Since the PlayStation 3 was released, its Swiss Army knife-like functionality has been rightly praised, but there’s no question that the flexibility of the system’s user interface was decidedly last-generation and paled in comparison to the Xbox 360’s more capable one.

In an effort to finally catch up, Sony released the PS3’s 2.40 firmware upgrade to consoles today. While Sony does add a nice ability to look at your progress toward earning certain Trophies (Sony’s version of Achievements), the new firmware unashamedly copies the Xbox 360’s Achievements system, right down to making a noise when a Trophy is won. It’s not subtle, but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Microsoft should be blushing that Sony - even after over two years - couldn’t come up with a better system.

The Sony system does utilize a wrinkle that stands apart from Microsoft’s Gamerscore; the Gamer Level, which incorporates the trophies earned and forges them into an overall level, using the ubiquitous Olympic-based bronze, silver and gold standards. Platinum Trophies, which are earned by unlocking all other Trophies in a game, will boost a gamer’s level quickly.

Friends list integration has been incorporate into every game via text messaging, and all the Xross Media Bar (XMB)’s functionality is available by pressing the PlayStation logo button on the controller at any time. From there, every option is available, though many will require you to quit your game to use them. Custom Soundtracks are available, but the game needs to allow it, unlike the Xbox 360’s system, which works on a separate level the game itself. Like much of the 2.40 upgrade, it works, but it feels more shallow than the competition.

In all, the 2.40 setup, while a big step forward, isn’t world-changing and still lags noticeably behind Microsoft’s superior flexibility. While the Trophies are nice, they’re flat-out lifted from the Xbox 360 and much of the rest feels tacked on… which it is, of course. That said, Sony’s finally on the right track - and realizing that you’re behind is the first step in catching up.

***

Kotaku.com is reporting that some users have had significant problems after upgrading the PlayStation 3’s firmware to 2.40, including “bricking” the system and rendering it inoperable. As a result, the 2.40 update has been pulled for the time being and Sony is said to be readying a response.  More information can be found on the PlayStation forums.

Thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon…

• There have been some good reads in the gaming press lately. Kotaku’s Leigh Alexander, who’s quickly becoming one of the more engaging writers in the biz, offers up a thought-provoking piece on how and why we defend gaming, and about how we’re often going about it the wrong way. Over at IGN Insider (if you’re a subscriber), a site that’s not exactly known for deep thinking, David Clayman and Michael Thomsen churn out a terrific piece entitled “The Death of Hardcore Gaming”, and at that bastion of game-related journalism, the… um… Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz raves about Grand Theft Auto IV while noting that he served with “The Godfather”, he knew “The Godfather”, “The Godfather” was a friend of his, and GTA IV’s no “Godfather”.*

• Thomsen pens another piece at IGN, “Contrarian Corner”, which deftly tackles Metal Gear Solid 4 in a spot-on piece that’s sure to ruffle the feathers of serious fans… even more so because he’s got series creator Hideo Kojima’s laborious style-over-substance modus operandi pegged. Further driving the point home is The Escapist’s Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, who basically says all the things about the MGS series that I’ve been dying to… but I’m not on a late-night cable network and don’t have the same obsession with bodily fluids.

• Microsoft’s cutting the price of the Xbox 360 - or at least, they will after E3, according to retailers who weren’t down with Microsoft’s whole “we’d like to make a splash at E3, so keep this under your hats, please” plan. The “Pro” mode (1,000th friendly reminder to Microsoft: you have way too many models here!), which sports a 20-gigabyte hard drive, will drop to $299 dollars, $100 less than when it was released. More importantly, Microsoft has apparently fixed its nightmarish digital rights management (DRM) problem, in which gamers who had their faulty Xbox 360 units replaced couldn’t use the content they downloaded off of Xbox Live without first getting approval from a Microsoft server. The software fix (the Content License Transfer Tool) is a day late and a dollar short, but at least it’s here. A better overview of the process can be found at Joystiq.

* Bonus points for those who know who inspired my summary of Díaz’s article… and yes, I’m aware it was a stretch.

Well, that was quick.

With Neversoft/Activision’s Guitar Hero: World Tour looming on the horizon in October, laden with the powerful Guitar Hero brand, a slew of deep gameplay modes and a collection of “instruments” that appear noticeably superior to their Rock Band counterparts, the team at Harmonix/EA/MTV Games announced that Rock Band 2 would release in September for the Xbox 360, one month prior to Guitar Hero: World Tour and only 10 months after the original’s release in November of last year.

“With the original Rock Band, the focus was on innovation,” Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos told The Associated Press. “With Rock Band 2, the focus is on perfection of the experience. We’ve had a year to listen to our fans and build out the scope, depth and polish of the experience, so it feels like a second-generation band game.”

Only they haven’t had a year in the marketplace yet, and while I’m not privy to the details of Rock Band 2’s development cycle, sports games generally go a year between releases and change very little in most cases. In an exclusive preview to IGN, Rock Band 2’s lead designer, Dan Teasdale, discusses the game in very little detail, saying little more than the game is deeper and better.

“For fans interested in hardware, the second-generation peripherals are an amazing step forward from the first-generation guitar and drums,” said Rigopulos. “The instruments make huge strides in both fit and finish as well as features and functions.” We’ll have to wait until Rock Band 2’s July’s E3 showing to find out exactly what Rigopulos is talking about, because the guitar that IGN shows in its coverage is simply a re-dressed version of Rock Band’s current Stratocaster mock-up.

Curiously, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and Wii versions will be released at some point later in the year, according to Harmonix. Why the Xbox 360 gets the pole position for one of the biggest releases of the year is unknown, but “Microsoft has been a great partner for Rock Band,” says MTV Networks Music Group’s president Van Toffler. “It’s just so easy to download the content using the Xbox 360 system. It’s evolved into a great marketing partnership as well. They’ll really blow it out for us.”

Most importantly, Rock Band 2 will have retroactive compatibility, meaning that any songs downloaded for the original Rock Band will be immediately playable in the sequel, and Harmonix insists that the in-game Rock Band Music Store is designed to function in any Rock Band game, so those that choose not to upgrade won’t be penalized with a lack of new content.

And with over 80 master tracks shipping on with Rock Band 2, the genres involved in that content look to be expanding. Teasdale spoke to IGN about the Rock Band Music Store’s downloadable content (DLC), where over 15 million tracks have been downloaded thus far, saying that “You’d be hard pressed to justify Jimmy Buffett and Disturbed on the same disc, but the great thing about DLC is that we can push the boundaries of what players experience.”

Says Toffler, “I believe we’re going to see global online competitions where bands performing throughout the world will compete against each other. I’m personally excited to open up the genres of music to country, hip-hop and R&B. We’ve just scratched the surface, really.”

They’re both right. Rock Band has sold 1.3 million units to Guitar Hero III’s 2.5, but in many ways, that’s comparing apples to oranges. When Guitar Hero: World Tour ships in October, both music-game franchises will be band-centric, and expanding the scope of the game (and the types of music found within) stands to land Rock Band 2 a lot more customers, assuming they do things right.

By the middle of July, we’ll know if 10 short months was time enough to re-invent the wheel.

I’m back from Canada, but unfortunately, I can’t share anything from the NBA Live 09 Community Event yet - as it turns out, we who attended the event might have seen more than we were supposed to - which is always fun - and due to that, EA’s marketing departments and developers and whomever else need to hammer out what we can spill the beans on and what we can’t.

At the moment, it looks like I’ll be able to cover things in more (any?) detail by the end of next week, but it may be sooner as well.

My apologies for the inconvenience, but if you were wondering - yes, the weather in Vancouver was lovely.

I’ll be up in British Columbia for the rest of this week, spending a little time with NBA Live 09 and its development team in their lovely studio in Burnaby, just east of Vancouver proper.

As Kotaku revealed on Tuesday, San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker has been named the cover athlete for the basketball title, and with the NBA Draft on Thursday, it’s possible that the design team has something special to share.

If nothing else, I’ll spend quality time with the game, pick the developers’ brains and discuss what’s to come with some of the best basketball gamers around.

Wednesday’s going to be a travel day and the Thursday schedule is completely packed with meetings and presentations from the early morning until late in the evening. I’m due to land back in Denver in the late afternoon on Friday, so with any luck, I’ll be able to share what I’ve learned late Friday afternoon.

I’m intrigued to see what’s become of NBA Live, a series that took great strides forward last year. With improved defense and some more polish, the game could be ready to compete with - and perhaps even surpass - 2K Sports’ NBA 2K series, a notion that would have been quite impossible a scant few years ago.

If you have any questions for me, or if you have something that I might be able to discuss with the NBA Live 09 development team on Thursday, please feel free to leave them in the comments thread. I’ll be sure to check them out this evening and I’ll see what I can find out later this week.

The 2007-08 NBA season might have just wrapped up, but for EA Canada, the NBA Live 09 season has just begun.

When a game publisher releases a demo, it’s designed to provide a taste of what’s to come; a sample of what the final product will be like in the hopes of persuading you to purchase it.

Oftentimes, such a demo illustrates how a game sets itself apart from the crowd or its competitors, but in the case of NCAA Football 09, things are a little different. Namely - the game has no competitors; NCAA Football has an exclusive license to college teams and stadiums, so in many regards, this demo is simply a matter of preaching to the converted.

Nevertheless, the game does change from year to year, and today, we’ll look at the recently-released NCAA Football 09 demo after playing it an borderline-unhealthy number of times in order to see what’s new and exciting for football fans next month.

***

It’s easy to notice that the game packs a bit more graphical punch; player shapes and sizes are more pronounced, animations are more varied, especially on tackles, movement throughout the game is noticeably smoother with less frame-rate jitters and the game’s received a pleasant makeover of color, specifically during sun-dappled afternoon games, when the reddish tint through autumn leaves creates a setting that none of pro football’s stadiums can provide.

During the pre-game introductions, the crimson glow might be a smidge overpowering, but that’s a quibble, and on the field, shadowing and lighting look excellent. Here’s hoping that the sun sets afterwards and these games finish with a dark sky and the field under lights.

The game’s commentary, which is among the best in sports gaming, is starting to feel a bit stale, but some of this is undoubtedly due to the size of demo and not the result of the announcing team’s solid work. Playcalling screens have gotten a makeover, as well, incorporating team-oriented graphics and a more efficient system of cycling through formations. This is often the hardest part of any football game to get right, and while it doesn’t break new ground, NCAA Football 09 has an efficient and easy-to-manage system, allowing the gamer to focus on their strategy itself instead of navigating menus. On the field, the pre-play adjustment menus are simple and effective, though the Coca-Cola Zero ad embedded within is excessive and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

On offense, many things have changed for the better. While the offensive line play hasn’t improved to the level that one can truly run effective counter plays, it is still improved, making screen passes and short-yardage plays more realistic. The addition of effective screen plays changes the entire dynamic of the game, allowing the offense to slow the traditional EA blitz-every-time style of defense played by too many. The linemen still blow a lot of obvious blocks, and you’ll still find yourself sacked before you can even make a standard hand-off at times, but that’s been lessened.

Quarterback is more challenging, especially if you’re playing as the road team. The new Home Field Advantage mechanic cleverly affects your receivers, whose button/target icons can disappear in the pre-play “coach’s view”. Quarterbacks under pressure can make some truly awful throws and planting your feet is critical if you want your QB to get anything on the pass. With any luck, this will end up cutting down on the playground-level lunacy that has befallen many a game of NCAA Football in the past. Your receivers have some serious hops - perhaps too much, as tight ends often pull down passes that normally would sail over their heads - but they also tip more passes, so the game’s balance isn’t at risk there.

Like most EA football releases, the game seems to noticeably favor the passing offense, which is at least a bit more realistic in the college ranks then the pros, but on the whole, the offensive balance is finally settling in, it seems - real attention has been paid to the running game this year.

On defense, the game can be quite difficult, as the game’s collision detection has improved. No longer do running backs go down with any type of contact. Since they’ll run right through arm tackles, squaring up your man takes on added importance. Getting pressure on the quarterback without a blitz is tough, which means that team with formidable front fours don’t have the advantage that they probably should, but hopefully, gamers will be able to adjust sliders to taste if this becomes a problem. Against the pass, man-to-man defense is usually effective, but the combination of high-flying receivers and slow-to-react zone defenders makes playing this defense a risk. Too often, playing zone means handing the offense the field 15 yards at a time, since the players don’t react well to open receivers in their zone. Coaches call that “taking responsibility”, and the defenders in the demo aren’t all that great at it.

All told, however, playing defense is fun and challenging, and making plays on “D” is often more satisfying than making them on offense. That’s something to be proud of.

“Icing the kicker” has been added to the game, as well; a last-second time out will slightly change the camera angle and add a heartbeat sound, ratcheting up the tension somewhat. With regard to special teams play, while the return games are appropriately exciting, I’ve run a half-dozen onside kicks back for touchdowns against the AI, which is unusual to say the least. Hopefully, that rather glaring issue isn’t in the game’s final version.

On the whole, NCAA Football 09 looks to be incrementally improved on the field, but that’s not a bad thing - it was the best football game on next-gen consoles to begin with. If what’s playing in the demo now is indeed exactly what we’ll see in mid-July, gamers will be sure to get some good, reliable fun out of the long-running series’ latest iteration, even if it feels more than a little bit familiar.