Back in August we brought you news of a forthcoming title from Sierra Entertainment called Prototype. Almost four months down the line we get our first glimpse of the game in video form. Enjoy.

Our friends at D+PAD have an issue out now featuring a three-page interview with Evan Wells, Co-President of Naughty Dog, and lots of Sony related reviews, including SingStar, WipEout Pulse and the new Syphon Filter. The magazine also features previews of LittleBigPlanet and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Take a look at D+PAD Magazine.

A new LittleBigPlanet video was shown last night at the Spike TV Video Game Awards. It shows a brand new level featuring a pirate ship with a sackboy dressed as a mermaid and, of course, a pirate! Talking to a few industry insiders, this game is going to be very, very impressive.

Morning all. Just a quick one to see who got Drake’s at the weekend and, if so, what do you think of it? Where are you up to? Anyone stuck? Anyone complete it over the weekend? Let us know what you think.

Following on from yesterday, here’s the second part of the Evan Wells Q&A. Also, don’t forget the Drake’s Trail competition which is happening now. Those prizes are pretty amazing.

Will there be any DLC content for Uncharted and what about a multiplayer?

We left multiplayer out of Uncharted so that we could focus the entire team’s efforts on creating the most compelling and exciting single player experience possible. As for downloadable content, we took a different approach. Instead of adding features later and asking people to download them or buy them from the PSN, we included them on the disc and tied them into our Medal Point system. If you collect all of the treasure in the game and earn all 1000 Medal Points, you will get to unlock a ton of really great rewards like behind the scenes videos, tons of concept art, skins, rendering modes, and cheats. We thought it was cooler to include these things right on the Blu-Ray disc rather than force you to download them later.

On developing on the PS3 : If Sony decided to increase the number of Cell processors and SPUs in a future release of the hardware, would Uncharted automatically take advantage of these new capabilities or would it just run at the same pace.

Currently the Uncharted engine isn’t even taking complete advantage of all the processors on the Cell chip. We’re essentially using about 1/3 of the power that’s being offered at this time. So if the Cell processor was improved in future iterations of the hardware, it would have no effect on the overall performance of Uncharted.

In terms of percentages of time spent, how much was spent on:
a) pre-production/proto-typing
b) design
c) actual development with programmers, artists etc
d) game play tweaking

This is a very hard question to answer because several of those things overlap. For instance the design of the game was constantly evolving throughout production. We were also tweaking the gameplay from start to finish. What I can say is that we had a small team of designers and engineers working on pre-production for about one year before full production began. We then had the full team working on the game for the next two years.

Read more…

PS3 Store

Title (Licence/Publisher): Price

Demos

Kane & Lynch:Dead Men (Eidos Interactive)

Packs

Domino & Adventure (MotorStorm) (SCEE): £1.49
The Origin of Belgae Pack (Folklore) (SCEE): £1.49

Video

Blazing Angels 2 - Multiplayer Trailer (Ubisoft Entertainment): Free

Themes

Mesmerize (SCEE): Free
Tori Emaki (SCEE): Free
Heavenly Sword (SCEE): Free
MotorStorm (SCEE): Free
Snakeball (SCEE): Free
Lemmings (SCEE): Free
Killzone 2 (SCEE): Free
SingStar (SCEE): Free

PC store

Demos

Socom:Tactical Strike PSP Demo (SCEE): Free
Syphon Filter Logan’s Shadow Demo (SCEE): Free

Video

Everybody’s Golf Trailer (SCEE): Free

Wallpapers

Locoroco Green (SCEE): Free
Locoroco Yellow (SCEE): Free

So, a few weeks back we asked for your questions for Evan Wells, and here are the answers - which make very interesting reading. Questions on the possibility of Jak and Daxter for PS3, rag doll physics and new challenges are all answered. The second part of the interview will follow tomorrow.

What technologies went into creating the game? - subsurface scattering/ parallax mapping/ procedural textures etc etc

There really are too many to list out. The answer to this question would just end up looking like a laundry list of all of the industry’s next-gen buzz words. Our engineers have really pulled out all of the stops and given our artists and amazing set of tools to work with. And all of the tech in the world isn’t going to do you any good unless you have a talented team of artists to work with it.

How long did development time actually take from the first snippet of code to the final product?

Full production on Uncharted lasted almost exactly two years. We had an internal team of about 70 employees working on the game as well as about dozen contractors. There was also about a year of pre-production where we had a small team working on early ideas and tech.

Will you be utilising the uncharted engine for upcoming titles - PS3 Jak anyone?

We will most definitely continue to build on the Uncharted code base with all of our future titles for the PlayStation3. We have a lot of very sophisticated systems that are general purpose and could be used for a wide variety of genres. It’s very exciting to think what we can do with this tech now that it’s in place and we can focus on accomplishing something even more ambitious. And Jak and Daxter is a definite possibility some time in the future. There is a lot of interest around the office in going back to that franchise and seeing what we could do with it using the Uncharted engine.

Read more…

There’s a nice comp running over at www.unchartedps3.com; a Google Maps-powered Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (ARG) alternative reality game. Track down Nathan Drake first and the prize is two return flights to Cancun, seven nights all-in accommodation in a four star hotel and two activities - GPS scavenger hunt and snorkel, and a submarine trip. Ten runners up bag a 26″ TV. The comp runs until the end of January.

Ah yeah, and if you’re a bit handy at this treasure hunting caper, best not to post your solutions to the tasks on here, as you’ll only have a slew of other contestants stealing a march on you!

Calling all trench monkeys, starting next week, we will be running a Warhawk Competition open to 32 Three Speech users. There will be two preliminary sessions of 16 people with a final featuring the top four from each group, thus eight in total.

Listen closely as this is about to get detailed.

The first preliminary session will take place on Monday December 10 at 5pm (GMT) and will be made up of three games. The first two will be 10 minute warm ups - death matches. The third game will be a 15 minute dogfight to ensure it’s a level playing field. The top four players from the dogfight will proceed to the final.

The second preliminary session will take place on Wednesday December 12, also at 5pm (GMT) and will be in the same format as the first preliminary session.

The final will take place on Friday December 14, again at 5pm (GMT), with eight finalists. There will be one 10 minute warm up game which will be a free for all. The final game to decide the first, second and third places will be a 20 minute dogfight.

The games need to start at 5pm (GMT) to ensure we can monitor the winners of each round. The password will only be given out to the 16 people playing in each game and we will need everybody’s PSN ID so that we can verify the correct people are playing. Players can only take part on their allocated day.

To take part please make sure you will be available to play at 5pm (GMT) on all days and mail us at blog@threespeech.com with your name and PSN ID, so we can confirm your place in the respective game and send you the password.

The first, second and third place winners will receive a rather nice Warhawk trophy.

Namco has released 17 brand new Tekken 6 screenshots today, and it’s looking very good. You can check them out at Gamersyde here.