Valentine’s Day is fast approaching! To help you celebrate in style, this week in PlayStationHome we have some great Valentine’s content! If you and your special someone enjoy spending time in PS Home, and in particular the SingStar space, we’ve got the event for you.

This week, SingStar will be updated with a Valentine’s themed dance area along with a mini-game aptly named Stupid Cupid. Pick a partner, get in the dance mood, and hit the dance floor: there’s a great new animated shirt for both male and female to be unlocked for those with the right moves! Once you’ve got your shirts, get your heart pumping on the animated dance floor.

The Valentine’s Day celebration doesn’t end there, though! We’ve got a fantastic emoticon bundle for male and female, so you can show your inner feelings, along with some amazing new tops. For the guys there is the “I’m Single” scrolling LED hoody and animated heart t-shirt. For the ladies there’s a scrolling LED “Love Stinks” shirt and animated heart shirt.

Come and visit the Audi Home Terminal in the Audi Space, where the Audi A1 will be revealed. You’ll be granted access to the currently locked showroom, with a model of the car on display and a web terminal with detailed information about “The next big Audi.”

Assassin’s Creed sneaks its way into PS Home this week with a massive offering in Threads. We’ve got several bundles available that are sure to be a hit! First up is the fantastic Ezio costume from Assassin’s Creed 2, available for both male and female. If the original is more your style, we’ve also got male and female versions of the Altair costume. Being an Assassin not your style? Then hunt them down wearing the guard costume; once again, for both male and female. Finally, for the women only, there’s the courtesan bundle.

Furniture more to your liking? Ligne Roset updates this week with a large range of new furniture: tables, chairs, sofas and footstools, there’s 18 new items in total.

Rate: (Average: 3.53 out of 5)

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First I want to start this article thanking SCEE and Jem for letting us participate in this blog.

So last week, I mentioned on Twitter that we were having a fan day in Montreal and I got tons of private messages about it!

So now is the time to unveil all the details about that event. Basically, we decided a while ago to welcome a few fans into our studio, a couple of weeks before the launch of the game, and give them the opportunity to see where we are creating Assassin’s Creed 2, but also introduce them to the people behind the game!

I had to say that our team was excited to meet fans, and we had a few surprises waiting for them. You are probably wondering who these fans are, and I have to say that it’s quite a mix of nationalities and profiles. We had the chance to gather people from UK, France, Italy, Canada and even Austria, to name a few. Among them were gamers, active forums members, blog writers, editors and lucky sweepstakes winners.

The first time we met was the day before the event, where we all went to a restaurant together. The evening was really cool with tons of questions and discussion about the game, our schedule, but also gaming in general. However, their main request was “who is the mysterious key speaker we’ll meet during the event?” Well even though they tried hard to corrupt me, I remained silent!

On Friday morning, I walked to the hotel to meet our fans and video staff. Yes, we had cameras during the event, and I mean lots of them! You’ll see why later on.

So, we met in the Hotel lobby and then we took taxis to go to the Ubisoft Montreal studio. We started the day with a studio tour, which is always exciting for everyone. They loved our video studio, especially the audio recording department, where they got to play with swords! Then we showed them how we create all the cool assets and videos you guys see on Internet. We also had a surprise for them, our Dev Diary #6 was just finished the day before and they were treated to a world premiere in our studio! But that was only the beginning…

We then went down to the Assassin’s Creed 2 floor, where we had prepared a huge room full of HDTVs and Playstation 3. After watching a couple of videos and trailers, we welcomed our main guest: Sébastien Puel, Producer for AC2!

He was kind enough to spend more than an hour answering a staggering number of questions (and that’s exactly where the cameras became important, you should be able to see a video done with SONY on this blog and on the PSN). And then Sébastien took a couple of hours to do some one-on-one interviews with all the fans, with the help of Benoit Lambert, our Game Director, and Francois Roughol, one of our main Game Designers.

After this really interesting round of Q&A, we let our fans play the game for 3-5 hours and about one hour on Assassin’s Creed PSP depending on their schedules, and if you want to know what other gamers thinks of the game just click on the following links!

• www.incgamers.com
• www.consolemonster.com

Once again, I want to thank SONY and our fans for attending, it was a blast and we enjoyed welcoming you in Montreal!

Atmon

Rate: (Average: 4.28 out of 5)

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The US Blog’s Jeff Rubenstein has been doing his usual gallivanting around (and wearing snazzy T-shirts). This time he’s taken a trip to Ubisoft’s studios in San Francisco to discuss the upcoming PSP game, Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines. It’s a great looking game and fans of the original on PS3 will no doubt be happy to step back into Altair’s shoes. Here’s Jeff to introduce the interview to you in his own special way.

Recently, Ubisoft invited us over to their San Francisco warren to check out Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines. I wasn’t really sure how they were planning on jamming Assassin’s Creed’s exploration, climbing, and free-running into a PSP, but I’ve got to say, they’ve done an excellent job (don’t take my word for it, IGN agrees).

In a theme we’ll be seeing a lot of this year, developer Griptonite Games didn’t produce a watered-down side-scroller and slap the Assassin’s Creed name on it – this is a true follow-up to the original, only portable.

The story picks right up where the first one let off, putting you back in the familiar boots and blades of Altair. How do the controls translate to the PSP? What tweaks have been made to the formula? Has Altair stolen any cool new moves from Ezio (the protagonist of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed II)? Producer Frederic Lefrancois and Senior Producer Dan McAuliffe answer these questions – with the added bonus of a bunch of brand new video.

Rate: (Average: 4.32 out of 5)

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Wow, what a day! Everyone has been talking about the Sony press conference hosted by Jack Tretton, President and CEO of SCEA, and with so many announcements, I’ll stop using up space with this introductory paragraph and dive straight in.

The PSPgo was officially unveiled on-stage by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. CEO, Kaz Hirai. It’s 50% smaller and 40% lighter than the PSP-1000 and with 16 GB internal flash memory, it’s designed for those who like their digital media “to go”, as they say over here. It will be released on October 1, 2009.

Complementing this new evolution of PSP is a host of fantastic games coming to both UMD and PlayStation Store. Kazanouri Yamauchi, the mastermind behind Gran Turismo, arrived to show GT PSP, which will feature 800 cars, 35 tracks and will run at 60 FPS. He was followed by another legendary Japanese developer, Hideo Kojima, for the reveal of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a brand new mission for Solid Snake, only on PSP, which takes place during the 1970s.

Completing the portable line-up were a brand new Resident Evil title; Buzz! Quiz World, which will also be on PLAYSTATION 3; and the news that Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines features interoperability with Assassin’s Creed 2 on PS3. And to make sure we see plenty more stellar titles for PSP in the future, Jack Tretton announced that the price of PSP development tools will be cut by 80%, expanding the opportunity for developers to create content for PSP.

Moving onto the PS3, Richard Marks of SCE research and development showed us a new motion sensing controller that works with PlayStation Eye to enable 1:1 movement response. The crowd was impressed by tech demos that allowed him to play sports, wield a giant sword and shield, aim guns and even write with astonishing precision. He spoke of “sub-millimetre accuracy,” which I like to think of as a metric shout-out to us Europeans.

There were absolutely loads of PS3 games on show, including a live demo of the opening scenes to God of War III; a gorgeous video of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves gameplay that climaxed with Drake taking on a helicopter; the trailer for Team ICO’s latest creation, The Last Guardian; a look at ModNation, which applies LittleBigPlanet’s mantra of play, create, share to the kart racing genre, allowing players to build playable tracks in a matter of seconds; Agent, a new exclusive title from Rockstar North; the surprise announcement that Final Fantasy XIV is coming next year, exclusively to PS3; and the first trailer for Gran Turismo 5.

The strength of this E3 line-up was best summed up when Tretton proudly announced that 364 games are coming out on PlayStation platforms in the next year. That and the number of semi-colons in the above paragraph.

So there you have it, which bit was best for you? I’m off to see what the rest of the SCEE guys are up to, although the words lying and down were being used quite a bit earlier.

Rate: (Average: 4.58 out of 5)

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