PS3 Fanboy

It's Thursday as I write this, a day that most PS3 owners (and perhaps a small number of well-connected PSP owners) look forward to as PSN update day. I too love Thursdays but not without a small amount of anxiety. I'm a bit of a completist (yea really, a gamer that's a completist. . .) and much like my obsessive drive to own a mint package of every Kool-Aid flavor ever made, each week when new game demos and vids are uploaded I am preternaturally compelled to download them. The videos are no big commitment, generally a quarter hour of passive watching and they're sufficiently digested, but demos are a real time sink. You see, I don't just download the demos of games or genres that interest me. Nor do I spend a few minutes with each demo, just long enough to decide if the game has me hooked and I should commit myself to buying it or not. Ladies and gentlemen, fanboys and fangirls, I present for your toxonomic consideration the newest discovered species of gamer - homo sapeins completus demotaris.

The Japanese PSN store has been graced with two new demos. GI Jockey 4 2007 and Heavenly Sword have both had playable nuggets placed online for download. For those of you still interested in Heavenly Sword but not ready to actually pay money for it, this new demo may be for you. Featuring Kai, instead of Nariko, the second demo allows you to play through one of her arrow shooting missions - also allowing you a taste of using aftertouch to guide her arrows.

As for GI Jockey, we're fairly certain that if you're not into horse racing then this demo won't change your mind. Keep your eye out for the Gran Turismo Prologue demo - due to drop on the Japanese PSN Store later today.

For E3 this year, Microsoft is offering a ton of content related to the show for download over their XBL service. It's a great way for us mere mortals to taste a bit of the excitement of E3 and maybe even try out a couple of the games. Last year it was a lot of fun, and people were wondering if Sony was going to step up to the plate with their own E3 offering. Unlike Microsoft, they've been rather quiet about their plans -- leading a lot of people to speculate that it was going to be yet another sparce content showing from Sony. But things may not be as they look, as just earlier today Sony updated their PlayStation Store front with an interesting teaser image (seen above). Sony has never used the main Store Top frame to advertise anything that wasn't directly related to the PlayStation Store some how, so this is an interesting development.

Hopefully this isn't just a tease and actually leads to a solid E3 content push from Sony. Toss in a Lair demo and a Killzone 2 video and that would make a whole lotta people happy little campers.

The PS3 dev kits on display at GDC apparently skipped the HDMI connection for some of their demos, casting doubt on how far along Sony's come with its hardware and digital standards compliance.

During GDC, Sony brought along a few PS3 demo units to show off audio and video, which TG Daily spied from a distance. As you can see above, the PS3 graphics demo unit used a standard AV Multi-Out connector while the "two HDMI ports right below the AV Multi-Out port were unused." TGD apparently offered to lend Sony officials an HDMI cable of their own to connect to the system, but they were turned down.

Of course, there's also a conflicting pic which Chris Grant took for us on Joystiq Central that seems to show that very HDMI connection being used, probably with another unit. (Scroll down to the second pic here to see it.) So what's the real story? Was Sony lacking enough updated HDMI 1.3 hardware and/or 1.3-compatible TVs to show off the HD goods, or were they simply short on cables? Maybe their budget was a bit tight for GDC (what with Phil's focused keynote and abundance of GDC sessions from Sony), so hopefully we'll see everything hooked up nice and tidy for E3.

[Thanks, Michael, Racky, pheen, and DocEvil; via TechSpot and CD Freaks]