Fatal Inertia, the Koei racer that infamously had problems working properly on PS3 and thus bailed ship to 360, is finally coming to Sony's console... as a PSN download.

The futuristic racer, which didn't exactly set the world alight on 360, is a bit like Star Wars pod racing through rocky canyons, except with shiny cars and big magnets to shoot at your opponents. And with framerate issues on 360.

'Fatal Inertia EX' will land on PSN in late May for $29.99 (about 15 quid) and Koei doesn't intend to release the game at retail.

"After the launch of the Xbox 360 version, we had a unique situation that allowed us to reflect on what could be done with the PlayStation 3 version," said lead producer Mike Bond. "But having watched the growth of the PlayStation Network's user base and the game's multiplayer component, we felt the strength of this game would be in its online community."

The PSN version will have "new features and gameplay tweaks," Koei told MTV, and the company is also making changes to the game's difficulty, which it says gamers found too high in the 360 version.

And thus Fatal Inertia EX includes a training venue with eight new tracks that should help train up rookie racers, and on the other end there's a Master difficulty level for those who like to punch a hole in the side of the couch.

"After developing and playing 'Fatal Inertia' for so long, it became very easy to underestimate the difficulty for a beginning player," Bond said. "Our goal was to make 'FI' challenging, but many players found the level of difficulty to be much higher than anticipated."

Courtesy of CVG.

Apr 30, 2008