This week’s PlayStation Store update brought two unannounced additions. With High Velocity Bowling, gamers can use custom soundtracks using any songs ripped to the console’s hard drive. And with the Timeshift demo, users can pull up the XMB to access in-game messaging. Wow. Two HUGE features that have users have been begging for just dropped in our laps with these updates. Nice early Christmas present from Sony!

However, this does beg the question: are these features something that needs to be implemented on a game-by-game basis by the developers, or could this be a global thing controlled by the XMB? I personally believe this is now globally available in the XMB. In the last SDK update, Sony released these types of features to developers. However, the developer must implement the code into the game. In the case of custom soundtracks, this isn’t really that bad. But for in-game messaging, I sincerely hope Sony implements this across the board. Every game should have this option. In my opinion, it’s the one real glaring advantage Xbox Live has over the PlayStation Network. Being able to message your friends and send invites across different games is huge. We’ll see how this plays out over the coming months with new game releases…