Ben-DutkaNot many things have gone right for the PS3 launch so far, but Sony is making damn sure their online services are ready to go immediately.
If you've been lucky enough to score a preordered PS3 – which you'll be picking up tomorrow morning – you can register for an online account to dive into the PlayStation Store, Sony's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace. Once in the Store, you're free to browse around and download demos for the system's first games, among other things.
Now, registration is free, but you're going to need a valid credit card to sign up (so kiddies, you're gonna need your parent's help). But once you're set, users can select an avatar from a couple pages of Sony-centric art, and that includes pics from the likes of God of War , Jak and Daxter , and the SOCOM franchise.
As for games, the Store is already sitting pretty with trailers for Resistance: Fall of Man , NBA 07 , Lair , Genji: Days of the Blade , MotorStorm , Calling All Cars! , Cash Guns Chaos , and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom . As for those demos we mentioned earlier, gamers can have some brief play time with Resistance , MotorStorm , Cash Guns Chaos , Formula One Championship Edition , Blast Factor , and NBA 07 . Lastly, they've got two full downloadable games available for purchase: Cash Guns Chaos and Blast Factor , both of which priced at $7.99.
But remember, the Store isn't all about games (as Sony kept telling us in the past few months). To add some extra multimedia flavor, they've included Blu-Ray disc trailers for Black Hawk Down , House of Flying Daggers , Ultraviolet , and a few more.
It looks like the PlayStation Store is off to a running start, and certainly reinforces Sony's insistence that they're putting a great deal of emphasis on Internet functionality and options for this generation.
