I’m excited to announce that the PlayStation Experience is back on tour for 2012 and we have some awesome games and experiences planned for you, our community. For those of you new to the PlayStation Experience, every year we tour the country’s biggest concerts and festivals to show off all of our latest games and gadgets. This is your chance to meet other local PlayStation enthusiasts, compete in your favorite PlayStation titles, and most importantly, get your hands on unreleased games! I guess there are also the live performances to check out too, but who goes to music festivals for that? Especially when you can play:

• LittleBigPlanet Karting
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale
• Starhawk
• Twisted Metal
• MLB 12 The Show
• PixelJunk 4am
• Journey
• Mortal Kombat
• Street Fighter X Tekken
• Soul Calibur V
• Madden 13
• FIFA 13
• NBA 2K13
• NHL 13

…and that’s just the list of games that I can share with you! To top it all off, we will be giving away loads of PlayStation prizes everywhere we go. Trust me when I say, if you love video games and PlayStation, you will definitely want to make your way to the PlayStation Experience. Here’s a list of our confirmed stops:

We’re constantly adding new stops to the tour, so be sure to check the PlayStation Experience page regularly for updates. You can also follow @HeyPlayStation on Twitter for live Tweets from the road as well as other event updates and weekly giveaways.

I hope to see each and every one of your game faces out on the road!

So how does it work? Each Friday starting October 9th (that’s today!) at UCLA, gamers of all types, from hard-core to casual, will be invited to come down and test their NCAA Football 10 skills to compete for cool prizes and perhaps more importantly, bragging rights for their favorite schools. If your field skills outmatch and outscore the competition then you’ll receive a custom PSP and trip to the Rose Bowl on January 1, 2010 to compete in the finals!

As an added bonus, participants at each stop will also have a chance to check out the redesigned PlayStation Patrol Truck. The fully loaded semi will be exclusively featuring EA SPORTS NCAA Football 10 on state-of-the art PlayStation 3 systems, so bring your friends and prepare to channel your inner champion!

The competition starts today at UCLA before continuing on through 19-cities in a three-month tour of college towns across the nation. Check HERE for more information on when PlayStation and the EA SPORTS challenge will be in your neck of the woods.

See you on the field….

Here are a few of the PlayStation activities you don’t want to miss:

• PlayStation Experience Truck: on hand at the XFest at the Home Depot Center, we will be offering jam-packed interactive and hands-on social gaming and competition areas, including access to some of this year’s most-anticipated titles prior to their general availability like Little Big Planet, and fan favorites like Rock Band (Take the Stage) and SingStar (Show Us Your Vocals).
• “Play the Pros” competition with Tanner Foust: on Friday, August 1 on the PlayStation Experience Truck, you might have the chance to go head-to-head against former rally racing X Games champion, Tanner Foust, on Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, the fifth installment of the world’s best-selling racing franchise and intense precursor to Gran Turismo 5. One catch, you’ll have to compete on Gran Turismo 5 Prologue earlier in the day and make it into the top five ranking to compete with Tanner and win bragging rights.
• You may also be the first to watch yourself play MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, the intense racing sequel to MotorStorm, on the STAPLES jumbotron on Friday, August 1.
• PSP Zones: located at the XFest at the Home Depot Center will offer gameplay opportunities (including Internet Radio and remote play) on titles like Secret Agent Clank, MLB 08 The Show, and Hot Shots Golf Open Tee 2, and entry into a sweepstakes for the “PSP Frequent Gamer” for a chance to win a prize pack including a new PSP and games.

For more information on X Games ticket prices and availability, please go to http://expn.go.com/expn/story?id=3452745

We’ve transformed the PlayStation Experience truck into a social and community-focused environment for gamers with the addition of several highly-interactive and hands-on gaming areas.

We are showing a pre-release version of LittleBigPlanet to consumers in a specially themed area. LittleBigPlanet is certain to be one of the biggest games to hit PS3 this year and we are offering an incredibly rare opportunity chance to play the game months before it even releases!

A new interactive Rock Band stage enables consumers to try out their skills with the blockbuster game Rock Band and register for our summer-long contest “Take the Stage with Rock Band On Tour,” where you and up to three additional band members have the chance to win a trip to perform on a side stage at an actual concert event! You can check out the current leaders and learn more about the contest and it’s rules at http://www.takethestagewithrockband.com/.

We also have a specially built SingStar Stage where SingStar PS3 comes alive as aspiring rock stars sing along to their favorite songs while watching the actual music video on screen from top artists including The Killers, U2, Smashing Pumpkins, Outkast, R.E.M., Radiohead, Britney Spears and The Pussycat Dolls.

We still left in plenty of regular game stations so you can check out many of the latest releases on PlayStation 3, including the exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and PLAYSTATION Network (PSN) titles such as PAIN, echochrome and PixelJunk Monsters.

The PlayStation Patrol truck has also gone through it’s own metamorphosis. We created the PlayStation Player’s Lounge, a competition area complete with lounge seating and two 52-inch LCD big screen TVs for some of the best big screen battles ever.

We did not want to stop there, so we built in two Gran Turismo 5 Prologue game stations complete with racing seats complete with Logitech Driving Force GT steering wheels!

With the five interior 40-inch LCDs still in play, along with tons of other screens on the outside, we left plenty of room for gamers to check out all the latest and best from PlayStation!

We’ll be updating both trucks with new games throughout the year, including exclusive access to this year’s most-anticipated titles prior to their general availability. Click here and here to see whether the trucks are rumbling towards a town near you.