Hey Sony, kudos for getting it right with your upcoming PS3-exclusive MAG and avoiding the usual, generally dubious review exclusives. After all, you're about to release a massively-multiplayer shooter tomorrow that supports--and by your own estimates, practically demands--up to 256 players simultaneously.

That's 256 players divvied into squads of eight players, with four squads to a platoon and four platoons comprising a company.

Yeah, massive. As in 'action game'. Ergo MAG.

According to Sony Computer Entertainment's Jeff Rubenstein (noticed by Examiner) on the official PlayStation blog:

Reviews can’t be written until the game is actually out. I mean, you can't pass pre-release judgment on a game whose major, industry-leading feature (256 players in a single battle) can’t be tested until release day.

So 256. That's certainly a big number in game lingo. It's also apparently an area code in Alabama, the number of different values in a data byte, 4 raised to the fourth power, the number of columns in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, the largest three-digit number that's also an 8th power, the hertz frequency of Middle C, the number of regular season games in the NFL, and--wait for it--the legendary 'split-screen' level in Pac-Man.

And we thought 16-player 28,000 baud Quake matches back in 1997 were mind-boggling.

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