After what seems like an age since the original announcement I finally managed to get into Playstation Home today which despite all the waiting is only in the Open Beta phase, basically if everyone loves it they’ll go live soon but if everyone thinks it sucks then they’ll keep in in beta and fix the dodgy bits.
So, what’s the verdict? On balance, it’s a definite ‘meh’ with a handful of annoyances.
My first annoyance started with the character creation screens, they give you endless options for customising the face but an absurdly small number of choices for clothing and hairstyles (most of which make you look like a weirdo or someone you’d love to punch). It definitely doesn’t have the slickness of either the Nintendo or Microsoft equivalents and Sony’s aim for a little more accuracy means that whilst my Mii or 360 avatar look kinda-sorta-almost-ish like me, my PS3 avatar just looks like somebody else. In fact I’d almost rather have a generic RPG character creation engine like the one in Oblivion, my PS3 guy looks no more like me than an Argonian.
On first entry into Home you’re put into you bland but theoretically swanky apartment, forced to endure a clunky tutorial (I’m not sure if it crashed, ended naturally or whether I quit) and left to explore. Here comes my second problem with Home, with the initial install (77mb downloaded at the PS3′s standard bitrate of 300 baud) includes only your apartment so when you come to explore you have to choose which ‘area’ you want to go to and spend five minutes pacing the floor of your tedious apartment whilst it downloads. This is classic Sony, why make life easy when you can make the user do the work for you?
The areas available right away in the beta are a movie theatre, a bowling alley, a shopping mall and a central space through which you can access the other locations. I had a little wander through all of them and I think the one I most enjoyed was the central square, it’s quite a good place to meet-up with people and in the background there are some giant billboards that play trailers, this might seem like ramming ads down your throat (it is) but it works and can be enjoyable – I loved the Loco Roco 2 trailer.
Once I’d watched all of the trailers I thought I’d try and chat to someone, the problem is that I (like most people) don’t bother with voice chat on the PS3 and (like most people) don’t have a keyboard plugged in. The result of this is that you’re stuck with the pre-canned phrases or using the on-screen-keyboard, I tried this but whoever I spoke to got fed-up of waiting for me to type and wandered off. I wasn’t that bothered really as I doubt most people in there are worth talking to, I was in the public areas of Home for no less than three minutes before I heard one avatar asking another “can I touch your nipple?”. Nice.
Despite my criticisms the basic premise, structure and execution of Home are actually quite good, it feels like an MMO or at least it feels like Phantasy Star Universe without the gameplay elements. There are some teething troubles (choppy framerate in busy areas) and there’s nowhere near enough open space to hang out in than I’d expected. I also like the fact that you can customise your space but it’s absurd to make people pay for that priviledge, as soon as I realised that a yellow rubber duck costs £0.59 ($1 or thereabouts) I walked right back out of the store and thought “Not. Going. To. Happen. ”.
I’ll be very suprised if the micro-transaction route takes off, I could see bundles working (e.g. ‘Contemporary’ furniture pack or a whole wardrobe of clothes from GAP. But I don’t think the Second Life model will work so well. Personally I think that this whole consumer-gouging practice is counter productive, it would make more sense to me if companies like Diesel, DKNY, FCUK, Ralph Lauren, YSL, etc. actually paid Sony to give some of their virtual clothing to the gaming community for free – that’s how advertising’s supposed to work, it’s meant to be free to the victim viewer!
The big question is – what is it for? I can see friends coming in here to chat before playing games, although it could do with some kind of social networking component for that to become really useful. If I think about my own behaviour though the picture isn’t so rosy, I don’t play online (that what the Xbox 360 is for), will I buy furniture and clothes in here? No. Will I watch trailers in here? No, Gametrailers or YouTube are easier. Will I try and make new friends in here? Hell No. Will I go back in there before the next major content release? Probably not.
This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: , 360, Avatar, Home, Mii, mmo, nintendo, playstation, Playstation Home, ps3, sony, xbox, xbox 360
The original Gran Turismo game was a triumph in my eyes, the first time a game had ever made driving feel even remotely realistic and it was the main reason I bought a Playstation. I spent hours and hours tuning up cars and racing the same tracks repeatedly to gain minor improvements or to win special prize cars, but on the release of Gran Turismo 2 I had moved on to other gaming pastures and didn’t really find the time for all of the tweaking and racing that the series demands of it’s players. Between then and now I did get to play both GT3 and GT4 and there wasn’t really a whole lot to draw me back to the series because by then I’d gotten back into the FPS genre and was loving Unreal Tournament, Half Life & Red Faction more than anything else. In more recent years though my interest in driving games has been piqued once more, starting with Project Gotham 1 and 2 which though ‘arcadey’ in style were pretty involved racing games. On the current generation of consoles I found myself disappointed in PGR3 but enjoyed Forza 2 considerably, though I never really found the time to plumb the depths it had to offer. So if there’s been any time in the last decade that I’ve had the potential to get back into racing sims then now is the time, and I’m actually quite excited.
I got hold of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue a couple of days after launch, on a nice lazy Sunday afternoon following a lie-in and a McDonalds breakfast so naturally I was in a good mood. Unfortunately the mood was soured slowly and gradually as I spent 15 minutes installing the game only to find I had to spend an additional 45 minutes updating it before I could start racing, clearly – this is not what I bought a console for. Once the hour of admin was out of the way (in which I spent £30 on eBay, checked my credit rating and helped bake scones) I launched the game and watched the intro which is graphically stunning but doesn’t quite manage the spine-tingling brilliance of the original GT1 intro. The menus are straight-forward and offer a couple of cool little features including a live rolling display of world track temperatures and when you leave the controller unattended the display shows panning shots of your current car in various pretty locations then flips to a replay if you leave it a little longer.
As with the other GT games the main menu presents you with access to an empty garage, a small sum of money and freedom to peruse a variety of dealership, I started off by buying a purple Mini Cooper S for 28,500 credits of the 35,000 you start with. The first thing I noticed about the game is that once you buy a car, that’s it – you just have to get in and race it, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to buy parts or tune the car at all – from what I’ve heard you unlock the ability to tune certain elements of the car once you’ve completed the A, B and C car classes. Getting into playing the game is pretty easy and once in there it’s relatively compelling and if you’re a noob like me you really can feel that there’s a lot to learn before you’ll have mastered the complex physics of the game. To help those of us who aren’t GT monsters (you know who you are) there’s an optional racing line indicator which not only gives you the best position to be in, it also shows where to break and calls out the required speed for certain tough corners. Regardless of your experience though I think everyone should at least turn off the traction control, by design it limits your ability to drift in the corners and makes the cars feel much too rigid and unfriendly.
The arcade section of the game adds a slightly different twist, offering the choice of all six tracks (High Speed Ring, Daytona Superspeedway, Fuji Speedway, Eiger Nordwand, Suzuka and London) on which you can enter a Time Trial, Drift Trial or a regular race. Before launching into the race you are offered a “Course Guide” which shows real video relating to the selected track accompanied by some annoyingly cheesy musak (along with much of the game), these are amusing but would be better accompanied by voice-over rather than scrolling text. The multiplayer facilities include a 2 player split screen mode (which appears to be as bearable as any split-screen racing) and the ability to race online, which consists of events similar to the single player game and seemed a little picky about which cars you were allowed to enter into which race. Once into the online game there’s a brief period of matchmaking before you’re thrown into a race, after which it plays just like a regular game. The play was a little laggy and a few cars seemed to ‘shimmer’ in and out of existence (though none dropped out) but I’ve seen worse in the past and I did have bittorrent running in the background. The most noticeable problem however was that the race was largely a jostle-fest with little semblance of fair play, I do wonder whether online racing games can really work with such a high number of players (my race had 11).
The other noteworthy features are the News feed, GT-TV and Rankings, all accessible from the main menu. News offers a mix of useful tips (currently talking about router setup, UPnP and port forwarding) and information about game issues, one mentions a workaround for a bug with the Rankings feature which allows you to see how you compare to other players online though there doesn’t seem to be any notion of ‘friends’ against which you could compare yourself.
All said and done, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue does exactly what it says on the tin – it offers a taster of what is to come and whilst really doesn’t feel quite like a full game I think there’s enough content in there to make it worth the £25 retail price (though if you’re savvy you can pick it up for £18 online). Will GT5P get me back into sim racing? Probably not. With GTA IV on the horizon I doubt I’ll spend too much time playing Prologue but the landscape may be different when the final game is release so who can possibly say?
Score: 8 / 10
This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Gran Turismo, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, GT5, playstation, Polyphony Digital, ps3, sony
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
So, what’s been going down in my absence? After a three month absence I thought I’d better catch up by posting my thoughts on the recent (and not so recent) news stories, so here (in no particular order) are the ones that caught my eye.
Suitably following on from my last serious post, the Apple TV finally launched – I pretty much stand by all of my previous comments, especially that the Apple TV’s success is probably in the hands of the hacking community. I actually had a play with one in the Regent Street Apple Store the other day and wasn’t too impressed, scaling low quality video up to an HDTV (they were using Sony TVs) looks pretty bad and given that HD content takes an age to download and isn’t that prevalent I really can’t see the need, I might consider it for £99 for the hacking alone but for £199 you can jump. Also, given that Microsoft are adding more codecs to their Xbox 360 player there’s even less of a need for it, I do agree with the crew from Macbreak Weekly that it’ll give video podcasts a realistic shot at getting HD content into the living room but I’m not convinced it’ll get the critical mass to make a difference.
In further Apple news, the announcement that EMI would be offering DRM free music. I really think that this will be the start of a sea-change in how the record companies view digital music one way or the other. Personally I welcome the move and will definitely begin purchasing music from iTunes if I know that I’m not tied to their platform.
And finally, in the gaming arena there was the launch of the PS3 in Europe, despite a couple of facts and figures about “record breaking” sales the whole thing went with a bit of a whimper and to date there’s still a lot more supply than there is demand. The problem right now is software and with only two viable titles on release right now (RFoM and Motorstorm) the prospect of laying ot £400 for one is hardly attractive. We’ll have to wait and see, in the long run I expect Sony will catch up but even if they do I doubt that they’ll achieve anywhere near the dominance of the PS2 – those days are over. The other niggling thought at the back of my mind is that Sony were originally touting the PS3 as having a 10-year lifecycle, if that holds true then just as they’re hitting the middle of the curve I’d expect both Microsoft and Nintendo to come out with another generation of hardware to challenge whatever momentum Sony have gathered up to that point. For my money, I’d pick the soon to be released XBox 360 Elite with a larger hard drive, HDMI, better online support, better games, better price, etc. etc. As for the Wii, I really don’t play it as much as I expected to but because it cost less I’m not too upset – I’m sure that at some point they’ll release a serious killer app and I’ll be straight back on it for a while.
written by admin
\\ tags: drm, emi, itunes, macbreak weekly, old news, ps3, wii, xbox 360
I know it’s cheesy but I thought I’d do a little roundup of 2006 and then later on a series of predictions for 2007. The lists are all Top Fives and are based on techie stuff unless otherwise stated.
1. Podcasting
I had a look in 2005 and there really wasn’t any great content out there, I came back in 2006 and it was like the whole ‘industry’ had exploded with some well established shows as well as some new favourites, this was really the year the podcasting became established.
2. Video Gaming
With the Xbox 360 released in December 2005 (but generally available March 2006) and the December launch of the Wii and the PS3 (US only) this really has been the year for gaming. More than that Nintendo have performed an amazing feat by pulling games out of Geekdom and into popular culture, not only with the Wii but with this year’s release of the DS Lite and the wonderful Brain Training.
3. Beta Releases
I’m not sure what’s happened but in 2006 nobody wants to release a product without having a public Beta, this has been true for games (Phantasy Star Universe + Final Fantasy XI on the Xbox 360), PC software (Office 2007, Windows Vista) and everything regarded as Web 2.0.
4. Video & Broadcasting
This year has seen a fundamental change in the way people watch and interact with video, of course nobody missed the popularity of YouTube and its acquisition by Google for $1.65bn but the I find the complementary changes in the broadcast industry to be even more interesting. Many major players have been trying to get into the User Generated Content (UGC) market ranging from pointless attempts by people who just don’t get it (MTV Flux) to well-done but still distinctly old-media (BBC’s Your News).
5. High Definition
In 2006 we saw the launch of both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, heralding a new era of home cinema – let’s just hope that one of the two competing formats wins sooner rather than later so consumers can buy with confidence. 2006 also saw the introduction of Sky’s High Definition Satellite service, sadly it was over-priced, delivered late and has limited quantities of genuine HD content. This year also seems to be the year that people started to buy HD TVs in great quantities, at the end of 2005 I didn’t know anybody with an HD TV, now over half of my friends either own or are seriously considering an HD TV and the prices still keep on tumbling.
Well, I’m convinced I’ve missed something but that’ll have to do, I think I’ll go to bed now and hopefully dream of 2007, if I do then you’ll have my predictions tomorrow!
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: beta, ds lite, nintendo, Podcasting, ps3, Video Games, wii, xbox
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