I'm addicted to a beta...

I can't stop playing the Resistance 3 beta.  It seems most betas tend to be plagued with issues and then it depends on the devs to patch it so we can continue to test.  That's exactly what Insomniac did and the result is gold, Jerry!  Gold!

The first week of the beta you could barely get in a game.  Matchmaking would take close to five minutes and games would end early for no reason.  Insomniac shutdown matchmaking and let people mess around with private matches while they fixed their software.  A week later they released a patch that made matchmaking instant and the lag zero.  The MP Beta and server stability are now what I expected to see from Insomniac.  I'm not sure why they had the initial hiccup with the beta, but they fixed it and it's now running as smooth as the Resistance 2 servers did.

Like most games these days, you advance your rank through XP points which you earn by getting kills, assists, capturing objective points, and ribbons for various events.  As you rank up you unlock skill points which can upgrade weapons and perks.  This can be anything from more ammo given when you set up an ammo beacon to resupply to upgrading a weapon's secondary firing ability.

Despite all of the new perks, the game doesn't feel out of balance.  The invisibility perk you can get is nowhere near as annoying as you'd think.  The player will flicker when they shoot or move, and you can always drop a decoy beacon on the ground to draw them out.  Or wait until someone on the other team walks up to it thinking they'll get a mele kill -- only to have your decoy explode.  :)

Adding a "doppelganger" perk is nice for when you're running across an open area.  Activate it and you have a hologram of your character running next to you.  Until the hologram takes a hit, the other team can't tell which is the real player.  It's another thing that makes drawing snipers out of hiding a lot easier.  I hate snipers. 

I think next week PSN+ members get in on the beta and I believe the week after that it hits "Public Beta" status for the rest of the PS3 user base. 

September 6th can't come fast enough. 

There's a mom joke in three somewhere....