Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

I’ve given up, that’s it – I finally admitted that the PS3 is worthless as a games console and I’ve traded-in all of my PS3 games. Admittedly I only had three, but those three are often the subject of much adoration from Sony fanboys desperate to justify their expenditure, for me they break down as follows:

Resistance Fall of Man
A passable FPS, would’ve stood out about 5 years ago but now feels dated. Clearly a first-cut by a developer used to creating kiddie platformers, I mean no disrespect as the Insomniac guys because they seem quite amiable but on any other console this would’ve gotten lost amongst all the other titles.

Motorstorm
I can’t say too much about this since I only played it a few times and each time I did a few laps and almost died of boredom, the feel of the game was pretty good but the arbitrarily difficult physics (‘smack into something solid and survive’ vs. ‘barely clip something and get trashed’) got on my nerves and at no point did anything make me want to persevere, hell – Need For Speed Most Wanted had me hooked for longer.

Warhawk
What can I say? After so much raving from the community I thought “this is a game I have to buy” so I did. I really should stop being so optimistic. For starters the whole SixAxis control method is way to spongy, I just seemed to flop around and not really get very far so I turned it off only to find that it’s the game that’s a bit weird and I find the third-person perspective made me feel so disconnected from the experience. On the plus side I will say that the maps are nice and big (though that seemed to make for long games with low kill counts) and the connection seemed to be very smooth even for very large matches (when managed to get into a game).

So now I’m left with my PSN titles – Super Rub-a-Dub (I love it), Tekken Dark Resurrection (I love it), Flow (it’s OK) and Calling All Cars (thoroughly disappointing). I don’t really plan to buy any more PS3 games until I’m certain that they’re any good, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune seems to be getting love from the community but the rest of the top games on the PS3 are multi-platform anyway so I’ll just stick with the 360.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: 360, Motorstorm, ps3, PSN, Resistance Fall of Man, Video Games, Warhawk, xbox

Tonight I’ve just spent well over an hour waiting for a train, the reason given for the delays is that there was a fatality on the tracks which was apparently hours ago. It’s not the event that I have issues with, shit happens, the problem I have is with the train company. London Midland is one of the companies that took over the carcass of the recently disemboweled Silverlink which I imagine was eviscerated for being rubbish in the first place. Well, here’s some news: changing the fucking logo didn’t help!

I noticed the problem right away on the first day after the changeover, they may have changed the logo, the livery, and even the timetable but they didn’t seem to change the staff. Now I’m not saying that all of the staff are useless, some are nice, courteous and helpful (and I’ll thank that one woman when I see her next), but enough of them were crap to have provided a legendarily bad service in the first place.

Tonight’s debacle was centred around the eagerness of London Midland’s staff to spout rubbish, slam doors directly in the faces of passengers who were calmly and politely asking questions and herd people onto trains only to herd them back off, onto another and then off of that one, etc. etc. I ended up on two separate trains, the guy next to me had been on three, all the while London Midland’s staff were just stonewalling passengers and sending people across the station on rumours and speculation. All this for the happy price of £15 per day with a 50% chance of getting a seat – even on a good day. Wankers, fucking wankers.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: ATOC, Commuting, London Midland, Silverlink, Trains