Tag: ps3

Silly Season

Why has the games industry compressed a year long sales window into three months? Take the 360 for example. From January to end of August the only games I bought were GRAW2, Crackdown and Forza 2 alongside a few Live Arcade titles.

In the September to November months this is the likely list of games I want to buy:

  • Bioshock – bought
  • Tiger Woods 08 – bought
  • Madden 08 – bought
  • Halo3
  • PGR4
  • Orange Box
  • Pro Evo 2008
  • Call of Duty 4
  • Mass Effect
  • Assassins Creed

That is just too many in a short space of time and also leaves out games like Skate and Sega Rally which have OK’ish demo’s but are lost in amongst the flurry. I understand it’s holiday time but surely having so many AAA titles launching in the same period can only hurt there sales. Imagine how crowded it would have been if GTA IV was launching in October? It would certainly make more sense to stagger these releases over the year. Well more sense to me as it owuld give me more time to enjoy each game.

However this is shaping up to be a vintage year for games. The game’s over the last few weeks have been excellent. The Call of Duty 4 beta has been a superb taster for the game, Halo 3 is out on a few days and in October alone PGR4 and Pro Evo 8 are both big big titles. Only caveat with Pro Evo is that the demo is a little odd. It plays faster than previous versions and that can end with real pinball sessions in the box. Still, it’s smoother and a lot prettier than previous versions although no doubt online will still have some issues. It also has a dive button. Finally.

You’ll notice there’s no mention of the PS3. A few of the games above are also out on the PS3 but due to Xbox Live and also friends with 360’s it makes sense to get the 360 versions of the non exclusive games. Heavenly Sword was pretty disappointing and Metal Gear Solid, Little Big Planet and GTA IV are delayed until next year. So what’s left for PS3? Killzone 2 does look very nice and Uncharted – Drakes Fortune picked up a lot of buzz at E3 but both would need pretty stellar reviews to make them purchases. There is also a bigger demo version of GT5 that does promise online racing for up to 16. I’d normally be sceptical of those numbers but Warhawk has been a great multiplayer game on the PS3 with 24 and 32 player games. Server support makes all the difference and hopefully it will come to Xbox Live soon, especially as it’s a paid for service unlike PS3 which is free.

So next up is Halo 3. Considering I was playing Halo 2 over two years after release there’s an argument that I should only be picking up one more title this year. I’ll post up some thoughts on Halo next week…if I get time that is.

This weekend was mostly spent…

  • Watching sport. Great win for Scotland on Saturday, and on Sunday in the rugby although they looked a bit nervous at times. Grand prix was pretty good – another close season. Tennis has also been top notch.
  • Playing with Facebook. I can see why it’s pretty addictive.
  • Recovering from golf on Friday. A great day was had by all and after a great round from me (to be honest a far to generous handicap helped) I took the trophy (now virtual) for another year.
  • Tidying up the laptop. It’s always a bit neglected compared to the desktop so every so often it’s needs a bit of work. All looking tip top now though.
  • Garden tidy. Need to take advantage of these good days and give the garden a good tidy. Started but by no means finished. Another trip to Dobbies required!
  • Enjoying Warhawk. First essential PS3 game for me…only took 6 months.
  • Starting sorting out photo library…finally. Using iPhoto and it’s been great so far. Only got a few years left to sort.

I’ve still got loads of jobs to do that I wanted to do a few weeks ago. Roll on two weeks time and another week of work. I’ll be busy….playing Halo 3!

Play TV

Sony’s announcement last week of a TV Tuner for the PS3 was pretty uneventful for me. However this video of the interface has changed my opinion.

The menu’s look excellent and far slicker than normal Freeview boxes. The ability to view recorded content and also live TV on your PSP being streamed from your PS3 was also very impressive. Twin tuners, hard disk recording and HD to 1080p (let’s hope Freeview gets a couple of HD channels) makes for an impressive package when teamed with the PS3.

With the digital switch off almost upon us this could be a big seller for Sony.

Gaming Costs

It’s been covered loads of times before, but releasing one car for Forza2 at the cost of 50 gamerpoints sounds expensive. Taking today’s Amazon prices that’s 43p for one car. If Sony applied that pricing model, and the rumours of 1000 cars in GT5 but only 300 included in first purchase are true, that’s an extra £300 to own the full game. Madness. Of course no one is forcing you to buy the content, and the likelihood is that you’ll buy only a few select cars, but the micro transaction gaming market is only heading in one direction and it’s not a cheap one.

Game Quickies

In no particular order…

  • Heavenly Sword demo was released today. It’s quite possibly the largest (almost a gig) shortest (lasts less than 10 minutes) demo I’ve played but afterwards I pre-ordered the game so I guess the demo worked for Sony. The graphics were stunning and this looks like something the 360 could struggle matching. Game on. I know there was some bad press about the gameplay being short (12 hours from memory) but I’d rather have a corking 12 hours than a spun out 30 hour game that I don’t complete.
  • Bomberman is superb on the 360 and well worth 800 points.
  • Played the Moto GP demo on the 360. What was once THE game on Xbox Live is now a shadow of it’s former self. Talk about milking an original format and regurgitating each year, this is little more than a bug fix from last years release.
  • GTA IV – only complete experience on the 360 according to Rockstar themselves. Made me grin thinking back to the exclusives that the PS2 had for so long. Not any more.
  • Had a large room on GRAW2 last night – blind siege with > 6 players is sooooo much more fun
  • Another firmware update on the PS3 – Sony are developing aggresively for the PS3 now and ar catching up fas on the 360. Music playback and X bar available in game for firmware v2.0?
  • Forza Leagues is going well and we have over 30 members with little or no advertising. Biggest issue has been lag within Forza. We struggle to get anyone to host a stable room with more that 6 players which is very limiting. It frustrates that the console model for online gaming is still mostly peer to peer which limits the amount of players you can realistically play with at any one time. I would quite gladly pay extra for server based gaming if it allowed 16, 24, 32 player gaming while limiting lag. I would love Sony to do more with server support in the hope it would encourage Microsoft to move in that direction as well.
  • Resident Evil 5 – another game that looks amazing!
  • The Metal gear Solid gameplay video was very impressive. Some nice touches, great humour and a graphics engine that looked up there with the best around. There was also a nice array of weapons. If Sony have lost exclusivity on this one they will be kicking themselves.

How much does episodic content cost?

Well if it’s GTA IV, it’s $50 million.

The first 25 is for the first episodic content package that’s supposed to go out and that is in March of ’08. That’s why it moved into current because it’s in the next 12 months. The second 25 will be for the second episodic, the episode, and that will be later in fiscal ’08.

Thats what Take Two have just announced via a shareholders briefing. $50 million gives the 360 exclusivity on the episodic content, the second of which could be almost a year after the game released. I wonder how much making the full game a 360 exclusive would have cost…and how many console sales it would have made.

Catch Up

Been pretty busy so not had much posting time, so without further ado…some stuff.

  • PS3 update. Firstly the reviews of the update have garnered some great reviews. Upscaled DVD’s look great, noticeably better than the 360. I guess most surprising for me is that they looked better/on a par with the Denon I have. Looks like I can eBay another piece of kit. Of course me writing eBay really means it will retire to the ‘gadget graveyard’ – the attic. I have an embarrassing amount of old gadgets and tech that I won’t part with or can’t be bothered selling on eBay and dealing with Nigerians (sorry all legit Nigerians), kids wrecking bids and fraud. 720p playback of Blu-Ray is also welcomed. Network playback of media…nice try but not quite there yet. Nero and Media Player 10 work well on Windows for sharing media. For the Mac, options are a little more limited. TwonkyMedia Beta 4.4 and EyeConnect are the best bet’s for the moment. Hopefully a version of Connect360 will support the PS3 (news that Connect360 tries to talk to the PS3). Joystiq have a list of 20 clients that may work. Final option is to use a NAS device that supports DLNA. Unfortunately my current NAS doesn’t. Synology forums admin have said they have purchased a PS3 to look at connectivity – supporting DLNA would have been my preferred option although it’s probably easier for me to rely on a Connect360 derivative.
  • Since switching to Mac I’ve only used Windows to update my remote and a couple of other small’ish tasks. However the last 3-4 weeks have seen me use Windows every day for a couple of hours and during that time Parallels has been a life saver. Rock solid and to be honest, you are hard pushed to notice your running a virtual OS. The coherence feature alone is worth the money. The good news is version 3 has been announced with increased USB support, 3D graphics support (pretty vague but a good list of Windows games) and future Vista Aero support. Sounding good and like a good little fanboy I’ve already paid for the upgrade.
  • Halo 3. It’s soooo much fun. It’s a shame it will finish this Sunday but I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of weeks. Robert – hope to see you before Sunday!
  • Forza out this week. Has had great reviews, the user screenshots from USA & Japanese gamers have looked awesome and a received a 9 in Edge this month. Roll on this weekend.
  • I’m starting to become a GTD geek. Been using iGTD for a few weeks, Omnifocus is picking up some good early press and the process has really help me keep on top of tasks recently. If you’ve got a lot on (even a little but some of it’s long term) or need something to help manage those inspiration moments that need noted down somewhere then give GTD a try.
  • WWDC next week which means a lot of Mac rumours. New laptops and iMacs could make my hardware feel out of date which is always the problem with Macs. However, the hardware has been good since I switched, the software excellent and I have absolutely no regrets. Should have done it years ago. Tips for next week – new Leopard features (I still think there will be some virtualisation/boot camp news) and new Macbook pro’s. One more thing – new iPhone features?
  • I think I’ve finally settled on a work/laptop bag. I’ve always admired Tom Bihn bags and I think the soon to be released Zephyr will fit my needs. Why does it take 30 mins to choose a laptop and 6 months to find a bag?
  • Try and catch the Jobs/Gates interview from last weeks D|All Things Digital. Gates comes across really well and it was nice to see the respect they both had for each other. Video’s here and now on iTunes.

Mmm – that went on a bit.

PS3 Firmware 1.80

Now this is nice. The latest PS3 update (out tomorrow in UK) add’s some great features.

  • Upscaling of DVDs, PS1, PS2 games up to 1080p on supporting HDTV’s via HDMI
  • Remote Play support on the PSP from anywhere on the internet. Connect to your PS3 from anywhere
  • Support for DLNA devices so that music, photo’s and videos can be streamed across networks
  • Photo printing nonsense with Epson printers

A pretty impressive update that has come out of nowhere. Does this mean I could stream media from my NAS to the PS3 and view that media on my PSP anywhere in the world?

Ninja Gaiden Sigma

Just played the demo on the PS3 and it looks amazing. HD visuals at 60fps and while it’s the same as the 360 Xbox version, I never did play it through so this looks a must buy for the PS3. Also tried Virtua Tennis demo but it was just as bad as the 360 version.

Seeing as games are a bit thin on the ground (no Forza until June) I may pick up God of War 2 and also Pro Evo 6 on the PS2. God of War as it’s had great reviews and Pro Evo because after having a few games of the PS2 version it just feels better than the 360. It’s also only £17.99. Bargain. Speaking of bargains, Shop.To are selling PS3’s for £360 this weekend.

Style

Bit of a lazy weekend has been had although there’s a few things worth noting. Firstly, Casino Royale on Blu-Ray looks fantastic. If you’ve got a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player (all 10 of you in the UK) then this is a must own title. I’m enjoying the PS3 for movie playback so I’ll be picking up the remote which will get a lor more use than the 360 equivalent. Only annoyance is the remote is Bluetooth rather than Infra-red so I can’t program it into the Pronto.

The new Bond has moved to the Bourne style of movies and low and behold if there isn’t a Bourne Ultimatum trailer available. Really looking forward to this and hope it meets the same high standard of the last two.

More style can be found in the new trailer for Forza 2 (cheers Graham). Around one month to go for this must have 360 title that can’t fail to be good – can it? There hasn’t been a decent racing game on the 360 since PGR3 (Test Drive unlimited is a sims game rather than proper racing – harsh but true) so i can’t wait!

I also decided that I would start hand crafting my own site style a good while ago but that stalled after a couple of days so I finally got round to putting some time into it this weekend. A new app from Panic may help (Coda) but it isn’t even revealed until tomorrow so that will have to wait. I’m finding it all a bit frustrating at the moment but I’m getting there…slowly. I’m guessing at my pace it will be a few weeks before I have something to show for my efforts. At the moment I’m aiming for white, minimal and little or no graphics or ajax. It’s time to get simple.

Trialling .Mac at the moment and it’s great for keeping the two Macs and their apps in sync (calendars, address book, iGTD, Transmit and Yojimbo). The trial lasts for another couple of months before I have to hand over any cash but it’s likely thats another £70 to the Apple temple which is a tad annoying as .Mac doesn’t offer much disk space – this is an area Apple could address for not much money. It would be great if the £70 bought 40Gb of disk space to back up to and share.