Just as a little reminder for those of you who got a PS3 2 years ago at launch date in Europe, your 60GB model is already 2 years old now. Let's cross fingers that those models will survive the next couple of years. Happy birthday, PS3!
Just a couple of days ago a bought my latest PSP game, Patapon 2. This has been the first new PSP game for me since weeks. If you take out the latest LocoRoco sequel it's been for month. Add to that the fact that more and more retailer shrink down the shelve space for PSP games and we can conclude that the PSP is slowly becoming insignificant for publishers as well as retailers. What surprises me though is the fact that there are more than 50 million units out there on a global basis and it looks like Sony is not really harvesting this customer base. So what is the big problem here?
Well, to some extend this due to a changed market environment which changed a lot since the launch of the PSP. Just think about the launch of the iPhone and the associated AppStore. With several years lead time, Sony wasn't able to implement the Playstation equivalent until recently. But not only the store front was missing, there are also no many snack type games, the majority of games you find in Apples AppStore. Funny enough, you can find even more of those games on PS3 than on PSP.
Sony made a few mistakes during the lifecycle of the PSP and it's up to be seen if this is going to change. In the beginning, the PSP had a lot of multiplatform titles which came out in parallel on PS2, which is kind of stupid as most of the PSP owners a most likely PS2 customers as well. Why would someone buy the same game on two platforms? Next mistake was the hugh price for UMD videos which finally lead to a dropping support by the various studios as customers were not willing to spend the same on UMD videos as they would pay for a DVD. Mistake number three was the slow hardware evolution that lead to three hardware revisions that almost looked the same. Finally, during the last 2 years, Sony's focus was almost 100% on the PS3 launch, which left the PSP aside.
Now it looks like that Sony finally found its forgotten child again, as they obviously realised that the PSP has still some market potential. It might be too late though as both Nintendo as well as Apple are wedging Sony from both sides.
They could have easily just said congratulation to Guerrilla for delivering a great game, but Microsoft just used the unquestionable quality of Killzone to say that this is just the way things are: you develop a game, we create a even better one ;-)
We congratulate Sony and Guerilla Games for their efforts with Killzone 2, however this is only the beginning of a new wave. The current technology employed for certain unannounced Xbox 360 exclusives far surpasses what gamers have seen in any game so far. Gears of War was the beginning of this technological benchmark when released on the 360 and this lineage will be carried forward in the following months with exclusives that shall stand for a new definition of gaming experience and provide stiff competition for the opposition.
Well, not knowing what games this undisclosed Microsoft spokesman just refered to, but I am pretty confident that Sonys pipeline is equally if not better equipped. This is actually a very interesting time as developers are more and more getting to know what's being possible on a hardware and what's not.
I guess one of the most controversial moments during the development of the PS3 was the famous E305 when Sony showed a few trailers of forthcoming PS3 titles. With the PS3 still more than one year away, everybody was expecting some announcements and of course a good reason why the PS3 should be the better console in the next generation of consoles.
It was one of those moments then when Guerrilla played the first Killzone 2 trailer that was breathtaking at that time and was hard to believe an actual game footage. Now, almost 4 years later we all know that this was actually not the case and seriously, it couldn't have been as at that time Guerrilla just started with the development of the game. What the trailer actually was suppose to be was an idea of what the final game should look like - a target render as developers use to call this.
Finally holding the game in my hands, it's time to check if Guerrilla / Sony were actually cheating at this press conference 4 years ago or not. This is not suppose to be a review, so please don't mind if I am not going down to the smallest detail here. Anyway, what becomes clear as soon as you start the game is the fact that Guerrilla delivered a master piece of a game that does almost everything right. No need to complain about missing coop modes or minor things like the additional weapon slot.
Killzone 2 is so close to a perfect game as a game can be at a time. The whole presentation, the gameplay, the sound, the visuals, just perfect. Talking about the visuals it it simply amazing what Guerrilla achieved during the last couple of years. Is the game matching the target render from E305? It's not just matching, it's even better than this if you look at some of the visual qualities. What the game achieves in terms of the lighting has not yet been seen in any console game and not being a PC gamer myself I don't think that there are equivalent PC games out there.
One could argue that the game doesn't offer to much variety sure, but I rather like to play a game that focuses on what it can do best instead of a game that tries to do everything but not succeeding in any way. There are more than enough examples of that.
On the technical side Guerrilla showed all of those screwed up developers what it looks like to develop a high quality game on the PS3 platform. Not enough memory? A too slow Bluray drive? Endless installation? Forget about it. Those things simply do not exist for Guerrilla and I hope that what the studio has achieved (together with other Sony studios) will be beneficial for other games still being developed.
So far the PS3 was a role model for a reliable piece of hardware. Other than the competition, the PS3 so far didn't have a reliability issues similar to the RRoD on the 360. Not that this is going change in general, but it looks like that at least re. the old 60 GB model, this is no longer the case.
The issue is very well known already: at some point in time during the PS3 life time the user turns on the PS3 which shortly shows the green LED which instantly turns to yellow (therefor the name) and switches off after another second. From that point on there is no other solution than calling the Sony help desk and filing an repair request.
What makes this even more frustrating is the fact that this seems to be an 60 GB model only issue, the console that still has the PS2 compatibility mode and is therefor for many owners the preferred PS3 edition.
The next potential frustration ist the fact that Sony does not really repair those consoles but rather replaces them with refurbished models with a new case. What seems to be nice policy turns out to be a big issue as all your downloaded content is linked with this hardware and their are only 5 parallel hardware profiles possible. In other words, after 5 hardware replacements you are no longer able to re-download any of the purchased content. The solution to this problem is to deactivate a console to unlink this specific hardware from the account, but guess what, if you are facing a technical issue with your PS3 you don't have the possibility to do that on your broken console.
So what is the actual problem with those consoles? Hard to say as there is no official statement from Sony saying that this is an issue at all. What it looks like right now, this is somehow connected with power supply which obviously seem to break mainly on the 60 GB models.
At this point it's hard to say how many consoles are impacted by this issue but based on the coverage in the various boards and blogs, this is far beyond the normal failure rate and very consistent across all cases. Personally I have two 60 GB consoles and actually got my second console just because of such an issue. Fingers crossed I hope that I am not experiencing this ever.
Not sure what you guys are using as a media server for your PS3 if you are using that functionality at all. But if you are either still looking for a decent solution here is a piece of code that is open source and specifically made for the PS3. Even though the PS3 is providing a DLNP-compliant media browser there are a few issues that rules out many of those available media servers out there.
This is where the PS3 Media Server jumps in providing advanced real-time media encoding for all of the non-supported formats and direct support for all native formats. And as a quick tip if your server is not finding your PS3 right away, check the "Force networking on interface" and try the various values there. The server will sure find your PS3 after 2 or 3 seconds.
Personally I am still using a NAS based media server which is no longer supported and has been replaced by a desktop media manager by now. Unfortunately, this product is not supporting any real time encoding due to the limitations of the used NAS which makes it difficult to view some of the media. That's why I am still interested into other products.
Being sucked up by my job again it's kind of tough to follow the news threat these days. One of the reason why I finally started twittering againafter not using my account for month now. It is a lot easier to share those 140 chars instead of writing a full fledged post. Anyway, what were the most interesting posts these days?
0.5 PS3
Definitely one of the most promising news is about the potential downsizing of the PS3 due to the forthcoming 45nm version of the Cell. Here is what David Reeves said in a guardian.co.uk interview:
We took our cuts in 07 and 08, we restructured and streamlined and we're as lean, as mean as we can be. I have seen no plans to cut jobs and it wouldn't be productive to do so. We're always looking at ways to reduce costs, replacing the current 65 nanometre Cell chip with a 45 nanometre one probably in middle of year. But will it be anything as off-strategy as releasing a PS3 with a DVD rather than a Blu-ray drive? I doubt it.
As much as i like the idea of the 45 nm version what was driving Reeves to speculate about a DVD equipped PS3? What type of nonsense would this be? Whatever, this new hardware revision gives Sony the flexibility to react during those days of finanical crisis with an adequate price reduction, which will come for sure this year.
Turn the lights on
If you are a loyal follower of this blog you should know by now that I am a big, big supporter of Philips Ambilight technology. Mounted on a white wall Ambilight creates a compelling atmosphere that no other HD TV can create these days. The good thing about the Ambilight technology is that it works with all video inputs. amBX on the other side is a Philips spin-off that uses the same kind of technology plus further effects like ventilators and shacking hand rests to even make this experience more realistic. Mainly focused on PC gamers with keyboards and usual monitors, amBX is now supporting the PS3. As much as I support the Ambilight technology I am not sure if this is going to take off as a new technology. Both hand rests and fans will not work in the typical living room environment and only the LED based lights would somehow work in such a context. But those lights just don't simply attach to a usual TV which makes it kind of difficult to use them. So, in case you are interested in this technology I would really suggest to take a look at the Philips Ambilight products as they will work with all games and movies and don't need special support.
Demos, demos, demos
As a PS3 fan I was waiting for those demos for month now and finally I wasn't even at home to start the downloads. Two critically acclaimed game demos have been released last week, Killzone 2 as well as Resident Evil 5. This weekend I finally found the time to at least take a look and check the quality of the games. After I downloaded the Killzone 2 demo I was a little bit disappointed to find out that it is basically a cut down version of the GC 2008 demo I already played last August. Too bad. I guess I have to wait for the final game. Resident Evil 5 on the other side was a very positive surprise to me. The game really picks up all the good things from the last chapter and comes with very good graphics that justify the long wait for the game. I can't wait to play both of those game in a couple of weeks.
Monkey Business
After the first rumors turned out to be true I had close to zero confidence that we eveer gonna see TimeSplitters 4, now that Free Radical seemed to be history. Well, it might not actually be the case now that we had to learn that Crytek, the company behind Far Cry and Crysis bought what was left of the company. Well, there is no confirmation yet, but I guess that part of the deal are all the company owned IPs, which would of course include TimeSplitters. If those Crytek guys feel at least a little sense of responsibility they will of course continue with the game after they have successfully brought those guys on board. The new name of the company is Crytek UK. Not very unique if you ask me.
Maybe this is a cost cutting decision in order to save some bugs for webspace and domain fees and therefor one of the obvious impacts of the financial crisis, but don't you also thing that playstation.joystiq.com is not the same as ps3fanboy.com. Well, we might never get to know. But one thing is for sure, playstation-disorder.com is going to called playstation-disorder.com tomorrow as well.
I know this is totally off topic and 100% Playstation free, but my new pet Nabaztag is really fueling my imagination. While thinking about various new use cases for Nabaztag it always boils down to leveraging the rabbits RSS reader capabilities. So what could be possible RSS feeds? How about todays TV program announced by Nabaztag at 8 pm? Or what about the movie program? But how do you deal with web pages that don't provide those infos at a ready to use RSS feed?
This is where Yahoo Pipes comes to the rescue. One of the most amazing Web 2.0 tools based on the simple concept that any kind of data can be converted in an RSS data set and transformed through various operators and aggregators to meet your specific requirements. Literally a RSS mixer. Based on the data that's out there on the net just waiting for someone to grab it and use it, there is hardly anything Nabaztag couldn't inform you about. Can you imagine to get informed about certain auctions on ebay that meet your specific requirements. Pipes can do that and let Nabaztag tell you about. We definitely need more apps and services that generate RSS as result sets.
If you want to see RFID and the Internet at work, Nabaztag is the device for you. Upps, I forgot, we are talking about a toy here ;-)
P.S. Still looking for a PS3 related application ... but wait, what about an RSS feed that lists you all of your PSN contacts being online? Soooonyyyy
Ever since the announcement of the PS3 I was waiting for Sucker Punch to announce the continuation of one of the defining franchises on PS2: Sly Cooper and its band of thieves. But then it was InFAMOUS that seemed to be the first game from Sucker Punch to hit the PS3.
Now first rumors are poping up directly coming from the developers refering to all new Sly game which features overhauled graphics and gameplay that will be more varied and focused this time around.
Add to that the fact that we are getting a PSP and PS3 game around the same time in 2009 and I can hardly wait for the game to be finally released. Could it be that this game will be released even before InFAMOUS? Btw, the first game of the series is still my favorite even though it had the most limited gameplay of all Sly games.
Just as a little reminder for those of you who got a PS3 2 years ago at launch date in Europe, your 60GB model is already 2 years old now. Let's cross fingers that those models 
Just a couple of days ago a bought my latest PSP game, Patapon 2. This has been the first new PSP game for me since weeks. If you take out the latest LocoRoco sequel it's been for month. Add to that the fact that more and more retailer shrink down the shelve space for PSP games and we can conclude that the PSP is slowly becoming insignificant for publishers as well as retailers. What surprises me though is the fact that there are more than 50 million units out there on a global basis and it looks like Sony is not really harvesting this customer base. So what is the big problem here?
They could have easily just said congratulation to Guerrilla for delivering a great game, but 
Not sure what you guys are using as a media server for your PS3 if you are using that functionality at all. But if you are either still looking for a decent solution here is a piece of code that is open source and specifically made for the PS3. Even though the PS3 is providing a DLNP-compliant media browser there are a few issues that rules out many of those available media servers out there.
Being sucked up by my job again it's kind of tough to follow the news threat these days. One of the reason why I finally 
Maybe this is a cost cutting decision in order to save some bugs for webspace and domain fees and therefor one of the obvious impacts of the financial crisis, but don't you also thing that playstation.joystiq.com is not the same as ps3fanboy.com. Well, we might never get to know. But one thing is for sure, playstation-disorder.com is going to called playstation-disorder.com tomorrow as well.
I know this is totally off topic and 100% Playstation free, but my new pet Nabaztag is really fueling my imagination. While thinking about various new use cases for Nabaztag it always boils down to leveraging the rabbits RSS reader capabilities. So what could be possible RSS feeds? How about todays TV program announced by Nabaztag at 8 pm? Or what about the movie program? But how do you deal with web pages that don't provide those infos at a ready to use RSS feed?
