Insomniac Games (Resistance: Fall of Man, Ratchet and Clank series) interviewed David Jaffe (God of War) for the second episode of their new podcast, The Full Moon Show. Of note is Jaffe's explanation for the delay of his upcoming PlayStation Network title, Calling All Cars.

Jaffe said that during playtests people were enjoying themselves more when the scores were close, rather than when the scoring gap was wide. He talked to some industry vets who had worked on a few Midway titles to see if they had any code that could be used to narrow that scoring gap, and sure enough they had some code.

"We certainly don't want to go into and put in tons of that, but we've gone in and added just a little bit," he said. He continued to say that his hope is folks who are within 20% of each other's skill levels to have very competitive matches. Jaffe also explained that this was the reason for another playtest, and if the code's effects are noticeable then they will take it out.

Jaffe noted that they are still planning for a release during the month of April.

The interview starts 21 minutes into the 2-hour podcast. Jaffe also talked about his frankness in discussion, his love of playtests (the fifth one is coming up) and his ambitious, now on permanent hiatus, PSP tearjerker Heartland. The podcast also includes updates on Resistance: Fall of Man and the upcoming Ratchet and Clank Future.

[Via Aeropause]

After briefly, mistakenly and idiotically reducing the entirety of Europe, with all its many cultures, languages and shoes to just the UK in an article yesterday, we've taken steps to reinforce the pathways that connect our brains to our rapidly typing fingers. Said fingers insist that we now draw your attention to the PS3's continued success in Madagascar the United Kingdom, with launch titles Resistance: Fall of Man and Motorstorm perching comfortably atop the Chart Track software list for the week ending 24 March.

Insomniac's first-person shooter debuted in the number one spot, with the muddy Motorstorm slotting into second position. Virtua Fighter 5 is all the way down in 14th position, bested by Namco's symphony of slide, Ridge Racer 7 (11th) and the comparitively out of tune F1: Championship Edition (7th). Finally, historically accurate crab battle simulations find themselves relegated to 16th position.

With these PS3 exclusive (for now, in the case of Virtua Fighter 5) titles making a splash in the charts alongside the PS3's strong launch performance in Guam the UK, it seems the doom and gloom impression that resulted from so many dead launch events was unwarranted. The coming weeks will show us whether or not the PS3 can maintain its momentum in both hardware and software sales.

With Insomniac Games launching its podcast today, It now seems like everybody has an online audio show. But the Insomniac approach intends to be different than most because gamers get to hear what goes on inside a developer; the twice-monthly show should could be a great marketing and community-building move.

Insomniac plans several regular segments, including interviews with members of its staff and even gaming personalities outside of the Resistance and Ratchet developer. The show will cover basics like gamers' mail and Insomniac product updates as, but we'll be regular listeners if it pulls off its fly-on-the-wall aspirations.

[Update 1: Insomniac let us know that it changed its mind and won't have a "/podcast.html" URL for the audio show. Instead, the main page will be updated when the podcast goes live in the next few hours.]

1UP informs us that the forthcoming Ratchet & Clank adventure is featured on the cover of April's Electronic Gaming Monthly, complete with its full title, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Brian Allgeier, design director for Insomniac Games, notes that the name "works on many levels. It signals a new era for the franchise, ties into the game's story, and includes one of our signature subtitle double entendres."

Tools of Destruction might even mark the first time that Insomniac's playful choice of words survives the trip to Europe. You might recall the PlayStation 2 titles, Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, being respectively changed to the more polite Locked & Loaded and Ratchet & Clank 3. It's just as well Insomniac didn't go for their original and somewhat less subtle choice, Ratchet and Clank To Come: Implements of Ravaging.

Insomniac Games, the guys behind the Ratchet and Clank series, were in the Big Apple showing off the latest build of their upcoming PS3 launch title, Resistance: Fall of Man. Kotaku had a Gawker cameraman on the scene to grab some video, and MTV News' Stephen Totilo managed the impossible. He extracted some positive press about the PS3 (Sony must be furious at Insomniac, this goes against their entire pre-launch strategy).

1. Turns out that Blu-ray drive that every armchair analyst is convinced is a giant wooden equine built to penetrate our consumer-weary walls and then attack with an army of HD movies may actually be useful for gaming afterall. The game currently takes up 22GB! That's seven whole gee-bees more than a single layer HD-DVD disc that the Xbox 360 won't (?) be using for gaming.
2. The Dual Shake functionality that was supposedly tacked on at the last minute ... well, it looks like it was still tacked on; nevertheless, it holds some serious promise. Ninety days before this thing has to be on store shelves the developers have still not activated the functionality on the controller, but they have added in some clever gameplay currently triggered with a button press. Shake off a melee attack by shaking the controller, or introduce the end of your rifle to their face with a quick jab of your right hand. Sure, you won't feel the vibration when that blow connects, but it's something.
3. But there's also multiplayer. How will Sony's secretive service compare to the superlative Xbox Live? R: FoM will feature: "40-player online matches at launch; 60 levels of player progression while playing online; two-player offline co-op." 60 levels of player progression ... sounds like another popular online game. According to MTV News, Insomniac even promised "better, deeper support than any Xbox Live title."
   

Has the PS3 buzz finally begun? We've been increasingly anxious that someone at Sony didn't get the memo that their latest and greatest was launching in a few scant months.

[Update: Insomniac's Ryan Schneider called MTV News to clarify what exactly is on those 22GBs. "While the music and vocals in Resistance take up only about 1 Gigabyte of disc space, graphics, level data and programming code occupy most of the remaining 21."]

Watch - New Resistance: Fall of Man video
Read - MTV News on Resistance: Fall of Man

What is this Resistance: Fall of Man? It's not fun. We want Killzone back. Where's that game?

We asked a Resistance developer what made his game unique. He stared at us blankly for a moment, fumbling for an answer, and then he told us that we would have to figure that out for ourselves. Not a good sign.

What we figured out were a number of winding hallways, stretching through an abandoned medical facility. Every few feet alien creatures would appear. Sometimes they attacked, and sometimes they just stood around. Either way, we filled them with hot lead and continued on. Rinse. And repeat.

Resistance is a derivative FPS. It's got no backbone. But with no Killzone in sight, Resistance looks to be one of the few -- if not the only -- option shooters fans will have on their shiny $600 (you're not really gonna buy the "core" system, are you?) unit come launch day.