This week on Second Opinion I’ll be dealing with TV that throws silverware at you, online battlefronts and flocks of iPad users.

A while ago we reported on Torne, which is essentially Play TV for Japan, and the fact that it will have trophy support. We didn’t exactly know what these trophies would entail, but now we have a vague idea. Apparently, Japanese TV-watching PS3ers will be able to earn trophies from watching final episodes of TV series, which is, uh, stupid. Trophies are meant to be challenging in some way, that’s the whole point of them – to show off what you have achieved whilst playing a game, not to show off to your friends that you caught the last episode of One Tree Hill. It’s not challenging to just sit on your arse and watch TV – just ask an entire generation of teenagers.

Sony have spoken out against (but also supporting, in a weird way) Apple, saying that iPad users will come to want a deeper, richer experience, and will then flock to the PSP. I can’t really argue with the reasoning, the deepest and most challenging experience I’ve had on my iPod Touch was trying to navigate N4G in Safari. There are some great games, such as GTA: Chinatown Wars, Dungeon Hunter and Call of Duty: Zombies, but they’re not even close to the quality found in many PSP games. Plus, the lack of real buttons makes anything that has to use on-screen buttons awkward to play, which is done in all of the games I mentioned. A real problem, I generally need to be able to feel where the buttons are and don’t want to have to keep glancing back at them in the middle of a car chase in GTA.

Elsewhere, Rebellion have said what every gamer ever has been saying for ages; there is no excuse for locked DLC on disks. This is such a shocking, against-the-norm opinion, my head almost exploded in sheer disbelief (happens more often than you might think). Seriously though, no developer should even consider putting content on the disk and then charging extra to unlock it by downloading a key and it’s nice to see that an actual developer agrees with us gamers. To those that don’t; the clue to this being a bad thing is in the name of DLC anyway; downloadable content. If you’re downloading a key, you’re not downloading the content, are you?

Now, moving towards actual games, there’s a rumour going around that Slant Six are working on Star Wars Battlefront Online, which is just Battlefront minus the single player campaign. With the game apparently being aimed at a PS3 and 360 release, this can only be good news. I happen to own Battlefront 2 on the PC and it’s great fun online, so I can only hope that I can blow an X-Wing up at some point in the future.

That’s it for this week. It’s a little short, but I have a reason for that; I have a new PS3 that I have to go and download everything I’ve ever bought from PSN onto. Until next week folks, I leave you with Gamoc’s final thought: Say what you like about the, frankly, extortionate price Sony charge to replace an out-of-warranty PS3, but by Christ, when you pay it, they sure as hell replace it quickly. I can only assume that they hired Hermes, the Greek God of Speed to deliver it, which means he was wearing a bloody good disguise when he knocked on my door.