The prize for the COD tournament was a signed Infinity Ward poster.  (whoopie)…

I understand this was Desctructoid’s first event.  Overall as a party goes it was pretty good.   There was a good group of folks playing Rock Band, a game I still don’t ‘get’.  Clearly sucking and looking stupid at Karaoke isn’t enough. At least with Rock Band you get to share the shame with 3 other people playing guitar and drums.   Some of the ‘bands’ were OK, at least they can push the buttons, but the singing, well, I should probably just stop here.

There was another station set up for people to play smash brothers.   Which to me was about as lame as it gets.  If I had shelled out $50 for that game I’d have to hurt someone.

There was a pre-release showing of a Ninja game.   Imagine the sword fighting of the Lord of the Rings PS3 games or Prince of Persia, mixed with the run around task based game Assassins Creed, only not as good and you’ve got this game.   I’ll certainly pass on that release.

The COD tourney was somewhat of a joke.  Very unorganized, and I’m sorry to say, you need sound to play that game.  That wasn’t possible hooked up to the big screens above the bar.

This review may sound negative and perhaps it is.  But the party was a blast and I’m sure it will only be better next time. 

Wh00t!

Why would you want this? What’s wrong with the 6 Axis?

Two reasons.

1. Six Axis controllers are $50, they seem to last about 3-4 months if you use them hard as I do. The analog sticks go to hell, become less responsive and it becomes almost impossible to use the L3-R3 buttons underneath them.
2. Some games really benefit from turbo, think Call of Duty, where your single shot weapons are now full auto’s.

The instructions for this thing were weak as most cheap over seas electronics are. But it is straight forward enough. The feel of the control is somewhat crappy. It’s a low end unit. The turbo functions work as advertised, but the analog sticks are crap. It often gets confused if you’re trying to move and run (using the left analog stick but also pushing it down to activate the L3 button, while looking around (using the right analog stick). You might do a 180, you might end up looking at the sky. Results are unpredictable.

It feels like the analog sticks are accelerated and non-linear. This blows when you need to make small critical adjustments (like sniping).

It has a switch with 3 settings for the analog stick movement, but none are good, medium is jacked up, fast is too fast, and slow is too slow. Even working with in game adjustments I couldn’t find a setting that was even close the the accuracy and quality of the Six-Axis.

Game controls are certainly subjective. The ergos are OK, it’s the mechanics of this thing that are jacked up.

It also burns a USB port because you have to use their dongle. Since the PS3 has built in bluetooth why hasn’t anyone reverse engineered how to make replacement controller that just uses that? Why do I need another dongle?

It also eats batteries. It burned through fully charged AA’s in 9 hours not the 400 hours indicated in the manual.

So if you are looking at this, you might want to pass.

PLAYSTATION(R)Network

-----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Customer

We have recently discovered the possibility of unauthorized access to
personal information on the PLAYSTATION(R)Store through PCs, a content
download service of the PLAYSTATION(R)Network.

Protection of personal data is Sony Computer Entertainment's highest
priority. Please be assured that we have taken immediate measures to
rectify this issue and system security has been restored.

Although very unlikely, it is possible that your password to sign in to
the PLAYSTATION(R)Network may have been changed through unauthorized
access, making it possible to view users’ personal information and/or
use the Wallet for the PLAYSTATION(R)Store. PLAYSTATION(R)Network accounts
do not display entire credit card numbers, so any unauthorized access to
your PLAYSTATION(R)Network account is very unlikely to compromise your
credit card number.

We have investigated the extent of any unauthorized access and possible
alteration of passwords that could have occurred before corrective
measures were taken, and are sending out emails directly to those
customers who may have been affected by this incident.

Oh what a POS this is.

Of course I didn’t read any reviews, and it’s a damn good thing I didn’t drop $60 for this. Instead I only burned $8 by renting it.

Games for kids on the PS3 are few and far between and I had somewhat been looking forward to this games release. I’ve never been a big Sonic fan, but sans anything else how bad could it be?

It’s so bad Sony and Sega should pay me for even screwing with it. Hell, on one of the game sites it only ranked a 4.2 and that’s is extremely generous.

This game is a half baked, half assed, very rushed game.

Ugh, there’s not much else to say. Don’t waste your time or money on this. Sony should be embarrassed that this is even on the market.

The Sonic page on gamespot

We lucked into a PS3 (at retail) around Dec 1, but we didn’t open it until Xmas. I put it on eBay at an outrageous price just to see what would happen, but apparently we missed the wave.

I was only willing to sell it if I got enough cash to cover both a PS3 and Wii at retail after the holidays but that didn’t happen. Things being what they are with the holidays, it stayed wrapped until Xmas.

I had a brief experience with a PS3 a couple weeks ago at a buddy’s house. We only played Madden for a little bit, and not being familiar with the controls it was a tad difficult. So now after 3 days with my own PS3 here are my first impressions.

The model we have is the 20gig model.

What it’s missing over the 60gb:

• - 40gb of hard drive space. (Not that big a deal thus far, and I’m sure we can upgrade this later.
• - Card reader ports, it doesn’t have the built in ports for memory cards. Even the 60gb doesn’t give you a PS2 memory card reader which is about the only card I can see putting in this. I have a 17 into one card reader and will use that via USB if need be.
• - Built in Wifi. Now, I already have an external wifi game adapter that we used with the PS2, but I can see this as being something I wish I had. I’m sure there will be a way to use a USB wifi stick at some point so that won’t be so bad.

Setup was easy. Plug it in Using HDMI the resolution is amazing.

Games played so far (2): Call of Duty and Madden 07.

I picked up these games and a second controller the night before Xmas as none of the games I had ordered were going to make the big day.

Game play:

Madden:

It’s a little rough around the edges, more so because once PS2 controls get burned into your head, switching them up is a bad idea. EA, you are dumb.

Game play is pretty good though once you make the transition. Being a launch game, expectations are somewhat high. There are far too many visual artifacts to please me. The review ratings for this game put it around a 7 and that’s fair. It’s still a keeper, and I look forward to Madden 08

Call of Duty:

Pretty much the same applies. Quite a number of visual artifacts at times and I’ve had the sound freak out on me twice. Luckily it reset at the next level. This game is still very well done. Reviews for this also come in around a 7 and that too is accurate.

Using the PS3 for other things:

Web browsing is a joke, the same joke it is on the PSP. It’s also not a funny joke.

Blue Ray, uh so far watching Talladega nights, I’m not seeing much different than a good DVD player puts out.

We did watch Cars using the PS3, and while not a Blue Ray disc, it was as good or better than our progressive scan DVD player. I was much impressed.

Playing PS2 games:

Ratchet and Clank Deadlocked plays well, even over the net in multi-player mode. The new R2 Trigger button hurts ya a bit but it’s not something you can’t learn to deal with.

We’ve played a number of other PS2 games and so far they all seem to work.

I think the biggest win for this is the PS3 OS and interface, which is modeled after the PSP OS/interface.

Creating users is huge, and the lack of a need for memory cards is a big win.

The wireless controllers are the bomb as well. Though the motion sensing part, well, I’m not too sold on that yet. There are a number of places in Call of Duty that use it. You wiggle the controller to fight off up close attacks, and you rotate it to set the fuse in bombs. Driving jeeps and tanks is horrible with the motion sensor. It’s a damn good thing those levels where you’re driving just simply aren’t that hard.

I don’t know what all the bitching is about. Maybe if I’d have paid > $1000 I wouldn’t be happy. But I am very pleased with the PS3 so far and look forward to the 2nd release games.

Go get a PS3.

Not sure when this was released or how I missed it. But this is pretty much the ultimate color/theme tool.

FREE at http://kuler.adobe.com/

Simply wow.

Silly us, we thought Sony was planning on grabbing market share in this console generation, but we were oh so wrong. "The name of the game is not market share, it's how fast we can grow the industry," says David Reeves, head of Sony Europe, who went on to say "We want to try and double digital entertainment in the next five to six years. Whether we have 40, 50, or 60 per cent market share is not that important." Good to know guys, we're really sorry for getting on your case about all this stuff, we had no idea you're not feeling so competitive this time around.

Heck, as long as your all about "growing the business" why not price the console at $1000 and grow the business even more!

If you hate to wander from the keyboard to launch a simple application or to check your mail, then this is the utility for you!

Despite having been built on top of Delphi I still like it.

It just sits, hovering above all else on your desktop minding it's business displaying the date and time:

Hit the magic key combination windows key-Q and type in a "Magic Word":

viola!

Your application or command will be taken care of. Pretty nifty stuff.

Poohbah rating: A+ so far.

[This tool tip leaked by: http://www.techtoolblog.com/ The Colonel didn't give up his secret recipe but he did give up this tip.]

Tags: commands, gadgets, nifty, software, utilities, windows

The Verizon UI still blows but it is what it is for now. The next dilemma is: Why I am stuck with only (4) Ring personalities?

• Master Volume
• Alarm Only
• Vibrate Only
• All Off

Hrms, this has to change. The other thing that is a serious issue for me is that mine seems to mysteriously be getting set to "ALL-OFF", or "ALARM ONLY" allot.

I don't know if this is a Verizon only issue or not. But you can toggle your ring mode using the outside buttons. I could do this with my v710 too but it never mysteriously changed.

These buttons seem to protrude quite a bit and I'd like to disable this feature in the RAZR.

Any suggestions?

Technorati Tags: RAZR, Verizon, Ring Settings, Motorola, Buttons

Also some interesting news about firmware upgrades for the PSP.

Wow,

So my PSP has finally come undone. I’ve had my PSP since the introduction. Since about the 2nd month, my analog stick wasn’t right. In games my characters would tend to drift, mostly to the right. I’ve survived though. Generally circling the joystick a couple times would straighten things out, but over time it’s gotten worse.

I figured it was just the nature of the beast. It’s not a true joystick feel. It kind of slides up and down, left and right instead of rocks.

A buddy of mine picked up a PSP for Xmas and grabbed a copy of GTA. He also added one of those Joy stick enhancers that give you a bigger PS2 kinda knobs to work with. Within a week he broke his joy stick. Luckily he was able to exchange his PSP at the store where he purchased it no questions asked.

Tonight, for me the wheels came off while playing GTA. No pun intended. After smashing everying in sight with the Firetruck, I was directed to blow the thing up and leave no evidence behind. I got out of the truck to do so, but couldn’t stop walking away. My joystick was done.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just GTA that does this to the PSP. Maybe it’s the road rage, or the adrenaline. If so Sony should take action against RockStar Games like everyone else.

But that doesn’t help me. I’ve got a broken PSP.

Technorati Tags: PSP, GTA, Grand Theft Auto, analog joystick, broken, no fun

Basically they dropped 18,000 of their 5 million members for selling their excess, “game” gold, in the open market. Perhaps they used cheating programs to mine the gold while online.

No matter, if that’s all you have in life, you don’t have much of a life. The article says that over the last year more than $2 million dollars (real dollars) in gold sales have been conducted on ebay alone. That’s real people like you and me spending money for in-game currency because they are too lazy to play the game and earn it.

Now I realize as online games go they can be very, very addicting. I lost more than a year of my life to Tribes. But I’ll be damned if I would ever have paid ‘Cash money’ to buy things like more ammo or better weapons. Oh there were certainly cheaters, and that’s eventually what ruined that game and many others just like it. (Not to mention Dynamix and the whole Tribes 2 Blunder)

A game gets going and gets popular. If you’re late to the game, you’ll never catch up, either skill wise or resource wise in this case I’m sure.

If you’re 3 or 5 months late to the latest and greatest first person shooter you will get fragged and hard. It takes time to learn the maps, the weapons and the skills. I’m sure with World of WarCraft, there’s plenty of strategy and game play that takes time to learn and master. If you’re this late to the party, I’m sure you could easily feel pressured into buying someone else’s excess.

Games like this need to have alternate parallel universe, or certain portions of it should reset from time to time, or they need a way of handicapping the newbs, and the vets. It’s the only way to keep things rocking and rolling and fend off this kind of crap.

I applaud Blizzard for trying to keep the game clean. But if there’s a market for this stuff, people will find a way to buy and sell it. If there’s an advantage to be gained in the game, then there will always be a black market for this stuff.

It’s also reasonable that if you’ve paid your way and earned all that gold legitimately, and you are getting out of the game, legitimately, you should probably have the right to sell your stuff. After all you earned it. You paid for it, or perhaps give it back for an online credit for another online game. If it has value, it has value, right?

But come on people, mining and selling it just for pure profit, and those of you buying just to get ahead? Get a life.