Is Sony finally getting its PlayStation 3 act together?

Will last month’s PS3 price cuts and this week’s set of additional announcements help Sony’s Playstation gaming platform to hold its own against Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s Wii? The verdicts from analysts are mixed.

Parks Associates analyst Michael Cai disagrees wholeheartedly Enderle Associates principal analyst Rob Enderle about PS3’s future.

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Game Of The Year: BioShock, Halo 3, Mass Effect & Orange Box nominated in Spike’s VGA

Yes, The Game Of The Year (GOTY) discussion is already beginning! Spike is hosting its 5th annual Video Game Awards this December in Las Vegas, and this morning the nominees were released on Spike.com. What’s in contention for Game of the Year? Orange Box, Halo 3, BioShock, and Mass Effect.

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Famitsu reviews Assassin’s Creed: 37/40

As if we needed further proof that November will assassinate your wallet, Famitsu has heaped glowing praise atop Assassin’s Creed. According to a forum post on the Ubisoft forums, Famitsu has given the title a very respectable 37/40, with the individual reviews standing at 10, 8, 9, and 10. Incidentally, Famitsu handed the same overall score to Halo 3. There are some tiny scans of the reviews on the forums, but our Kanji is a little rusty. Thankfully, someone went to the trouble of summing things up. Apparently, the Famitsu reviewers were impressed by the story, presentation, and addicting acrobatics, noting that Assassin’s Creed is a true next-gen title. Some knocks against it are the one button combat, confusing map, and occasional camera problems. All in all, it sounds pretty solid. Good news for gamers, bad news for bank accounts.

Apps Already Coming for Google’s New OpenSocial

A day after MySpace and Google sent shockwaves through the Web 2.0 world, third-party developers already are announcing plans to build applications using their jointly developed social network APIs.

MySpace and Google announced Thursday that they had joined forces

to create a set of APIs that can be used to by third parties to create social applications on a variety of sites.

Plaxo, for example, Friday unveiled new dynamic profiles that support Google’s new OpenSocial APIs. Users of Plaxo’s Pulse social network can now create distinct professional and personal profiles that include photos, contact information and privacy settings. Any applications written to the Google OpenSocial APIs can be embedded in the profiles, Plaxo said.

The impetus behind OpenSocial, Google said, was to allow developers to learn one API and then be able to write a social application for any OpenSocial partner site. “And because it’s built on Web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don’t have to learn a custom programming languages,” noted Amar Gandhi and Peter Chane, group product managers at Google in a blog post.

Google estimates that more than 200 million users of the Web sites that have committed to OpenSocial, like MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn, will have access to these applications.

“Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts,” the two noted in the blog. “OpenSocial will also work in nontraditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we’ll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts.”

Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape (later acquired by AOL in 1998) blogged that OpenSocial dispels the common assumption held by some that Facebook has established unquestionable dominance in the social networking world. He noted that while many people assumed in the mid-1990s that AOL owned the Web because it had amassed tends of millions of users, it lost its dominance when broadband became widely available and people no longer needed a dial-up ISP.

“I am not predicting the death of Facebook,” Andreesen blogged. “I think the Facebook people are brilliant and are going to do very well over the next several years. But the idea that you hear from time to time that ‘all the users are on Facebook’ and ‘the game is over; the Facebook platform has won’ is silly, as you can see every time you use a web site that doesn’t end in aol.com.”

Andreessen, of course, founded Ning, a company that allows users to build their own social networks and is an OpenSocial partner. Ning plans to make OpenSocial applications available to all of its 113,000 social networks later this year or early next spring, the company said. OpenSocial applications will run inside social networks across Ning, the company said.

“All of the partners finalizing and releasing all of the initial OpenSocial container and application implementations, of course,” Andreessen noted in his blog. Everyone can just smell the opportunity, and people are going to drive to ship as quickly as possible.”

Need for Speed ProStreet Update

With Need for Speed ProStreet revving its engine and about to roll up to the starting line, we ran through the opening sections of an almost final build of the game to see what’s in store for us in just a few short weeks.

We’ve previously talked at length about how you can create a Race Day online for other players to jump in and play at their leisure. The single-player game works the same way, with events grouped into said Race Days and your goal being to win or even dominate each set of events. Each event in a Race Day, be it a Grip Race, Drag Race or what have you, earns you a number of points depending on your placement, how much you can beat a target time by and the damage total on your car. Once you’ve garnered enough points, even if you haven’t completed all of the events, you’ll be crowned the winner, and if you earn enough, you’ll be deemed to have dominated the event, which earns you extra goodies.

Horsepower and skill are the keys to victory.

When you’ve completed an event, you’ll earn a cash prize as well as a mystery gift. Five “cards” will appear face-down on the screen and you can choose one at random. These prizes range from more cash to a new car to a repair ticket or more.

Credits: IGN.com

New trailer for Ubisoft’s: Assassin’s Creed

A new Assassin’s Creed’s trailer has been released.

 Check it out by clicking here