The infamous missing in-game Cross Media Bar. Some want it, some don’t. But with the sweet news of a possible positive implementation of universal in-game messaging, who’s to be upset about that?

The eagle eyed few spotted an update on the Official US Playstation website, which has now mysteriously disappeared. The mention of in-game messaging is what excites, and its removal only adds to the intrigue.

One savvy individual managed to take a screenshot of the offending new PSN section before it went down, so we can read exactly what was said:

Friends & Messaging: Talk to others during game play, say hello anytime you’re online, or have a video chat with an Eye camera, USB Camera, or headset.

The wording appears to be very much deliberate, with “during game play” and “anytime you’re online” being the highlights. We all know it’s possible, with many games taking up the in-game XMB gauntlet, some with in-game soundtracks (High Velocity Bowling, MLB 08) and others with in-game messaging (TimeShift) or alerts (Devil May Cry 4). We will just have to wait for Sony’s announcement, presumably to come at GDC.

We’ll keep you posted on any further developments. For evidence of this news, feast your eyes on this screenshot (click to enlarge.)

Source: Neogaf

Update: The original webpage can now be viewed as a google cache screenshot at this address, in addition to the messaging paragraph appearing on the Official Australian Playstation Website.

Are Sony mixing up their words and giving us false hope, or is this a positive reveal just before GDC ‘08?

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