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Gear up and get ready to roll out, soldiers. We've got a SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 black-ops mission that needs the expertise of veteran men and women -- those who have played through not one SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo game, but folks who have also survived its sequel, SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 2. This isn't some kind of joke or theme in some blog post; you better be ready to put some foot-mobiles down.

Intel comes courtesy of PlayStation.Blog, which reports enemy units are on the move and should enter the DMZ any minute now. By Thursday, February 11, PSN will be crawling with hostiles, so safeties off, PSPs plugged in to charge and have your screen wipes at the ready. We're going to need maximum visibility for all our troops in the field.

Hopefully, the third time is the charm for SOCOM Fireteam Bravo. After two delays, the Slant Six-developed co-op shooter is finally making its way to PSP on February 16 on both UMD and PlayStation Network.

As per usual, online multiplayer is central to the upcoming SOCOM sequel. Fireteam Bravo 3 will not only support sixteen player Infrastructure play, it also features four-player co-op -- a first for the franchise. Considering Slant Six's track record, it'll either play like the brilliant SOCOM Tactical Strike ... or like SOCOM Confrontation.

News of yet another SOCOM delay should be unsurprising to those who have been following the franchise since Slant Six took the reigns from Zipper Interactive. Fans have only recently received the long-awaited SOCOM Confrontation 1.60 patch, one that fixed crucial game-crashing bugs; after months of suffering through bugs and game balance issues, Joystiq commenter Solace went so far as to call Confrontation a "glorified beta."

For reasons not yet revealed by SCEA, the upcoming PSP installment, Fireteam Bravo 3, has been pushed back from its already-delayed January 12 release date. Considering Sony's admitted failure at marketing the upcoming tactical shooter, a later date will certainly give the publisher more time to prepare the title for retail. A new release date will be announced "in the coming weeks," according to an SCEA rep, but we wonder if SOCOM fans will have any patience left when that day comes.

Detailed a couple months back, SOCOM: Confrontation's DLC pack "Cold Front" arrives later today on the PlayStation Network for the introductory price of $10 ($15 after December 20), though we're just seeing it in action today with a couple of gameplay trailers.

The DLC includes not just five new maps, but snow effects, a new gameplay mode and ... wait, what's this? Fancy new clothes! Nothing says "tactical warfare" like goose down jackets! Get a taste for the DLC, then test your mettle against the urge to get fashionable, just after the break.

[Thanks, Edgar]

Done with the MAG beta? Bored? Well, you could always jump back into SOCOM Confrontation, especially now that the long-teased 1.60 update is live. Highlights from 1.6 include the addition of new special forces: Dutch KCT and the Italian COMSUBIN Special Forces teams, each equipped with unique weapons, and four new weapons for all players: the 9mm Sub and M82A1A for the Mercenaries and the AK-74 and SR-25 for the Commandos.

In addition to the new content, the 1.6 patch fixes a number of bugs ranging from serious "players were being booted out of the game to the XMB while loading into and during gameplay" to minute. The full patch notes can be seen on SOCOM.com.

[Thanks to everyone that sent this in!]

Hold on to your helmets, soldiers, because SOCOM: Fire Team Bravo 3 is breaching stores on January 12, 2010, and the game's dev team is excited. How excited? Excited enough to sit in front of a camera and talk about the PSP title's action-packed story and "authentic" gameplay. SOCOM: Fire Team Bravo 3 is set to continue the series' (sadly forgettable) storyline and includes online co-op and over 70 weapons to show terrorist scum who's boss.

On November 10th, Bareis Technologies, LLC filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft, Sony Computer Entertainment, Electronic Arts and Disney Interactive Studios, claiming that various games, including Tom Clancy, SOCOM and NASCAR titles, infringe upon a patent filed in 1996. "Optical disk having speech recognition templates for information access" describes a process "integrating automatic speech recognition technologies into optical disk players for command and control purposes."

As is typical with lawsuits of this nature, the plaintiff is seeking "no less than a reasonable royalty" for the supposed use of this "stolen" technology. Should the case make it to court, the plaintiff will have a few hurdles to overcome. Primarily, lawyers will have to prove how a patent largely targeted towards accessing specific music tracks on audio CDs is applicable to the video games in question.

Considering it's been over seven years since the debut of the first SOCOM game, it's surprising that the plaintiff has waited so long to file this suit. Perhaps it's telling that the company going forward with the lawsuit has done so little in the thirteen years since filing the trademark that it has no web presence whatsoever.

[Via GamePolitics]

Over at the PlayStation Blog, details for the competitive multiplayer modes for SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 have spilled out revealing the game will feature 16-player competitive multiplayer games across eight maps and seven new modes. The modes -- which are available both locally and over the Internet -- include a "Leader Mode" allowing players to designate team captains and a "Tug-of-War" mode, where teams fight for tickets similar to the Battlefield franchise.

Playing SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 online also allows worldwide players to experience tournaments, clan modes, character customization and voice chat. Voice chat, you say? Finally our dream of bringing hateful language on the go can be realized.

Just when you thought those Q1 delays were over, SCEA comes in with a surprise. The upcoming SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 for PSP will miss its original late November release, and will instead come out on January 12th, 2010, two weeks before Zipper deploys MAG on PS3.

SCEA Senior Producer Mark Rogers says that developer Slant Six is not responsible for the delay and "development is on schedule." Instead, Rogers blames marketing, saying "some high value visual assets (screens and video) have only recently been made available to global marketing and we have decided to move the release and allow time to get the word out to everyone." So, although assets have been available since April, marketing hasn't received them until "recently." We're not entirely sure how this makes sense, but the end result is clear: you'll be waiting longer for this game, as someone gets their act together.