The new handheld PS Vita launches on February 22nd in North America, and Sony has finally announced the complete game lineup that will be available that same day. It’s a very strong showing, with 25 titles planned for launch day, and more than 100 games currently in development.

The complete launch lineup follows:

Army Corps of Hell (Square Enix)
Asphalt Injection (Ubisoft)
Ben10 Galactic Racing (D3 Publisher)
Blazblue: Continuum Shift Extend (Aksys)
Dungeon Hunter Alliance (Ubisoft)
Dynasty Warriors Next (Tecmo Koei)
EA Sports FIFA Soccer (EA)
Escape Plan (Sony, download only)
F1 2011 (Codemasters)
Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational (Sony)
Hustle Kings (Sony, download only)
Little Deviants (Sony)
Lumines Electronic Symphony (Ubisoft)
Michael Jackson: The Experience (Ubisoft)
ModNation Racers: Road Trip (Sony)
Plants vs. Zombies (SOE, download only)
Rayman Origins (Ubisoft)
Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen (Namco Bandai)
Super StarDust Delta (Sony, download only)
Tales of Space: Mutant Blobs (Drinkbox Studios, download only)
Touch My Katamari (Namco Bandai)
Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 (Capcom)
Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Sony)
Virtua Tennis 4: World Tour Edition (Sega)
WipEout 2048 (Sony)

Sony expects game prices to range from $9.99 all the way up to $49.99, presumably based on the scope and quality of the game. Sony also announced that every PS Vita system will ship with six AR Play Cards and one download voucher, good for several “AR Play” minigames (augmented reality). An additional ten games have been announced as “launch window titles,” meaning they should be out sometime within the PS Vita’s first quarter year on the market. Those ten titles are:

Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention (NIS America)
Gravity Rush (Sony)
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (WBIE)
MLB 12 The Show (Sony)
Ninja Gaiden Plus (Tecmo Koei)
Reality Fighters (Sony)
Ridge Racer (Namco Bandai)
Silent Hill: Book of Memories (Konami)
Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted (505 Games)
Unit 13 (Sony)

When I heard the news that Sony is redesigning PlayStation Home from the ground-up, my first thought (like probably many of yours) was… People actually play that? Sony must feel the same, because this overhaul is bringing some significant upgrades that all kinds of gamers will appreciate.

I’ve popped in on Home now and then over the years, and yes, there are always plenty of people there, hanging out, playing mini games, or collecting stuff to deck out their personal “Harbor Studio” space. But I never quite got what the big deal was, and I know loads of others who feel the same. For most, it’s a footnote, a sideshow curiosity in the annals of PlayStation history.

The new "Action District"

Mostly I’ve always been amazed that Sony has the gall to charge real-world money for virtual goods that serve no purpose whatsoever. The tchotchkes for sale inside Home are clothes, furniture, and accessories, which are fine, but they do nothing at all to improve your gaming experience. The same could be said about Xbox’s avatar store, but I’ve never spent money on anything there, either. Why would I? Bragging rights, so all of my avatar’s little avatar friends can ooh and aah over my supreme fashion sense? Give me a break.

The new "Pier Park" (yes, you can ride the Ferris Wheel)

To make Home more appealing to gamers like myself, Sony’s new “hub and districts” design organizes content by genre instead of by game. You’ll find places like the Action District, Sportswalk, Adventure District, and Pier Park (for puzzles and mini games). The Central Plaza is going away entirely to make room for the new “Hub,” which functions as a more streamlined core user experience, but you’ll keep your Harbor Studio and all of your personal trophies. They’re even updating the game engine.

The new PlayStation Home central "Hub"

But the big news is quests. Like achievements and trophies, quests are meant to give added purpose to your actions within Home by awarding you for the games and activities you participate in. The idea is that players who choose to can use quests to turn the entire Home experience itself into one big game. The video above goes into more detail about this concept and how it will make Home a more interesting place to “live.”

So if you’ve never indulged in Home, do these redesign plans make you more likely to jump in?

The reimagined PlayStation Home is expected sometime before Christmas.

A map of the overhauled new PlayStation Home

Sony PlayStation Vita

The PlayStation Vita, Sony’s next-gen PSP handheld, is coming, with all its high-tech new bells and whistles. Would you like to know when?

February 22, 2012 is when you can buy a PSVita of your very own if you live in the United States, Canada, Europe, or Latin America. The Wi-Fi model will cost $249.99, and the 3G model will be $299.99.

Sony says that there are over 100 games currently in production for the PSVita, though they haven’t confirmed how many of them will be available at launch yet. When the system arrives in Japan in December, Sony is planning to make 26 games available at launch. The PSVita really ups the ante on the PSP in a big way, adding in cutting edge tech like an OLED capacitive touchscreen, a capacitive rear touchpad, Bluetooth, GPS, and more. There’s also lots of built-in social networking functionality with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and Foursquare.

So… will you be buying one?

Sony also showed off footage and demos from their hottest upcoming titles. But will 2011 always be Sony’s year of the PSN meltdown? Or did their showing at this year’s E3 help that image fade?

PlayStation head honcho Jack Tretton took the stage and addressed the “elephant in the room” right off the bat, apologizing to gamers for the PSN security breach. With that out of the way, Sony got down to business.

Something about Sony’s events always feel humdrum to me. They throw just as much money into the production as Microsoft does, but their format — lifeless speeches from corporate suits and game developers who are both more comfortable behind a computer screen than in front of an audience — is just dry. They also tend to throw a ton of details at the audience, apparently hoping that some of them will stick.

Anyway, they’re not nearly as bad as Nintendo, I’ll give them that. I’ll get back to the big N later.

Sony’s big event this year focused mostly on the PSVita handheld device. It was good to finally see the machine in action and get a feel for what it can do, but I was struck by how Sony didn’t have much of anything new to announce. There were no Portal 2-sized surprises.

Back to the top story. PS Vita was unveiled in all its glory, and we got to see quite a few games in action, being played live. First of all, take a good look at the hardware. There’s no denying the similarity between the form factor of the PSV (I think I shall take to using that — it sounds so much better than the alternative) and the PSP. The major differences exist under the hood.

This bad boy’s got tons of horsepower, along with a fancy OLED touchscreen, a rear touch panel that can also be used for unique game controls, dual analog sticks, both front and rear cameras, gyroscope and accelerometer, and more. It runs games off of digital downloads and a specialized flash memory card, and it comes in 2 flavors: Wifi, and Wifi + 3G. The 3G version is wired for AT&T’s network (an announcement that caused loud groans throughout the audience), and will cost $299. The Wifi-only model will run $249. Both are expected in stores by this holiday season.

The most memorable moments from the PSV demo were the Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Little Big Planet demos, which bothshowed off how PSV changes the gaming dynamic with its touchscreen controls. It’s nifty stuff, but looks awfully familiar to anyone who’s used an iPhone or iPad.

Sony also announced a dedicated 3D TV built just for PlayStation players. (You can use it for watching live TV too, of course, but it’s branded for PS gaming.) The medium-sized flatscreen offers a very unique capability: instead of splitting the screen when two local gamers are playing together, the screen will display two different images overlaid atop one another. Both gamers get a full-screen experience, but their orientation to the screen will determine which image they see. And both images are in 3D. It’s undeniably cool.

The PS3 has no bigger upcoming blockbuster title than Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, and the trailer and demo we saw didn’t disappoint. The demo featured Drake fighting his way through an enormous ship at sea, which eventually starts to sink and even turns onto its side at one point, changing Drake’s entire orientation. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom for some sweet new screens from this hot title.

Here are some of the other games shown off during Sony’s E3 event.

Perhaps trying to take the focus off of the colossal disaster currently happening over on PSN, Sony today announced that a pair of tablets dedicated gaming are being added to the “PlayStation Certified” line-up of products. The “Sony Tablets” will join the Xperia Play telephone as part of this product line, which will primarily play ported PlayStation 1 games.

Running on Android 3.0, the two Sony Tablets are very different in design. Both come with built-in Wifi and 3G/4G compatibility, and both will run Sony-approved apps for web surfing, email, video, ebooks, and more via their touch-sensitive interfaces. Sony‘s press release on the tablets lists out these features, making the devices sound like iPad-killers. But the real focus for Sony is on downloadable games (a la the iTunes App Store), because that’s where they’ll make the bulk of their profits.

The first tablet sports a roomy 9.4 inch display (iPad’s is 9.7) and a slanted back which is supposed to make it easier to prop at an angle in front of you.

The second tablet has a pair of 5.5 inch displays (kind of like an extra-large Nintendo DS) which can be used as one giant screen or the bottom screen can be put to use as a virtual keyboard.

No word on pricing yet (expect dollar amounts competitive with Apple), but both devices will be available to consumers this Fall.

Following months of speculation and insider leaks, Sony at last unveiled its follow-up to the PlayStation Portable. It’s codenamed “NGP” (next-generation portable), which I can only assume means that Sony isn’t planning on calling it the “PSP2.”

The new device is a powerhouse of hardware, with tons of cutting-edge features packed into its sleek, stylish frame. At a special event last night, Sony worked hard to make the NGP out to be a high-tech cross between the power of a PS3 and the social capabilities and capacitive touchscreen of a smartphone or iPad.

That’s right: the NGP comes with a touchscreen — and not only that, but the rear of the device is equipped with a touchpad of the same size, allowing for new ways of playing. The front screen is 5″ wide, offering 960×544 resolution, and it’s not LED — it’s OLED, the next-gen screen tech that’s brighter, clearer, and draws less electricity to run. It has the usual arrow and PS action buttons, along with two analog sticks (compared to one on the PSP), making it more like a PS3 controller. It also uses the same Sixaxis accelerometer and gyroscopic sensor that’s inside the PlayStation Move controllers. Other specs include some striking similarities to the iPhone: 3G and Wifi connectivity, a three-axis electronic compass, built-in GPS, Bluetooth, and both front and rear cameras. No idea if Sony is planning a “FaceTime”-like video chat feature for those dual cameras, but they did mention that ARGs (augmented reality games) would definitely play a big part of the new device.

NGP will support downloadable games as well as a new physical media that’s basically a specialized flash memory card. The best part about this is that flash cards are upgrade-proof, meaning that future games will be able to use flash cards that hold more data but maintain the same physical size. Sony says that DLC and saved games will be stored directly on these flash cards as well.

Social networking is a major component of the NGP, with full PlayStation Network access and a whole new application called “LiveArea” that makes it easy to keep up with your friends’ activities. LiveArea will work with every game, automatically displaying the latest stats and activities of your friends on whatever games they’re playing. Another feature called “Near” will keep track of where you take your NGP, and show an interactive map that displays the locations of your friends when they’re nearby.

Franchises with titles announced for the NGP at Sony’s special event include:

• Killzone
• Uncharted
• WipEout
• LittleBigPlanet
• Call of Duty
• Resistance
• Little Deviants
• Hot Shots Golf
• Reality Fighters
• Gravity Daze
• Smart As
• Broken
• Hustle Kings

Sony also announced a new initiative called “PlayStationSuite,” which will bring last-gen PS features and games to specially-licensed and authorized smartphones (such as the leaked prototype that’s been making the rounds). The NGP handheld will be compatible with all PlayStationSuite content, and will be backwards-compatible with PSP downloadable content as well.

No pricing has been announced yet — although with all that advanced tech crammed into such a small package, there’s no way it’ll be cheap — but Sony expects to deliver it to the marketplace by the end of this year.

In 2011, Sony is going to reward players for being mega-fans, through a new “PlayStation Rewards” program. The overall concept sounds a bit like PlayStation Plus, just without having to pay for it. But Sony insists it’s more than that.

The program is going to reward players based on user rankings of “Select,” “Pro,” and “Legendary.” These three rankings are determined by how much you play a game, download demos, play PlayStation Home, use the PlayStation.com Forums, answer PSN surveys, and buy stuff on the PlayStation Store. Higher user rankings will get you greater access to stuff like exclusive Home avatars and content, themes, events, giveaways, and entry in special sweepstakes.

PlayStation Rewards is currently being offered as a closed beta to PlayStation Plus users, but it will open to the public early next year.

The PlayStation Phone is real.

It’s seemed like such an obvious thing, for so long, that tech-heads have been expecting it for years. After all, with the iPhone proving that smartphones can also be powerful gaming devices, why wouldn’t Sony engage in some corporate synergy between its Ericsson and PlayStation divisions?

Thanks to Engadget, we now know that the dream of a PSP Phone is no dream at all — it’s real. The popular tech site got its hands on this leaked prototype PlayStation Phone, which could be both the long-awaited PSP2 and a smartphone in one device. Engadget reports that the prototype appears to be running Android 2.x, complete with its own app store for buying and downloading games. (The PSP Go, with its download-only games, must have been conceived as a bridge between the original PlayStation Portable and this PSP Phone.)

Its specs are a handsome step up from the PSP, since it uses a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor and has 512MB of onboard RAM, with a microSD expansion slot. (The iPhone 4 also uses a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM.) The PSP has only 333MHz processor with 32MB of RAM. The PSP Phone has a generous-sized screen along with the standard PlayStation buttons and D-pad, as well as the standard shoulder triggers. One of the most interesting features is something entirely new to gaming devices: that long silver strip you see between the two recognizable controllers is actually a multitouch trackpad that emulates the same basic functionality as a pair of thumb sticks.

Sony is internally referring to this product with the codename “Zeus.” That’s all that’s currently known about the device; we have no idea when to expect it or how much it will cost, but my guess is that it will be priced to compete with the iPhone, its obvious target competitor.

Follow @FGgamer on Twitter for the latest gaming news.

Did you own an original PlayStation? Did you buy it when it first came out? If so, be aware: you’re dating yourself.

The PlayStation 1 has turned fifteen years old. Can you believe it? Since 1995, Sony has sold more than 377 million PS1s, PS2s, and PS3s.

I mean, look at the big plastic buttons and ports on that old thing. By today’s sleek & sexy standards, this thing looks like a child’s toy. But on the plus side, it was the first game console to ever use discs instead of cartridges — a format that would soon be adopted by every console maker.

To celebrate 15 years of the PlayStation, Sony is offering free themes for PS3 and PSP on the PS Store, a PS Home commemorative PS1 “ornament” for your avatar to sit and stare at, and weekly discounts on PS1 titles from the PS Store.

England’s MCV magazine is reporting that Sony might be planning to make a surprise announcement (which would be less so now, I suppose) at next month’s E3: the PSP2.

Now that the iPad is bringing high-def handheld gaming to the masses, Sony has to be feeling the pain with its low-def PlayStation Portable. Then there’s the already-announced, but yet to be seen, Nintendo 3DS, the successor to Nintendo’s uber-popular DS handheld, which is reportedly upping the ante by adding 3D screens to its new device that requires no special glasses to view. Add these two together and you’ve got yourself a world of hurt for Sony’s handheld device, unless they’re already planning to answer both devices with something brand new of their own.

PSP2 rumors have circulated for years (along with artist renderings of what the sleek, stylish new device might look like, such as the one above), but MCV‘s report sounds pretty convincing, even though it comes from the second-hand reports of the usual “industry insiders.” Of course, last year’s E3 brought us the PSP Go, the minor “upgrade” to the original PSP that deleted data discs in favor of downloadable content. But the PSP Go hasn’t caught on, and fans have been clamoring for a whole new device with boosted speed and capacity, and a bigger, high-def screen, for a long time.

Chances are, this report is just wishful thinking. But Sony would be crazy to not at least be planning the next PSP. The only real question is if 2010 is the year it’ll be unveiled. Sony has its new Move motion controller to show off at E3 this year, but that’s old news, comparatively. I can’t imagine anything else Sony could do to make big headlines at E3 than pull of a mega-surprise like a whole new device.

Though I do not mean that question to be taken literally, I am pretty sure that many of you (this includes me!) have actually used their netbooks or mobile phones in the bathroom. Anyhow, I ordered some nice soaps – yes the kind that you use to wash your hands – from Etsy a couple of months ago.

As you can surmise, I am on an Etsy roll…so what about these soaps? The Etsy shop that sells this soap is Digital Soap, run by Chrystal. She makes natural soaps, without using animal products, detergents, and the like. All her products are also NOT tested on animals, so if you’re sensitive that way, Chrystal’s products are safe for you.

The best thing about her soaps are their shapes! The set that I ordered included a couple of PS3 controller soaps and a mobile phone soap. I actually got them as a joke for my husband who, for some reason, does not think that washing his hands more than once a day is necessary. I was thinking that if the soap were shaped as a controller, he might actually be enticed to use it.

Seriously though, Chrystal’s soaps are so cool. They smell great and they serve as awesome conversation pieces when you have guests.

The new update, v2.40, was THe update that would bring in more accessibility to the XrossMediaBar (XMB), allowing people to actually access it in-game, slight tweaks to the PlayStation Store, tweaks to the DVD and Bluray playback capabilities, and the piece de resistance, the Trophy System.

But availability of the new update was short-lived as Sony pulled it back after complaints flooded the PlayStation message boards about updated PS3s locking up when users try to load a game. The problem seems to also be across the board as owners of 40GB, 60GB and 80GB versions reported the problem.

Sony has yet to issue a statement regarding the issue or an announcement on when it will be made available again.