u l t r a m o o k i e

I broke down today and got a Dual Shock 3 controller.  Yes, Sony has punished me for their stubbornness in not settling the whole force-feedback lawsuit.  But, I’m glad I got the controller, it works well in Burnout Paradise and my new game GRiD.  Unfortunately, the force-feedback does not work in Call of Duty 4 [...]

I broke down today and got a Dual Shock 3 controller.  Yes, Sony has punished me for their stubbornness in not settling the whole force-feedback lawsuit.  But, I’m glad I got the controller, it works well in Burnout Paradise and my new game GRiD.  Unfortunately, the force-feedback does not work in Call of Duty 4 (I’m hoping for a patch or something to activate it).

Talking about new stuff, I also picked up GRiD today (I got a stash of birthday money).  I had downloaded and played the demo — I didn’t know what it was, but I thought I had to give the demo a try.  What a fantastic demo it was, very polished and the presentation was spot-on sexy.  I just had to get the game after playing the demo.  The driving mechanics are not hardcore simulation like the Gran Turismo series, they have some simulation feel to them, but the mechanics lean more towards arcade (though, not crazy arcade like Burnout Paradise).

The thing that intrigued me was the damage modeling in the game.  It is pretty cool and a car can be broken down into pieces — and the debris littered all over the roadway as a driving hazard for the rest of the race.  Gran Turismo 5 Prologue still continues to “tradition” of Super-Man cars that are indestructable.  That has always been an annoyance to me, as I could use other cars as bumpers around corners to win races.  Not here with GRiD where your car can fall apart from too many hits — the damage modeling is cool, but not realistic as each car can take quite a beating before falling completely apart or malfunctioning.

GRiD is the old Race Driver TOCA game, but with the RPG and backstory crap ripped out — and the hardcore simulation engine removed and replaced with a more arcade-like engine.  I am glad they ripped out the backstory and drama crap from the game as it refocuses the game on racing.  And what a great racing game this is.  The feel of speed is tremendous — and in some situations it is scary fast, like when one drives the open wheel formula cars which scream down the tracks.  The sense of speed that Codemasters has put into the game is indescribable in words or pictures, you have to play the game to get a good feel of just how fast (and fun) the racing is.

Although I love Burnout Paradise and continue to play it, I wanted something that was track-based to play — and something with real licensed cars.  Paradise’s open-world is both a blessing (it’s rather cool not to be forced to play races in order) and a curse (frakking getting lost during a race really blows).  Having track-based racing lets me practice and memorize something a little smaller than a whole city.  And the licensed cars (45 in total from what I read) is really cool.  Sure, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue has 60+ cars, but do I really want to spend my time racing a Suzuki Cappuccino?  Not really.

Anyways, back to racing!

For my grad, dad and birthday gift, my wife got me a spanking new Playstation 3.
Thank you wifey for such a cool gift!  You are a kick-ass wife and the PS3 is a kick-ass gift!
I wanted a PS3 mainly so that I can watch Bluray movies — we already pay for Netflix, so it would [...]

For my grad, dad and birthday gift, my wife got me a spanking new Playstation 3.

Thank you wifey for such a cool gift!  You are a kick-ass wife and the PS3 is a kick-ass gift!

I wanted a PS3 mainly so that I can watch Bluray movies — we already pay for Netflix, so it would be better to take advantage of the Bluray selection, rather than pay a whole lot more for HD satellite feeds.  I must say, the PS3 is quite impressive — although, I guess I could be a bit biased as an ex-Sony employee.

Observations about the PS3:

• Now that Bluray has won the high definition format war — finally — the PS3 has an upper-hand when compared with the Xbox 360.  Whether it really plays out, I don’t know.  But, that was the whole reason why I wanted a PS3:  Bluray.
• Brilliant move pricing the lowest priced Bluray player the same price as the PS3.  It just makes people think that they are getting a “free” game console with the Bluray player.
• Demos on the Playstation Network (PSN) are great!  Usually, I don’t play through a whole game unless I can really get into it — and there are not many games that I can get into.  So, playing a demo from start to finish is usually enough to make me satisfied.
• PSN network speed is horrendous.  It takes forever to download something from the PSN.  I tried downloading the PS3 update from PSN and it ran ~160kBps, which is terrible (my DSL line is a 3Mbps line so I get around 300kBps max).  Sony needs to invest into more bandwidth (or stop throttling).
• Even though Sony is out to sell Bluray discs, there is still a market for downloadable video and audio content.  So where is it Sony?  Sony has a whole library of movies, TV shows and music that it can sell online.  They should get on the ball and start doing it — Microsoft does it with the Xbox 360 and Apple does it with the AppleTV already.
• The PS3 hardware itself is beautiful.  When Alice lent me her Xbox 360, I was surprised by the size of the total package — most importantly that the power brick was the same size as the Xbox 360 console!  The PS3 is all enclosed, the only thing that sticks out are the HDMI and power cables, no fugly external power brick here.
• The PS3 is quiet.  Alice’s Xbox 360 was loud — not just the fans, but the drive also.  And not just “kind of loud”, more on the “this is distracting my gameplay loud?.
• I’m kind of disappointed at the lack of 1080p games.  Most games seem to run at 720p, which is fine, but I figured the PS3 was powerful enough to squeeze out 1080p gaming easily.
• The DVD upscaler (software) does not do as good of a job as a dedicated DVD upscaler.  When compared to the old Pioneer DV-400V upscaling DVD player that we had, the PS3’s upscaled DVD output is a little disappointing.
• The SixAxis controller is lighter than I thought.  Also, I don’t like having to pay for Sony’s stubborness when it comes to rumble.  Sony should have swapped out the SixAxis controllers the minute they settled the lawsuit against them.  One of these days, I’ll get a Dual Shock, but not right now.  I’m fine with the SixAxis.
• The lack of PS2 backwards compatibility is a disappointment, but not that big of one.  It is not like I have played any of my old PS2 games recently and that I would pop one back into play anytime soon.  I still have my slim PS2 in the garage and can pull it out to use when I want.  It would be nice to have the backwards compatibility, but not a requirement.  What is hugely disappointing is the actual reason why Sony stripped out the backwards compatibility from the 40GB PS3.  Sony reasons that “by omitting the option of playing PS2 games, Sony hopes that new customers will instead spend their money on more PS3 games.”
• The one game that my wife got me was Burnout Paradise — because I’m a huge Burnout fan, I have all of the games on either the PS2 or PSP.  Burnout, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Revenge on the PS2.  Burnout Legends and Burnout Dominator on the PSP.  Now, Burnout Paradise on the PS3.  Fantastic game.  The only thing that has be a bit frustrated right now is that I still don’t know my way around Paradise City and that makes doing races a bit difficult — as sometimes I find that I have turned on the wrong street and am going the wrong way.  If only Criterion would have made the minimap like a GPS device — mark out a general route (that skips shortcuts) for the player, if the player gets off route, then “reroute” based on where they are heading.  This would help lessen the frustration of being lost in the city — there are subtle hints that Criterion threw in like the blinker on the car will give you a hint where to go.
• The one movie that my wife got me was Casino Royale.  The movie is a gorgeous showoff film for Bluray.  The scene where Bond and the bombmaker are fighting it out on the crane really shows off the resolution of Bluray movies (as the water sparkles brilliantly in the background while the helicopter-mounted camera revolves around the two from a long distance).
• Remote Play functionality — where the PSP can take control of the PS3 and display media (and some games) — works really well.  I was surprised at how easy it was to setup and get going.
• Although the PS3 has no PS2 support, it, ironically has psOne support.  The support works and there are some “enhancement” technologies to try to make the old games look new again — like texture smoothing.  The psOne games I have tried on the system (Gran Turismo 2 and Metal Gear Solid) both work well and look…well, like the are ten years old.
• Netflix continues to amaze.  I sent back movies the day that I got the PS3.  That night, I logged into my Netflix account and flipped on the Bluray option and moved some Bluray discs to the top of my queue.  The next day, Netflix received my DVDs and sent Bluray discs to me.  I got the Bluray discs the following day.  That is normal operating style for Netflix and it continues to amaze me.  Now, if only Netflix to adapt their “Watch Now” feature to stream HD content and stream it to a PS3, that would completely knock me out of my chair.
• The PS3 is made as a media center.  What I love is how the harddrive is easily user-replaceable (which I will do with an old, larger notebook drive.  What I also love is that the PS3 can play all sorts of media — including MP3, WMA, AAC, DVIX, XVID and H.264 AVC.  And all of this can either reside locally, on a USB thumbdrive, on a DVD-RW disc, or can be streamed over the network (from a DLNA server or, as Alice tells me and I have to test out, an Apache server).  The PS3 is surprisingly open for a product that has come out from Sony.
• The PS3 can also take Linux, but I don’t know if I’ll go down that route.  I have enough Linux boxes at home (yes, one can actually have “enough” Linux boxes).  I don’t really want to turn my PS3 into a semi-Linux box also.

I guess that’s a long-winded enough posting for now about the PS3.  I’m sure I’ll have more later.  Do you own a PS3?  What do you think about it?  And what’s your PSN name?  I want to add you to my friends list!

I installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my main PC notebook.  I admit it.  I did it.  Yesterday.
While I loved having Fedora 8 — or in general any distro of Linux — on the notebook, I wanted to do stuff that I couldn’t do in Linux.  One of the big drivers was the fact that [...]

I installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my main PC notebook.  I admit it.  I did it.  Yesterday.

While I loved having Fedora 8 — or in general any distro of Linux — on the notebook, I wanted to do stuff that I couldn’t do in Linux.  One of the big drivers was the fact that Netflix’s Instant Play just went unlimited.  That means that I can stream as much as I want from Netflix and still have my three DVDs delivered.  That makes for a wonderful deal at $14 a month.  The only problem was that the Netflix player only works in Windows.  Sigh.

A side benefit is that I can now play some of my older games, like Command and Conquer.

Other than the stuff that came with Windows Vista, I haven’t really put any other tools on there that need to be purchased.  Everything else is pretty much Open Source stuff — Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.  There’s some freeware stuff that I installed also like iTunes and Yahoo! Messenger.

Installation was a breeze (Microsoft did do a good job of cleaning up the install process).  Most of my devices were detected and installed during installation — whatever was left (like a MemoryStick reader) was later installed during a Windows Update.  Vista is not as slow or bad as people say it is — I am running it on a older Celeron M 420 notebook that I bought in April, the box has 2GB of RAM, a fast SATA drive, but suffers from slow built-in video.  Is there “Wow” in Vista like Bill Gates wants people to believe?  Not really.  Vista is really a five year warmed over version of XP with some extra bells and whistles added on.  It works, it’s OK.

I got some awesome loot from Christmas!
Thank you Joyce and Albert for Mario Strikers!  I have been waiting to play this one for a long time!  Now, I can — and added benefit, I can play against Albert online with Nintendo Wifi.
Thank you Mom and Dad for the gift monies!  With it, I got Super [...]

I got some awesome loot from Christmas!

Thank you Joyce and Albert for Mario Strikers!  I have been waiting to play this one for a long time!  Now, I can — and added benefit, I can play against Albert online with Nintendo Wifi.

Thank you Mom and Dad for the gift monies!  With it, I got Super Mario Galaxy (another must-have game!), The Bourne Ultimatum (finally finished the series) and MacOS X 10.5 Leopard (just installed).

And of course, the best gift ever, thank you to my Wife and Son for my iPhone!  Yay!

What did Santa and Family and Friends bring everyone?

I have been playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption lately on my Wii (many, many thanks to Alice for lending it to me). The game is pretty cool. The only other Metroid Prime game that I have played was Metroid Prime Hunters on the Nintendo DS. Corruption really shows off the power of [...]

I have been playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption lately on my Wii (many, many thanks to Alice for lending it to me). The game is pretty cool. The only other Metroid Prime game that I have played was Metroid Prime Hunters on the Nintendo DS. Corruption really shows off the power of the Wii — and the limitations. Yes, the Wii is not a graphics powerhouse like the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 and it shows. The graphics in Corruption look slightly better than Halo 2 on the original Xbox. But, the graphics are still gorgeous because of the art design of the game.  The game is also very cinematic and that draws me into the game.  It also helps that there is complete voice acting throughout the game — instead of something like Twilight Princess where I have to read all the dialogue.

The biggest thing about Corruption are the controls! Boy, do they work good. They are tweaked to perfection and work almost as good as a keyboard and mouse setup.  I am quite impressed by the control scheme.  The Wii-mote and nunchuck make for great gaming — a lot better than the dual analog setup on the other consoles.  Bravo to Nintendo for not going with the standard controller on the Wii.

I have some minor complaints about Corruption.  There are no “any time” saves in the game.  You have to get to a save room or your ship in order to save.  The “scanning” part of the game really slows things down.  There are some serious load times:  When I come up to a door and shoot it, sometimes it takes upwards of 5 seconds for the door to open.

Overall though, the game is pretty damned good.  I am really enjoying it.  Yes, the graphics are not going to be Halo 3 type graphics.  But, Halo 3’s controls are not going to be as perfect as Corruption’s controls either.  Alice finished the game in about 15 hours, I’m hoping to do so also, but will probably take longer.  Thanks again to Alice for lending me the game!

In what could be the lamest marketing ploy, Microsoft released a Halo 3 Special Edition Xbox 360.  What’s so special about this Xbox 360?  It is green, it has a green controller, it has the Halo 3 logo on it and it costs $50 more than the comparable white Xbox 360.  Well, you say, that [...]

In what could be the lamest marketing ploy, Microsoft released a Halo 3 Special Edition Xbox 360.  What’s so special about this Xbox 360?  It is green, it has a green controller, it has the Halo 3 logo on it and it costs $50 more than the comparable white Xbox 360.  Well, you say, that $50 is because they have bundled Halo 3 in with this special edition Xbox 360.  WRONG.  In a run away show of lameness, Microsoft has released a special edition system based on a game WITHOUT THE GAME it is based on.  Sorry, that’s just stupid.

A new Wii channel has shown up in the Wii Shop.  It’s free and it’s the Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Preview channel.  It is basically a video preview channel for the upcoming Metroid Prime 3 game (release date 8/28/2007).  Metroid Prime 3 is shaping up to be the hardcore game for the Wii — and [...]

A new Wii channel has shown up in the Wii Shop.  It’s free and it’s the Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Preview channel.  It is basically a video preview channel for the upcoming Metroid Prime 3 game (release date 8/28/2007).  Metroid Prime 3 is shaping up to be the hardcore game for the Wii — and it has the benefit of the Wii control scheme.  The nun-chuck plus Wiimote are the closest thing on any console to the classic keyboard (WASD) and mouse combination on the PC.  I can’t wait to play Metroid Prime 3, it looks fantastic.