MotorStorm 3D Rift, a pack of ten 3D tracks for the last Motorstorm title, will be released via PSN next week.

“MotorStorm 3D Rift lets you experience 10 MotorStorm Pacific Rift tracks in stunning 3D and features a selection of festival-favourite off-road vehicles: Bikes, Buggies, Racing Trucks and Monster Trucks – the latter being my personal weapon of choice when racing across the dangerously unpredictable jungles, beaches, waterfalls and volcanic wastelands served up by this particular tropical island,” said Evolution’s Simon Benson, speaking on the EU PS Blog.

The pack includes ten events – one for each track – and features the full range of competitor difficulty levels through the races.

See it as a precursor to the fully 3D MotorStorm Apocalypse, which releases next year.

It’ll cost £9.99 or €12.99. It’s out on Wednesday, August 25.

SCEE’s announced that Killzone 2, Resistance 2 and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift will be added to the Platinum collection in Europe for PlayStation 3.

No prices yet, but they will be out on September 2. You can pretty much bet they’ll cost £20-£25 in the UK, depending on where you look.

More over at PS Focus.

The US Home update is live and it includes the Movie Theater, with a brand-new 10-screen layout, a new lobby, and the ability to unlock rewards in select screening rooms. Future updates include the possibility of full-length TV shows or movies, and not just videos.

Burn Zombie Burn has 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 an exclusive reward.

The first wave of MotorStorm content will be arriving with MotorStorm Pacific Rift Game Launching functionality soon, just like in Europe. Same with the new Fat Princess space.

US Home users can find out more over on the US PS Blog.

MotorStorm Pacific Rift Game Launching functionality and loads of MotorStorm stuff is planned for the coming weeks on Home, according to Sony.

However until that happens, Home plans to pacify you with sweets via the Fat Princess event “Quest for Cake”.

Based upon the PSN title, the redecorated events space contains 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, these clues will “give you access to the finest gateaux and, eventually, her majesty’s waistline.”

Should you unlock all eight pieces of cake, you are rewarded with the Princesses throne for your PS apartment.

More over on the EU PS Blog.

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is including a Speed Weekend festival as part of its upcoming pack, Expansion: SPEED.

It promises loads of unlockables, rewards, trophies, and re-formulated Eliminator and Race events.

Expansion: SPEED is expected soon.

Not sure how soon because Evolution Studios has not announced a date, but you can get more details on what to expect through the US PS Blog.

Evolution Studios will be on-hand at E3 and MotorStorm: Pacific Rift fans will be able to get the first look at the new Speed and Adrenaline expansions for the racer.

Speed includes three new tracks called Dark Fire Swamp, Engorged and Quicksand, three new track variants, four vehicles with three paint jobs each, and a 48-event Mini-Festival called Speed Weekend which has unlockable rewards, trophies and Microbadges.

Adrenaline also has three new tracks – Brimstone, Hallowed Earth and Reefrunner. Five new track variants, four new vehicles with three liveries to choose from, six characters each with three different costumes and a large bit of paint for the vehicles you already own.

No word on pricing or a when it can be expected, but E3 is just a few days away.

New DLC is making its way to PSN for MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.

Best of all – it’s free.

For eight weeks, one pack per week will be released  featuring new paint jobs for three vehicles.

When all is said and done, every single vehicle class in the game will have a new look.

There’s a video of the new colors posted after the break.

The PSBlog’s confirmed that Motorstorm: Pacific Rift’s about to get its first major patch. It looks as though there’s a good amount of stuff tweaked and fixed in there, including the following:

• Restrictions to the copying of Saved Data have been removed. This will make it possible for Saved Data to be backed up and then restored to the User Account it was created under (whether that’s on the same PLAYSTATION 3 or not).*
• Changes to the way the game handles data. These changes will help to prevent Saved Data corruption.
• Visual notification of critical save progress has been added. A ‘MotorStorm Helmet’ icon will be displayed on-screen to warn users that critical data is being saved. This is in addition to the HDD Access light which currently flashes while the game makes a critical save.
• The glitch which enables a player to exploit the Boost system has been removed. The development team are working to identify which times have been achieved using this glitch; Action will be taken to ensure that the Leaderboards become genuinely competitive again.
• Time Attack times and Rank information will update correctly for all players. Any pending Time Attack times will begin to filter through systematically and the online Ranks should display correctly once the update is released.
• Additional fixes and improvements to gameplay. Many thanks for your feedback on these and other issues so far; we are still investigating the other issues that have been brought to our attention.

Apparently the update’s in the “final stages of development and testing,” but there’s no fixed date.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift has passed 1 million sales, Sony Europe studios boss Michael Denny’s told GI.

“We’re pleased with the high Metacritic rating of 82 per cent and it’s sold over a million units worldwide,” he said.

The games was released at the beginning of November, entering the charts at number 29 in the UK and then falling the following week to 35.

Just goes to show. More through there.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift lead designer Nigel Kershaw’s told the 1UP show that too much importance is placed on whether or not target renders can be compared to final games. Although he seemed to be a little more annoyed than that.

The quote in full:

“We always do a render. Before you do a game, you do a test render that says, ‘This is the game we want to make, now let’s go make it.’ It’s just like writing a game design document. The end result might not look like the render that you did. Who gives a shit? If you’re 50, 60, 70, 80% to that line, then you’ve succeeded. But also, it’s not about the visuals. If you go back and look at that movie, it was about the interaction of the vehicles. It was about lots of vehicles racing together…all that stuff that we achieved….

“But it’s this thing that haunts you, that you didn’t match your target render…. Everybody makes such a big fucking deal of it. Who gives a shit? That’s how we make games. If people have got a problem with that, tough.”

Draw your own conclusions. More through the link.

Posting on the US PS Blog, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift director Nigel Kershaw has said the team at Evolution is to try to provide weekly DLC for the game – which launches in the US tomorrow – and that larger chunks of extra content are on the way next year.

“Once were all rested its back to the development bunker to finish off the DLC we have lined up for you guys in the coming months,” he said.

“We’ve got a pile of stuff waiting in the wings, and, you’ll be glad to know, a lot of it is free. We’re going to try and give you something new to play with every week, and we’ve also got some major packs in development that should be on the store after Christmas.”

We assume that means you’ll be paying for the bigger lumps.

More through there.

The off-road racer has had some middling reviews but there’s a demo on PSN if you want to make your own minds up.

By Mike Bowden

…too much of your time is spent grinding second-choice metal in search of elusive pace, or cursing imperious AI and unpredictable catastrophe, and in the battle between the game’s infrequent but electrifying highs and its frustrating lows, the result is too close to stalemate to match the first game’s understated achievement.

So there you go. Game’s out in Europe on November 7.

By Mike Bowden

SCEE’s just confirmed that Motorstorm: Pacific Rift will release on November 7 in Europe, not November 14 as suggested by this now sketchy-looking list of dates.

The game’s going head to head with Gears of War 2, in case you’d forgotten. Another notable for the same day will be Tom Clancy’s EndWar. Looks as though it’s going to be an expensive time for you multi-genre buffs.

You can get the Motorstorm demo from PSN now.

It’s Friday night! You could be getting drunk, or taking drugs, or whatever, but instead you’re going to hit this link and look at 93 screenshots of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift.

Better, there aren’t even that many vehicles in them, as they’re mainly environment shots. Crack won’t take you higher. CVG could be bothered to upload them, so don’t feel bad about doing it: the drugs will always be there next week.

Sony’s confirmed that MotorStorm Pacific Rift is to release on October 28 in America.

The news comes by way of the US PS Blog.

There’s been no confirmation of a European date as yet.

Sony’s confirmed details of this week’s MotorStorm: Pacific Rift demo, according to Eurogamer, and the track the lucky few are going to get to play is “Rain God Spires – an Air Zone track that takes you along a bumpy coastal mountain circuit with plenty of ups and downs to highlight the game’s massive draw distance.”

More through there. As previously reported, those allowed to play the demo will be picked at random and emailed later this week.

Randomly selected European PlayStation 3 owners will be able to get their hands on an upcoming demo of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift previously thought to be exclusive to US gamers who bought an episode of PSN show Qore.

There’s more info on Eurogamer and ThreeSpeech. Basically, random PS3 owners in Europe are to be emailed a voucher to download the demo.

Hit the links and read.

New episodes of QORE are released on the first Thursday on every month so expect this around the 4th.

Europe will be getting this along with the other non-subscribing freeloaders in October.

Thanks, DarkZero

By Mike Bowden

Have look-see.

By Mike Bowden

In the wake of July’s NPD figures, we thought we’d look at just how well the ‘big three’ have fared over the last seven months by tallying all hardware data for 2008.

We all know Nintendo is having a fantastic year, but just how well is Wii doing?

Microsoft and Sony are fighting their own high-def battle, but how big is the margin between the two, and who has the lead?

After the drop.

Back in February, “Big” Jack Tretton announced that this was the year of the PS3, and if it wasn’t for Wii he may well have been right.

The Mario machine has certainly lived up to its E3 promise of making people smile, moving 4,038,000 units so far this year.

Wii’s success isn’t the only reason Nintendo’s smiling like a Cheshire cat this year: DS has sold 3,795,400 machines so far in 2008, making Nintendo’s total hardware tally for the US 7,833,400.

By comparison, Sony’s three-pronged attack of PS3, PS2 (no Jan 2008 sales figures are available, oddly) and PSP, has achieved 4,705,000 unit sales in total.

Xbox 360 sales figures have remained steady since January, but have always rested near the 200,000 mark. Total 360 sales for the year come in at a relatively paltry 1,560,800 units.

This figure puts Microsoft’s console firmly at the bottom of the next-gen pile. In fact, if we take every device into consideration, Microsoft’s great green hope has sold just over 400,000 more than PS2, and that’s without January’s figure for the last-gen Sony machine included.

As we’re fast approaching the Christmas period, and with so many big titles from all three consoles – most markedly from Sony and Microsoft – the most pertinent question in the US market is whether or not the Nintendo train can be derailed in any meaningful way.

Sony is pushing LittleBigPlanet hard, with the company wanting Sackboy to become an “emblematic character” for the brand. There’s also the mouth-watering Resistance 2 and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift to look forward to in the last quarter of this year.

Microsoft is betting heavily this autumn on Epic’s Gears of War 2, a Rare duo of Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, and Lionhead’s atmospheric Fable II.

While all the above look fantastic, it remains to be seen if these high profile titles will be preaching to the converted or they’ll have the power to turn onlookers into new customers. Will they encourage the nearly 5 million Wii owners to choose a PS3 or 360 as their second console?

The only ‘AAA’ Wii titles confirmed as hitting US shores before Yuletide are Wii Music, Animal Crossing: City Folk, Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquillity and Star Wars: Clone Wars Lightsaber Duels. While it looks like an anorexic line-up, Wii Music alone is likely to secure success for the machine this Holiday.

But Christmas is months away. Who’s “winning” in America so far this year?

NPD Hardware for 2008

1. Wii: 4,038,000
2. NDS: 3,795,400
3. PS3: 1,833,000
4. PSP: 1,704,200
5. 360: 1,560,800
6. PS2: 1,168,500

By Mike Bowden

On Watch Impress. Looking good from where we’re standing. Pretty, even. Go see.

Game’s out at the end of the year.

Eurogamer TV’s posted up an exclusive visit to Motorstorm 2 developer Evolution Studios, complete with loads of interviews and in-game footage. Take a look.

Check them out.

By Mike Bowden

What’s Motorstorm 2 like to play? We don’t know. Eurogamer does, though, as you can see from this hands-on. Snip:

The placement of water in Cascade Falls and Kanaloa Bay is extremely well thought-out, an object lesson in track design. MotorStorm’s remit – wide-open, branching tracks, with multiple racing lines and balanced for multiple vehicle types – is perhaps the hardest design challenge in racing games, and the first game was consequently a little basic and messy in places. You can already tell that Pacific Rift is a tighter ship – in vehicle classes as well as track design, this game is looking much better tuned and balanced than its predecessor.

Full thing through the link.

Jeux-Video’s posted up two new movies of Motorstorm Pacific Rift. They’re filmed off a screen, but they’re a good length and show plenty. Looks great, in our bleedy-eyed opinion. Worth watching to hear a French chap say, “Le boost”.

Just to add to this lot of screens and movies, here are the last shots we missed from the asset disc handed out at the SCEE PlayStation Day yesterday.

• MotorStorm Pacific Rift shots
• Siren: Blood Curse shots
• SingStar Vol. 2 shots
• SingStar PS3 shots
• PlayTV shots
• Elefunk shots
• PixelJunk Eden shots

D-Pad‘s got some new shots of Motorstorm 2 in its latest issue, as well as an interview with game director Nigel Kershaw.

Kershaw confirms there’ll be Home integration in the game, which is down for an end-of-year release.

“Home is a really exciting area for all PlayStation 3 developers; it’s going to have a huge impact upon the gaming public when it comes out,” he said. “I think it’s going to really start binding the PS3 online community together. I’m really looking forward to watching it progress, and MotorStorm will be a strong presence from the off.”

Go have a look. There’s plenty of good stuff in there, including a GTA IV review. Bet you can’t guess the score.