sideway: New York is available from today, find out if you have got what it takes to battle your way through a twisted graffiti world! Beware, in Sideway New York, you’re in a world where your favourite colour might just kill you! So try out the trial today, I know I will be.

Also for you Dragon Age 2 fans, we have the Mark of the Assassin expansion pack available. Embark on a thrilling adventure of deception and intrigue alongside a mysterious assassin.

Resistance 3 gets an expansion pack today with the Survival Pack. Take back a piece of your homeland from the Chimera or conquer new territory as a Chimeran soldier with this Invasion multiplayer game mode, along with four new character skins and an exclusive static theme.

And finally we have the Call of Duty Sale starting today, including some great content for you guys to expand your games and get those trigger fingers in training.

So that’s it for another week from me, have fun.

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We want to let you know that we have detected attempts on Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment (“Networks”) services to test a massive set of sign-in IDs and passwords against our network database. These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources. In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our Networks. We have taken steps to mitigate the activity.

Less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of our PSN, SEN and SOE audience may have been affected. There were approximately 93,000 accounts globally (PSN/SEN: approximately 60,000 accounts; SOE: approximately 33,000) where the attempts succeeded in verifying those accounts’ valid sign-in IDs and passwords, and we have temporarily locked these accounts. Only a small fraction of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. We are currently reviewing those accounts for unauthorized access, and will provide more updates as we have them. Please note, if you have a credit card associated with your account, your credit card number is not at risk. We will work with any users whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases made to restore amounts in the PSN/SEN or SOE wallet.

As a preventative measure, we are requiring secure password resets for those PSN/SEN accounts that had both a sign-in ID and password match through this attempt. If you are in the small group of PSN/SEN users who may have been affected, you will receive an email from us at the address associated with your account that will prompt you to reset your password.

Similarly, the SOE accounts that were matched have been temporarily turned off. If you are among the small group of affected SOE customers, you will receive an email from us at the address associated with your account that will advise you on next steps in order to validate your account credentials and have your account turned back on.

We want to take this opportunity to remind our consumers about the increasingly common threat of fraudulent activity online, as well as the importance of having a strong password and having a username/password combination that is not associated with other online services or sites. We encourage you to choose unique, hard-to-guess passwords and always look for unusual activity in your account.

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