Damn, Sony’s been busy this month, haven’t they? I’ve been toying with the idea of trading in my PS3 with an added 120G Hard Drive for the new PS3 Slim. I was also thinking about trading in my PSP Slim for the Go! Then I noticed something that had escaped me previously – the very small $50 or so price difference is disproportionate to the massive performance difference. Then that had me thinking “what the hell is Sony thinking?!”
Let’s start picking this apart then.
Downloadable content is all the rage. Gamers get more to play, publishers and developers get more money. It’s a win win situation… usually. What about all those games you don’t want to buy? Publishers are quick to release all kinds of DLC for these games to try to get people playing. Sadly, it doesn’t work. Releasing additional content will not change the fact that your game sucks.
I want to point fingers at all of the offending parties, but sadly there are just too many to point. All too often the updates for the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store are riddled with content for games that sold and scored poorly. I understand publishers need to try to recoup their money any way possible, but who’s really buying all this? Do we need more content packs for Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2? No, we don’t.
Now mind you, I’m not talking about games that sell and score okay, these are games with well below a 50% Metacritic average. I understand this is a business, but this is me talking as a gamer. If people don’t like your game, don’t try to push more content on them.
I’m done ranting now.
Now we all know that the Xbox 360 has its share of problems, most notably the RROD (red ring of death). For some people its very existence is a reason to never make a purchase. I can’t blame them really. After all, Microsoft knew the problem existed and decided to push the system out anyway, which is complete and utter horseshit. But there has always been a bit of a contrast provided by various companies to offset this questionable practice. This contrast has taken the form of PRP (product replacement plans). For $50-$80, you can get a 2 year replacement plan to cover any reasonable damage of occurrence to your system.
Unfortunately, 2 years to a retailer has its own definition.
Most of you out there might look at me funny for saying that I enjoy Qore and think it’s worth the money. I bought the yearly subscription shortly after it was made available on the PlayStation Store. I don’t look at is paying for demos or other videos, it’s more of a digital magazine. I get it, it’s worth it to me. But here’s part two of things going wrong for me last night that resulted in something else broken.
The implementation of downloading new episodes for your annual subscription is one of the biggest clusterfucks I’ve seen in a while. Sony hasn’t done a good job of making things easy with the PlayStation Store downloads (required installs, extra prompts, etc.). Here’s another way they’ve botched things up.
I’m not an angry person, but this is part one of what set me off last night. I bought myself a copy of Spore a little while ago and finally got down to start playing it Thursday night. I installed and fired up the game and was prompted to download a patch. Ok, seems normal. What PC/Mac game doesn’t have patches? What ensued started a fire-storm.
I sat there for literally an hour and a half as this patch downloaded and tried to install. Guess what? It froze up my entire MacBook Pro. Yep, good times. So, I restarted and fired up the game again. Not being prompted for the patch this time, it took (again, no exaggeration) ten minutes for me to get to a point where I could create a new game (I already have a Spore account, so all I had to do was login). After starting a new game, I entered the Cell stage. To my surprise, I had NO creature displayed on my screen. That’s right, I didn’t exist. Yay! Yet another broken piece of the puzzle.
No one can debate that Xbox Live has brought the medium of gaming to unprecedented levels. As the current frontrunner of gaming communities, Microsoft has done wonders with the ability to unite gamers from around the world into a single common goal: play games and enjoy doing so. The current state of Xbox Live has degraded to a racist, hate-fest so fast, that the hardcore gamer is getting a little fed up.
So here I sit.
Almost fully moved into my new apartment on the eve of my birthday. Life has been weird recently – I find myself once again alone in my surroundings – newly single and adjusting accordingly as one should.
I find myself sitting on my bed typing this article using a connection from one of my unknown, faceless neighbors. I no longer feel like a caveman – once again having a link to the outside world. I have lots of time on my hands.
For gaming.
It seems that life isn’t so bad after all. Hit the jump for more
Yeah, I didn’t want to say ass in the title. Sue me. I’m sure you’ve seen Tycho over at Penny Arcade rant on the modding in the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3. Basically, he thinks it’s crap that you need a USB flash drive (or other memory card type) to copy the mods from your PC to the PS3. Personally, I could care less about this. Who doesn’t own a PC and some sort of memory card these days? It’s not that big a step. It’s not completely necessary either. If you try to play online with someone using a mod, it will be automatically downloaded to your machine.
What bugs me is that you need to copy one mod at a time via your USB drive. So in my case right now, I had to make 5 trips from my computer to my PS3, loading one mod each time, then starting over. There is only one file that is used on the USB key to transfer the mods and that file can only contain one mod at a time. I think Epic REALLY needs to come up with a better way of doing this. Yes, we all love mods. Yes, we love user created content. Yes, we know it’s a totally new concept to console gaming. But we need a much more streamlined way of getting them. Direct downloads from the PS3’s Internet Browser would be ideal, but allowing multiple mods to be copied over at once on a USB drive would work perfectly as well. And with the Unreal Editor update coming very soon, the amount of mods available on the PS3 is going to increase exponentially. Imagine wanting 25 mods, but needing to make 25 trips with your USB key. I think I’ll pass.
This has nothing to do with the PS3 being good or bad, so it shouldn’t turn into a flame fest. This is Epic’s implementation of mods for the game on PS3. It’s the first time it’s been done, so there are growing pains involved. Just pointing out some optimizations that need to happen sooner rather than later for mods to become more mainstream on consoles.
That’s my 2 cents. What do you think?
Last night I was watching TV and came across a movie I have not seen in well over a decade, Street Fighter. When it came out in 1993, I was only 12 and thought this movie kicked serious ass. Boy, was I an asshole. Watching this again through the eyes of a grown ass man, I realized how inherently bad this flick was. I understand the movie was supposed to be campy and include the likes of the video game characters. Fine. Yet there are some absurd liberties the writers of the movie take. I have decided to write a little tidbit about each character and some of the lines they say or things that just happen for no reason. Read on, its well worth it.
Yesterday, I wrote an article about the Xbox360 and its supposed failure due to the power brick being plugged into other surge protectors. Apparently I opened a virtual Pandora’s box of comments(the above link and here) where the focus went not from the article, but to readers flaming each other on which system is better and finally digressing into an all-out argument. Like myself, I am very passionate about the video games I spend so much time playing and reporting on, but there are very few facets about the gaming community I am utterly confused about: The Fan Boy is one.
Wikipedia defines the fanboy as follows: Fanboy is a term used to describe an individual (usually male, though the feminine version fangirl may be used for females) who is utterly devoted to a single fannish subject, or to a single point of view within that subject, often to the point where it is considered an obsession. Fanboys remain loyal to their particular obsession, disregarding any factors that differ from their point of view. Fanboys are also typically aggressive and hateful towards the opposing brand or competition of their obsession regardless of its merits or achievements.
Coming Soon!
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