You’ve all been waiting since last Thursday’s v1.3 core client update for the highly-anticipated camera item, and that’s why we’re happy to announce that every one of you devoted PlayStation Home community members will now have a free camera. You heard me – free! This camera will automatically appear in your inventory today and will allow you to take photos from the 1st and 3rd person perspective. Any pictures you take will immediately be saved to the “Photo” section of your XMB where you can then share these photos both in-world and out, whether it is in the Picture Frames that decorate your personal spaces or on Flickr, Twitpic, or Photobucket accounts.

You’ll also find two new spaces have been released in PlayStation Home today– the PixelJunk Museum and the MotorStorm Monument Valley Campsite. The PixelJunk Museum is a sleekly designed public area dedicated to the PixelJunk series where you can explore and collect content related to the PixelJunk Eden, PixelJunk Racers, PixelJunk Monsters and PixelJunk Shooter titles. The MotorStorm Monument Valley Campsite is a mesa-top personal space with its own MotorStorm caravan and an amazing vista of the MotorStorm festival across the Valley. There’s also a ton of MotorStorm-themed furniture available to customize this exclusive hideaway. Check out the pics below.

Dethklok – the death metal super group from Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse cartoon – is pleased to announce that their never-ending quest for intergalactic domination has extended into the world of PlayStation Home. Show your support for all things evil (and metal…but mostly metal) and pick up the new Dethklok merch, available in the Mall, and check out the Dethklok video, now live in the Theater. Raise high the horns and rock out in a manner most deadly with Dethklok in Home!

While you’re in the Mall, you can also grab the new Neptune Suite furniture and other assorted virtual items and the new Jon Burgerman line of virtual goods. World-renowned for his hand drawn cartoon characters (which have been shown in galleries around the world), Mr. Burgerman has lent his talents to Home and has produced a special line of animated clothing for the guys and the gals. If you ever wanted a tattoo for your avatar, it’s high time you check out some of Burgerman’s patented designs.

We here at PlayStation Home are all about spreading the love around and supporting important charities. This is why we have partnered with EA SPORTS to produce and distribute exclusive virtual items that serve to support National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. 100% of proceeds for these items will go to the Brees Dream Foundation in support of breast cancer research and awareness programs, so please pick up these items and show your solidarity with all the breast cancer patients around the world. Remember, together we can fight this deadly disease.

MotorStorm Arctic Edge is finally here for the PSP and we have the 4th and final iteration of the “Making Of” video series to share with you. The teams at Bigbig and Evolution have really enjoyed your comments to the video series to date and are really looking forward to you getting your hands on the game. If you have been watching the series, you know that a lot of time and effort went into making Arctic Edge a title that brings the best of the MotorStorm brand to the PSP and PSPgo. (If you missed them, be sure to check out parts one, two and three!).

For part four, Bigbig Studios unveils a bit about the creative inspiration and artistic differences that make Arctic Edge unique, yet maintain all the things you already love about MotorStorm. They also talk about the challenges taking a game as big and as beautiful as MotorStorm and bringing it to the PSP in a way that is uncompromising to fun and graphic quality you are expecting from a MotorStorm title.

We had a lot of fun bringing you this series and hope you will have more fun playing MotorStorm Arctic Edge, available now on UMD and available on the PlayStation Store October 1st.

We’re proud to announce another major core space update. The Movie Theater brings you ten times as much exciting content [including from the PS.Blog! -Jeff] with a brand-new 10-screen layout, a new lobby, and the ability to unlock rewards in select screening rooms. Be sure to check out the screening rooms often – you never know when one of them will be giving something away. Stay tuned for lots of exclusive new videos over the coming months, including the future possibility of full-length TV shows or movies, with new features debuting on a regular basis.

But that’s not all! The Burn Zombie Burn space brings its classic cartoony graveyard style to PlayStation Home with a crypt for lounging in while you watch Burn Zombie Burn videos, a zombie-infested maze mini-game where you’ll be challenged to find your way out before you get zombified, and as always, an exclusive reward. Don’t get lost in the graveyard!

Next, the first wave of MotorStorm content will be swerving into PlayStation Home with MotorStorm Pacific Rift Game Launching functionality topping the bill. If you’re new to Game Launching, click here for more info on how this great functionality works.

There will be more MotorStorm news coming your way very soon; in the meantime, check out the screenshots below for a tantalizing snippet of some of the great MotorStorm content coming to PlayStation Home over the coming weeks.

Next (and this is very exciting) as of tomorrow, we will be launching a new event in PlayStation Home – the Fat Princess “Quest for Cake.” Based upon the brilliant PSN title which launches today, all you have to do is click on the PlayStation Events Space chip on your World Map to join in this very special confectionary quest.

In the fully redecorated space you will find eight pieces of cake, locked away in cages. To unlock the cake and feed your Princess you need to search the space high and low for clues. If you do manage to unlock all eight pieces of cake, and feed the Princess, a special reward will be yours – the Fat Princess’ very own throne for your personal apartment. Here are a few screenshots of the space to whet your appetite…

Finally, be sure to cruise through the Mall to check out still more updates to our lovely new stores…sources say there will be some cool new items to pick up to show your friends, both free and for sale!

See you in Home!

~CydoniaX, PlayStation Home Community Manager

Make no mistake, this mode is HUGE…it’s packed with unlocks, rewards and trophies, and has been designed to keep challenging you for as long as you want it to. How? Buckle up and I’ll divulge some (but certainly not all) of its secrets!

We were very pleased that the speed race events in Pacific Rift were so fantastically popular – they provided a great change of focus and pace from the Eliminator and Race events, and had the scope for repeated play, and for beating your own best score. While we’ll be the first to admit the formula wasn’t yet perfected, we all felt we had taken the first steps here towards something that would be absolutely stellar as a dedicated single player game mode. We decreed early on though that if we were going to revisit it, we had a few ideas to improve it, and we wanted to make sure it more fully realised it’s potential.

So the basic idea has survived pretty much intact; Start off with a bank of time (10 seconds) that’s counting down from the race start, make your way from one gate to the next as quickly as possible, each gate adding further precious seconds to your ‘banked’ time. Try to record as high a final ‘banked’ time as possible when you fly through the finish gate. So far, so good.

Well, in Speed Weekend, that’s become our qualifying race structure right there; You need to have at least 15 seconds remaining on your clock to qualify for one of the ‘easy’ races, 20 seconds for ‘medium’, and 25 seconds for the ‘hard’ race types. Beat that threshold, and that race is marked as complete on your race card. When you qualify on all 6 events for a vehicle class (2 easy, 2 medium, 2 hard) you’ll unlock a reward for that vehicle class. Work hard, get the unlocks for all 8 vehicle classes, and you’ll get a cool final pack of rewards. If you never play any further than this into the mode, you’ve just worked through 48 events! That’s probably 5-6 hours for the average MSPR player. But wait! For those willing to go the extra distance, that’s just the start…

Once you’ve qualified for an event, you unlock the Main Event version of that race. Now, as well as gates which add time, each race also features barrels strategically placed throughout the track. Any green barrels you hit are going to add extra time, 1 second per barrel. Any red barrels you hit are going to get deducted, 1 second per barrel, once you cross the finish line. This massively opens up the scoring opportunities, and the strategic decisions, facing the player. Do you straightline through those red barrels to save time now and take the penalty later? Do you veer off your racing line in pursuit of extra green barrels? Do you maybe ignore the barrels and concentrate instead on the quickest line between gates?

On bikes and ATVs, there are green bonus time barriers to duck under and buried red barrels that need to be avoided or bunny-hopped over (and duck and hop controls are assigned to L1 and R1 for this mode to make life easier for everyone)! Chances are your moment-to-moment strategy is going to need to accommodate all of those options and more, because your focus now isn’t beating our pre-defined thresholds, it’s beating your friends.

Before each main event the game presents the player with a friends-focused leaderboard. These are the up-to-the-minute times set by people on your friends list; your target time to beat is always going to be the buddy who’s directly above you on the leaderboard. Maybe he got more green barrels than you managed, maybe he went penalty-free and avoided all the red barrels. Either way, you go in, you race, race, race, and when you beat his time, the system automatically sends an update to his machine and next time he turns on the game, he’s going to see that YOU’VE now beaten HIS time! The dreaded red helmet icon on your progress chart tells you that your time has been beaten by one of your mates – which means you’ve slid down your friends leaderboard, and he’s just climbed closer to the top! This is such a compulsive feature, and makes the mode massively addictive – the months of playtesting here in the office have seen friendships turn into bitter, swear-laden rivalries as day after day, week after week, someone pushes the top score that little bit higher – and everyone else gets notified of it, and gets to work trying to beat it. The office swear-box has never had so much cash in it!

For us, this has always been the main focus of Speed Weekend. This is what’s going to keep you playing time and time again, day after day, improving your scores, and beating the best efforts of your buddies. We’ve worked hard to tune the experience so that this inter-friend rivalry as heated and compelling as possible. It soon becomes all about the strategies you pursue in each race; once you realise that you can slam into one barrel and propel it into others to get a ‘domino’ effect going, the scoring possibilities are opened wide. Of course, this also means one green barrel can hit a whole mess of red ones and scupper your best laid plans – so at the highest levels of competition there are multiple factors to take into account and the angle you hit every barrel can make all the difference to whether you’ll be the Top Dog or just a Middling Mongrel amongst you and your buddies.

So, be sure to grab a copy of Expansion: SPEED (coming soon), a couple of like-minded buddies, and warn your family and friends that you may soon be turning the air blue with foul language! Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines; the Speed Weekend is about to begin…

In each of the new expansions there are 3 brand new tracks, playable in all online modes, and offline in Time Attack, Free Play, and Split Screen. Let’s take in the holiday brochure descriptions of the new locations, pack by pack.

First off, the Expansion: Speed tracks;

Quicksands –

The sea breeze in your racing leathers, the sand in your face, crystal clear seawater in your gas tank…Quicksands isn’t just sun-kissed, it’s sun-smooched-on-the-doorstep-and-put-out-on-the-first-date. When ‘beautiful azure waters’ sits so close to ‘brutal, deadly crossovers’ in the brochure description, you’ll be saying, “Wish you were here,” while wishing you were somewhere else at the same time.

Darkfire Swamp –

No sooner was this swamp-based track completed than Mother Nature decided to do some heavy handed redesign. With fissures opened up along its length, long-stagnant pools drained and dried, and deadly molten lava rolling in for some hot pool party action, the MotorStorm organizers decided it was the best redesign EVER.

Engorged –

Through an impossibly narrow chasm where sunlight rarely shines, natures torrents carve new, untamed-able routes for her disciples to follow. Big boulders, fast waters and epic vistas; this track satisfies every appetite. One to really gorge on, you’ll need a hunger for survival – get ready to jump to the main course.

Moving onto Expansion: Adrenaline;

Reef Runner – The world’s downright-prettiest boat graveyard, Reefrunner combines hard, fast sand flats, wide coastal shallows and a lightning-fast, foliage-packed jungle sprint. Lightweights should look to hop over the sand banks, heavyweights can tear through the shallows, and everyone else can stick to the middle routes while trying to apply the sunblock and get their swimming trunks on for the post-race beach party.

Brimstone – Spurred on by a love of all things stupid and deadly, the hardcore lunatics united and set up this battlefield of a racetrack. Located inside an unstable volcanic wasteland, Brimstone offers smoking craters, sulphurous lakes, and deadly underground lava tubes. Hell above and Hell below makes this a hell of a good place to stage a race.

Hollowed Earth – At the top of the Island lies the racetrack at the bottom of the world. Built in and around a cavernous and complex natural cave system, Hollowed Earth demands fast reactions, racing discipline, and the ability not to think about the millions of tons of unstable volcanic rock directly above your head. A torch and a mining helmet probably wouldn’t go amiss, either.

As you may well know by now, each expansion pack also re-introduces familiar tracks in entirely new ways. Dubbed as ‘Track Variants’, there are 8 in total, selected from the most popular online tracks, and all given the ‘Volcanic’ subtitle. Rather than just tweaking the tracks by adding a few routes here and closing a few others off there with barriers or fencing, we’ve chosen to theme these redesigns around the idea of the Island going fully volcanic! Imagine lava Bombs spattering the track, erupting volcanoes, ash falling in the air, lava spewing across racing lines, the whole works! Each of these tracks features different degrees of ‘natural interference’ ; at one end of the scale we have The Edge Volcanic, which as an Air track isn’t going to see too much direct Lava interference, but is going to have its racing lines significantly affected by huge chunks of molten rocks smashing all over the track. At the other extreme, Earth and Fire tracks like Rift Volcanic and Scorched Volcanic show just what can happen at ground zero when the fires of hell spill out over the raceways! Lava levels rise, mud fields bake and crack, standing water evaporates, and tracks you think you know all too well suddenly provide an altogether different racing experience! We’re hoping you’re going to love the variety and surprises these new tracks provide, and that you’ll all enjoy getting your head around the new strategic racing approaches they require!

Next time, we’re going to take an in-depth look at the massive new single/multiplayer experience that is Speed Weekend, debuting in the Expansion: Speed pack! Keep those motors running!

As ‘Stormers’ worldwide continue to collect their FREE Signature Liveries every week, all eyes are turning towards the coast of the setting sun to see what’s in store next. We’re well aware of what you’ve all been wishing for – Tracks, Modes, fresh Rides and a few surprises on the side. All wishes, we’re very happy to report, that we’re about to make come true.

If you’re one of the fortunate 40,000 attending E3 at the LA Convention Center on June 2-4, and you’re a MotorStorm fan, then you’ll be able to count yourself amongst the first in the world to witness our 2 new major downloadable content packs, ‘Expansion: SPEED’ and ‘Expansion: ADRENALINE’. Rammed bumper-to-bumper with new content, you’re going to need to set aside some serious time to investigate them both fully.

• Expansion: SPEED will be the first off the start line, and screams into view fully tanked up with MotorStorm goodness; 3 brand new tracks (Quicksands, Engorged and Dark Fire Swamp), 3 brand new track variants, 4 sweet new vehicles (sporting 3 paint jobs each) and a whole brand new 48-event Mini-Festival, ‘Speed Weekend’, packed with unlockable rewards, trophies and Microbadges.
• Expansion: ADRENALINE is racing along beside it, neck-and-neck, and bringing with it even MORE content! 3 MORE new tracks (Reefrunner, Brimstone and Hollowed Earth), 5 new track variants, 4 more exclusive new race machines (each with 3 liveries to choose from), 6 brand new characters (each sporting 3 different costumes), and a whole big fat stash of fresh new paint jobs for your existing vehicles.

Let’s look at those numbers for a moment – between these two packs, we’re almost DOUBLING the track count in the game, giving you plenty more locations for online races, plenty more Time Attack ghosts to chase, and plenty more settings for split screen fun with your buddies. And you’ve got to believe me guys, these new tracks and the new track variants are some of the best-looking, best-racing tracks we’ve ever made.

So, what do you think?

We’ve now shared all of our pre-E3 Q&A sessions, save for one. Look for our Heavy Rain interview next week.

Hope you’re having fun ripping it up in the jungle on Pacific Rift because starting this Thursday, May 14th, we’ll be sending a downloadable vehicle livery pack your way every week for the next eight weeks exclusively via PlayStation Store. Each pack features new paint jobs for three vehicles, and the full set will give MotorStorm: Pacific Rift players a cutting-edge new look for every single vehicle class in the game: Mudpluggers, Quad Bikes, Monster Trucks, Rally Cars and more. Each new livery has been designed by one of Evolution’s top studio artists and the result is a collection of some of the craziest and out-there vehicle sprays ever seen in a racing game!

And to top it off, all these liveries are FREE!

Additionally, Game Update #2 was just released, and provides a number of useful fixes and updates for MotorStorm Pacific Rift. These include:

• Sugar Rush short-cut removed – The short-cut to the left of the “keep right” arrows going into the sugar field was not intentionally included and has been removed
• Sugar Rush respawn point fixed – Crashing at a certain point on the track no longer respawns the vehicle in a generous position
• Inclusion of Microbadges

Actually, wanted to focus on these new Microbadges as these are very cool ways of giving each player a distinct identity when online in MotorStorm Pacific Rift. Microbadges are in-game displayable ‘medals’ which let you flaunt your proudest personal accomplishments and your off-road racing prowess to every other racer online.

Microbadges go beyond the usual Trophies that MotorStorm Pacific Rift already awards; the idea is that they should be dedicated to things you’d want other players to know about while you’re racing online. Here are some examples:

• Gold Festival – Completed Pacific Rift Festival with all Gold medals
• Immortal – Win an Online Ranked race without wrecking
• Flame and Fortune – 20 Boost explosion wins
• Time Attack Master – Record an impressive Time Attack time on any Leaderboard
• Supreme Victor – Win any Online or Offline race by a margin of 15 seconds

Microbadges are displayed beneath each Online ID, and players can display up to three badges from the get-go. Three more badge slots (there are six slots total) can be earned by working up the online ranks, and players can unlock 40 microbadges total. Players can choose which badges to show off and highlight what they’ve achieved in the game. Microbadges will also provide retroactive credit, so if you’ve already put in the hours, you’ll be reaping the rewards.

Last but not least, we wanted to give you a heads up on the photo contest we highlighted earlier.

Well we have finally gotten our winners, and they will be officially announced later this week on the official MotorStorm VIP site: vip.motorstorm.com. Keep an eye out to see if you are one of the lucky winners!

With the MotorStorm: Pacific Rift version 1.01 game update, we launched a new and improved Photo Mode to enable you to take even more stunning pictures of your brutal off-road experiences.

Now, in an exclusive competition on VIP.MotorStorm.com, we want to give you the chance to show off your best snaps in superb style.

We want your best shots using the improved photo mode that capture the brutal thrills of race action and the savage beauty of the island. The more action packed the shot the better.

The 20 best pictures will each be considered for inclusion in one of our future updates as a loading screen image (with your PSN Online ID signed on it as the credited creator), and the photographer will also win a MotorStorm t-shirt!

Imagine how sweet it would be to start up a race, with your friends sitting around on the sofa, and seeing your photo displayed (with your name on it) on the loading screen before the race!

To make your mark in your favorite game and to take your place in MotorStorm history, either post up to three of your best pictures into the competition thread on the VIP.MotorStorm.com forums or email them to competitions@community.eu.playstation.com, with “MotorStorm Photo” in the subject field. Please ensure that each photo is named after your PSN Online ID (such as “MusterBuster_01.jpg”). Also please indicate that you are submitting from North America as we will be selecting 20 winners from Europe and 20 from North America.

To submit a photo:
1. Pause the game and take a photo using Photo Mode.
2. Export the photo from your Gallery (in your Garage) to your XMB.
3. Transfer the photo from your XMB to your PC (and email it or host it on a website and post it in the competition thread).

Your entries must reach us by 11:59 pm pacific time on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 to be eligible. You must be 16 or older to take part. Further terms and conditions are listed below.

Terms and Conditions

1. The Competition is open to residents of the United States and Canada ages 16 or over except employees of the Sony Computer Entertainment companies, their families, agents or any other person professionally connected with the Competition.

2. Maximum of 3 photos may be submitted per household.

3. All entries must be received by 11:59 pacific time on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 (the “Closing Date”).

4. Winners will be notified via email within 28 days of the competition Closing Date and must respond within 28 days of receiving the notification to claim their prize.

5. Please click here for further terms and conditions.