PS3 Fanboy

It had been rumored around the internet for a while now, so it's not exactly shocking news to hear its confirmation. Motorstorm 2 has officially been re-named Motorstorm: Pacific Rift. We're almost certain we'd heard this before, but since it hadn't been confirmed (the official unveiling is due in June's edition of PlayStation: The Official Magazine) we thought it'd be nice to assure you that you can, in fact, call the game by this title when amongst groups of friends. So get ready to race around some sexy islands and get into some sexy crashes later this year with Motorstorm: Pacific Rift.

[Thanks, Andrew Gaspar!]

Scott Kirkland, the Technical Director behind MotorStorm, sat down with Beyond3D recently to talk about some of the more technical details of developing the intense off-road racer. They cover a pretty wide range of topics, from Evolution's contributions in developing the Havok 4.5 physics middleware, to culling unseen vertices in order to increase rendering performance. Here are a couple highlights:

On SPU usage:
"MotorStorm only uses between 15 and 20 percent of available SPU resource, so we're aiming to achieve a 5 fold increase in SPU performance, which should allow us to do some awesome stuff!"

On using the SPUs and RSX for cooperative rendering:
"The leap in performance provided by [the SPUs] gives us the bandwidth to significantly reduce RSX time spent processing vertices that don't contribute to the final scene. The favoured approach is to use SPUs to generate minimal scene/instance specific index and vertex buffers from compressed data."

It is a fantastic read, and well worth checking out. It gets EXTREMELY technical at a couple points, so don't feel bad if your brain catches on fire. I set off the fire alarm twice.

We all know MotorStorm took #1 in the US and Japan with software sales, which is awesome. We're not ashamed to admit that -- neither should you! It's a fun game. Lots of mud. Anyway, alongside Resistance: Fall of Man, it's taken the top of the charts across the world. It's not an easy feat to say that you've been number one in the US, Japan, and Europe!

Evolution's boss, Martin Kenwright, issued this statement: "Developing Motorstorm to a standard we were all happy with was certainly a challenge - but the team here really delivered. Evolution has a reputation for delivering high quality racing titles, but the consensus was to come up with something really special for Sony's new hardware. We're delighted that the public has agreed with the press and made Motorstorm a worldwide number one PlayStation 3 title." Shall we raise our mugs and sing a song to honor this accomplishment?

The Turok franchise has been an acquired taste; where most FPS franchises gain popularity through a constant rate of carnage, Turok the Dinosaur Hunter featured large environments and heavy segments of exploration. When it debuted with this formula on the N64, the game was widely received as being a generally great game. The rest of its installments on the console followed the path that the first title paved and it wasn't until Turok: Evolution hit the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube that the franchise became the fish out of water, flapping on the concrete and slowly dying.

As such, the announcement that Turok would be returning to the PS3 with a new team of dedicated folks behind it who aim to return to the franchise's grass roots of its glory days on the N64 brought about hope to many a gamer. IGN picked up on that beacon of hope and set sail through dark waters in order to conduct an interview with Propaganda Games Vice President and General Manager Josh Holmes.