Never has clicking the Buy Now button ever felt so empty yet exciting at the same time. Don’t get me wrong. I think PlayStation Plus will be pretty sweet, but there just wasn’t that much bang for the buck in this debut.

As I said I would on the podcast, I purchased a one year subscription to PlayStation Network’s new premium pay-us service PlayStation Plus. It was perhaps only an hour or so since it was posted on the PlayStation Store that I excitedly download firmware 3.40, scratched some unknown gray stuff off some PSN cards, typed in some codes, and bought my way into PS Store Shopper: Elite status.

Thank you, Gametrailers, for finally bringing us new information on the zombie portion of the upcoming Map Pack 2 for Call of Duty: World at War. It looks like Treyarch has ratcheted up the scare factor and difficulty of the addictive co-op minigame once again.

Continuing on from the random spawn points for the weapons box in Map Pack 1’s Verrukt, Perks machines on the new map, Shi no Numa, are now randomly spawned. (Great…)

Other new features include a quick escape zip line and a flogger. Flogger, you say? Basically, it looks like a fence that spins on a horizontal axis and sends zombies flying (see below).

The kicker though, is the hellhounds: extremely fast moving beasts that explode upon death and occasionally spawn in place of the zombies.

 

To see all of this in action, head on over too Gametrailers here, and watch the first part of this episode of GTTV.

Seems that there’ll be quite a bit of work to do to get those new zombie map Trophies.

Square-Enix is having their press briefing now. So far, it’s mostly a FFXIV Q&A. The first thing brought us was that Square Enix is considering all platforms, including Microsoft hardware, so the possibility is that this will be a timed exclusive. It was confirmed that the game will be out on PS3 and PC in 2010, with a simultaneous worldwide launch in 4 languages.

Other little tidbits:

- The battle system they aren’t talking about yet, so expect it to be different than FFXI.

- FFXI development will continue, at least for this year. The hope is that people will play both, as they are expected to have separate communities.

- Lessons learned from making and running FFXI will be utilized in XIV, of course.

- The target is a more casual, WoW, like audience, so both party based questing as well as soloing as well.

- While similar races exist, the world of FFXIV is entirely separate from FFXI, so no character transferring will happen. Apparently, they wanted FFXI fans to be able to play a similar type of character in FFXIV.

- No beta news yet. Stay tuned.

- Some of the video footage was in game. Can you guess which parts? From what I could tell from the screenshots, graphics should be around the level of White Knight Chronicles, though with better art.

Thoughts?