Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

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

In case you hadn’t guessed I’ve just upgraded to the new Sony Ericsson W960i, now I’m still not 100% sold on the phone itself (more info to follow as I decide) but I’m jumping in with both feet and making it my primary phone right away.  In order to do that I need to be able to sync the phone with my Macbook (without which my life would fall apart), the problem is that blessed Sony Ericsson have thusfar failed to release a plugin for iSync.

Fortunately the Internet came to the rescue (see here), in case the file there gets knocked off of the file host I’ve decided to host the files myself here: Sony Ericsson W960i iSync Plugin.

All you need to do is extract the contents of the zip and place the entire ’Contents’ folder in the following directory under Macintosh HD:

/library/PhonePlugins/SonyEricsson_W960i_isync_plugin_v1_07.phoneplugin/

Restart iSync and you should be able to connect to the phone, it worked a treat for me and I even received a call whilst the phone was in the middle of the sync and the call had the real contact’s name on it!

I will submit a more detailed review soon but for now it’s worth noting that the aside from the lack of an iSync plugin (which I’m certain will come) the W960i does work as a Mass Storage device out of the box and charges from USB so whilst there’s no actual software it’s Mac-friendly enough that I can get away without switching on the dreaded Beige Box in the corner.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, Ericsson, iSync, osx, sony, Sony Ericsson, W960i

Well, I’m jumping the gun a little bit but I think it’s near enough and I need a decent topic to post about because it’s been bloody ages since my last post! About a year ago I was waiting in line at my local Gamestation having been one of the lucky few to get a preorder, that said I got my preorder in August by asking in store every few days for ages so it’s a mix of luck and persistence. Now I think it’s time to take a good look at how thing have turned out.

The Console (8/10)
When I got the thing back I was pleased to find the console to be a bit smaller than the old Xbox but horrified to see the bus-sized power brick that comes in the box, I setup the unit quickly and easily then migrated my Live account and off I was – nice and simple. I’ve heard plenty of people bitching and moaning about their boxes overheating and the console freezing, I have never had this and would be 95% sure that most of these cases are down to bad placement, poor ventilation, general stupidity, etc.

The Accessories (8/10)
I love the wireless pad, it’s the first time I’ve seen a decent responsive wireless controller and I just love the feel and everything about it and the absence of wires is great. I have used a wired pad and would generally recommend against using it, not because of the cable (I’ve been used to that for years), but because the battery in the wireless version gives it an extra bit of weight which makes it feel just right.

As I bought a premium unit on launch day I received a free IR remote control (not as big as the one available in retail), I use this thing all the time – not only does it save batteries, it’s just much more pleasurable to use if you’re hopping around the dashboard. Other accessories I have bought include a play & charge kit (useful but not essential) and the camera (useless but entertaining).

The Operating System (9/10)
To me, this is probably the single best feature of the Xbox 360 – Microsoft’s decision to bring music, chat, messaging, gamercards, settings, etc. into the OS rather than have it handled by games developers was truly inspired. I know this will make me sound like a fanboy but I believe that MS truly led the way with this and I am regularly amazed at the consequences (cross game invites, cross-game chat, achievements, games invoking the guide for gamercards, etc).

The dashboard though is a bit clunky and sometimes a pig to navigate but the ability to stream music and video and pictures from a PC (or CD/USB), iPod support, etc. make up for it’s mildy frustrating interface.

The Software (4/10)
Well, what can I say? Most of the games released to date have been disappointing re-hashed crap with shiny textures added in to make them look ‘next gen’. I’m quite bitter about this as I’ve spend a lot of my hard-earned cash to find games are to short or too samey or just plain rubbish (PDZ). The best games I’ve played are GRAW (truly brilliant), Oblivion (very pretty and a fantastic game but short-lived by Morrowind standards) and PGR3 (though it’s about a third the size of PGR2 and rubbish online). I am wholeheartedly (but cynically) looking forward to Gears of War (have done ACT1 but can’t comment properly yet), Rainbow Six Vegas and Grand Theft Auto 4 (due next October) but everything else I’m pretty nonplussed about.

I am totally fed up of game developers/publishers churning out the same old rubbish over and over again and people keep buying it, I think that in this uber-corporate modern age games are tailored too much for the mass-market whilst niche games or innovative games fall by the wayside and never get anywhere. Perhaps it’s slightly unfair to bring this rant up on the birthday of the Xbox 360 as this problem affects the whole industry – the only company I see trying to do anything about it is Nintendo. The DS succeeded in putting fun back into the handheld gaming market and has crushed the PSP by doing so, the Wii furthers that model and I truly hope it succeeds because if it doesn’t – it’ll be bad for all of us.

XBox Live (7/10)
Marketplace is brilliant, the Red vs Blue guys made fun out of it but sometimes I do just pop on to the box, browse some Marketplace content (demos, trailers) then maybe do some chatting without playing a game. I would say that even after the recent reorganisation it’s still hard to find what you want sometimes, it could definitely be done better. My other major concern is that we’re being slowly bled dry by marketing execs selling small amounts of content for medium amounts of money.

As for actually playing games over Live, I rarely play with anyone other than my existing friends – I’m not quite sure why or whether it’s the fault of the 360 but I just don’t like playing against strangers now. I could probably trace this malaise back to Halo 2 being full of trash-talking tossers, but remember PGR2 had a good community of clean racers and friendly people – the 360 brought us PGR3 which was full of dickheads trying to run you off the road. Something’s not right, but I don’t know what it is.

I also haven’t seen much innovation in terms of how games are played online, the same old game modes are churned out by developers with no real ‘next gen’ thinking (I sound like a journo now, what a twat).

Xbox Live Arcade (9/10)
Absolutely totally brilliant, with disappointing games costing £50 it’s refreshing to be able to buy some great games (Marble Blast, Wik, Cloning Clyde, Doom) for a few quid and get a real sense of pleasure out of them. Sure, there have been some turkeys (SF2 being the worst) and I don’t know why retro titles are laggy over Live when something like GRAW isn’t but all in all I love Live Arcade. You also have the chance to play trials of every title and on the few occasions I have been burned it have been because I didn’t play the trial version first (aka my own stupid fault). I would say that there ought to be more original content on there rather than so much retro stuff but that takes time so maybe the next year will bring some great titles.

The Community (8/10)
A few years ago who would have thought that one of the world’s biggest corporations with monopolies in several major markets would actually listen to it’s customers? I certainly wouldn’t but I have been proved wrong and I am glad to have been so. Microsoft have been great at communicating with Xbox customers using a whole range of multimedia outlets, from the forums on Xbox.com, the blog and podcast from Major Nelson to the little things like holding community days for both major and independent websites. On top of that with E3 and X06 they put hours of content up on Xbox Live market place so that we could share the previews and demos that normally only journalists get to see.

Conclusion & The Future
In all I think it’s a great system but I feel let down by the lack of decent games being released, this at least is something that can be fixed and launch games are rarely the best so I feel able excuse that in my mind. I am still glad that I bought the system and will cynically look forward the coming year!

This next year will be critical for the 360, for the first time there is competition in the market and PS3 will sell regardless of Sony’s inept PR and arrogant ways – the Sony fanboy may well still be king. What I really hope is that the upcoming/recent games (Gears of War, Rainbow Six Vegas, Medal of Honour Airbourne, Call of Duty 3, Grand Theft Auto 4, Halo 3, etc.) will truly make this console worth owning. If this happens then MS have a good chance to hit Sony where it hurts, if Sony tie or even lose this round then some of the arrogance will fade and we’ll have a truly competitive market – which is always good for the consumer.

One upcoming development is the imminent release of the XNA Games Studio, for those of you who are unaware this will enable anyone to write their own games on the PC then play them on the 360 as well as distributing them to others via the Internet. I believe that this has the potential to revolutionise gaming though it will depend very much how content is distributed and how much control Microsoft retain over content and censorship. Too much control and the service will be full of rubbish games that aren’t worth playing, but too little control will result in kids getting hold of adult games and spawn a thousand lawsuits.

Other developments to watch are: MS selling high-definition movies & tv shows over Xbox Live market place, the HD-DVD drive addon (a bargain for the very latest technology), Live Anywhere (messaging, invites and even gaming between Xbox 360 and PCs, Mobile Phones).

THE END

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: games, gaming, Microsoft, nintendo, playstation, sony, wii, xbox 360