Right, this is strange. The day after my rant about the PS3 not needing an in-game XMB, we get two things on the Playstation Store that ironically address the themes of discussion. High Velocity Bowling supports custom soundtracks, and the TimeShift demo allows you to bring up your friends list and read your messages.

Strange aye? It’s as if Sony was watching me write my rant, and is now putting the finger up to me and saying “suck on that!”  I’m sorry Sony, you know better *cowers*.

So if you have any music tracks on your Playstation 3’s hard-drive, you can now play them during High Velocity Bowling. This all suggests that a lot of these features are available for the developers to use now, but it’s up to them to implement them and find system memory to allow for it.

However, High Velocity Bowling doesn’t support playing music via streaming from your computer, only from tracks on your PS3’s HDD.

These screenshots show the feature off:

Another surprise on the Playstation Store is the TimeShift Multiplayer demo, which allows you to bring up your friends list and fiddle around with your messages. Pretty gobsmackingly satisfying stuff aye? Resistance had a similar feature, and Motorstorm had its own friends list…but it’s nice to see it elsewhere and implemented so easily in to a demo of all things.

We know this is all coming from Sony, we just want it now. I hear on the grapevine that what’s taking them so long is both HOME, which should come with all these features, and the sheer amount of memory that the keyboard takes up: around 20-30MB memory. Sony have put aside memory for all of this, but 20MB is simply too much, and I’m sure this is what they are working on reducing.

Well the future is coming and we can now see it in front of our eyes. The PS3 just needs it for all its games. Please?

Credit: Neogaf

Tags: custom-sountrack, high-velocity-bowling, ingame-xmb, messaging

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