Tag: PS3

Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) videogame system

Strikers 1945 (PSP)

I am a big fan of the Strikers series (or 1940 series … or whatever type of shooter), so at some point I assume I will get Strikers 1945 for the PSP, but probably not for $10. Fun game, but I think $7.99 is a little more reasonable for this type of game. Gamer Dad (or Gaming with Children) has one of their quick no nonsense reviews.

For a little more than ten bucks, Strikers 1945 is a pretty decent download, but the game could’ve used a few more options and tweaks. There are several screen viewing size options, but none that let you tile the PSP on its side to view the action from an arcade screen ratio. Even though you get unlimited continues, maybe some selectable difficulty modes would’ve been nice so you’re not dying quite AS often. And it’s a bit short. Fans of arcade classics may still enjoy it, though. And heck, any game that lets you pilot a plane called the “Flying Pancake” can’t be ALL bad!

Of course I would not even consider this one if my copy of 1942: Joint Strike that cost me $9.99 from the PSN supported the PSP or Remote Play.

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SuperCar Challenge releases August 28?

I read on PlayStation LifeStyle that SuperCar Callenge is going to be released August 28, but I am not sure if this is for the US or UK. According to System3 this sequel to Ferrari Challenge will feature full 1080p graphics, improved AI, and host of other new additions.

Your opponents’ artificial intelligence has also been completely rewritten with a brand new Dynamic AI setting allowing the game to change the challenge you receive based on how well or badly your career is going. Of course, if you fancy a real challenge you can always set the AI to Legendary… strap yourselves in tightly though because it won’t be an easy ride!

I cannot find the game listed on the usual suspects such as Amazon and EBGames. This is one that I want – Ferrari Challenge is superb, but it is also one I can wait for because I have plenty of gameplay left before I am ready to discard Ferrari Challenge. If you are looking for a much better than decent semi-simulation racing game, Amazon currently has Ferrari Challenge for a tad under $16. Give it a go; it is well worth the price.

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Madden 10: Countdown continues

IGN just reviewed Madden 10 and awarded the game an 8.9 (out of 10). Happy days?

There are issues with some of the new aspects that have worked their way into Madden (and things that have been taken out), but there’s no denying that this is the best pure football experience in videogame history.

Back in the day it seems like everyone would say that the latest game was the greatest ever, but these days this sort of praise is pretty rare.

Thankfully the gameplay in Madden NFL 10 is, in a word, fantastic. I can’t tell you how many people walked by my desk as I was playing and wondered if the NFL season started early this year. The speed of the game has been ratcheted down only slightly so hitting holes while running and making jukes is just a bit easier than it has been. That’s not to say that the game isn’t difficult – ramp up the difficulty to find out for yourself – but everything has an excellent ebb and flow this time around.

I think I just got a halfsie. God willing and if the creeks don’t rise, I will be playing Madden 10 this time next week. The countdown rolls on.

Happy Saturday!

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Madden 10 Countdown: August 14 is almost here.

We are officially one week out from the arrival of Madden 10. A week and a day away from the Falcon’s first preseason game in Detroit. Maybe more importantly we are two weeks away from my oldest son turning eleven-teen. Let the countdowns begin!

I have been enjoying Bill Abner’s Madden 10 posts at The Nut and the Feisty Weasel. I have picked up a few interesting points from Mr. Abner’s posts:

-sliders work; adjustments are noticeable
-sliders need to be adjusted on All-Pro to enable AI rushing to be effective
-offensive linemen do not always block correctly
-WRs pickup a lot of extra YAC because receivers may be too hard to tackle
-unpredictably in a good way; the game has some randomness to gameplay elements
-some teams HB actually split carries, but backup HBs average very few yards per rush attempt
-draft AI looks to be much improved; rookie ratings are not over the top

I am really looking forward to Madden 10. Why? I have not played in videogame football in months. I passed on NCAA Football 10. Perhaps most important, this new version of Madden actually looks improved and fun to play.

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T&A Thursday Features PS3 Porn (sort of).

T&A Thursday returns with a little porn action for the PS3 courtesy of kotaku.

Japan’s DDM.tv is bringing on-demand Blu-ray quality HD adult movies to the PLAYSTATION 3.

The service requires a broadband connection, an HDMI cable and, obviously, a PS3 console — the only device the service works with presently.

Yeah. I think this is only in Japan, but where there is a will there is a way. I’m just saying. Read the article’s comments; some of them are screwed up.

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Will Sony announce a PS3 price cut August 18th?

I found this article from SMG (via N4G), which is a rare treat. Imagine a well-written, thought out article on the current state of the Big Three consoles, and how Sony plans to move up the rankings.

And while a cheaper Xbox 360 was unable to halt the Wii’s advance, any gamer worth his salt faced with a choice between the Wii and the Playstation 3 knows that Sony delivers the most consistently reviewed video games and versus a console with no media playback abilities or high definition support, the fully featured Playstation 3 would certainly be the savvy consumers choice for the best bang for your home entertainment buck. Add to this the impending launch of Sony’s more advanced motion capture controllers that were in development long before Nintendo’s Wii-mote and suddenly even Nintendo should start looking over its shoulder.

I do not necessarily agree with all points in the article, but like I said in the opening, this is a nice article and definitely worth a read.

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I will be glad when the holiday buying season kicks off.

Early August has nothing video game related going on except waiting for the latest Madden release. There are plenty of articles out and about on id’s upcoming Rage: will it or will it not run like crap on the PS3? A few more PSP Go articles are trickling in, but all things considered, everything is very quiet right now.

At least my Falcons season tickets arrived today – that gives me something to look forward to in a few weeks!

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Wii wins popularity contest over the PS3.

I have never visited Helium before; I found this article via some obscure search looking for something entirely different than a combination PS3 vs. Wii article and poll.

Now consider the Wii. The Wii is the least advanced of the 3 major consoles on the market. Its dated technology means it cannot cope with today’s ever advancing games industry. Instead, it is forced to rely on a gimmicky gaming style. The Wii cannot handle the level of gaming that the PS3 does, so it instead has to turn to games in which the actual gaming experience is less important.

The style of games that the Wii promotes is not one that will last. Sure, the Wii can be very fun at first, but how long could you control Indiana Jones with nun chucks before you start to wish you had a proper controller, and a fuller, richer gaming experience? The novelty value of interactive aerobics and simulated bowling will soon wear off, and gamers will be left wishing for something more substantial. And substantial gaming is not something that the Wii provides.

Silly rabbit, everyone knows that the Wii, with great first party games from Nintendo, compliments a PS3 or Xbox 360. And I guess the writer has failed to notice that this casual gaming craze keeps on keeping on. iPhone games. Granny games on the Wii. It is kind of the Tetris phenomenon, minesweeper, or solitaire all reincarnated.

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Final thoughts on my PlayStation 3 HDD backup and recovery adventure.

Over the last few weeks I have written a number of articles about my trials and tribulations with backing up my HDD. I was looking at the site statistics over the last week and noticed that I get a lot of searches and referrals to folks looking for info on backup up their PS3. I thought it would be useful to put together a “What did I learn?” type article. Enjoy!

HDD upgrades are easy
Upgrading your HDD is very easy. You follow a few simple steps to remove your original PS3 HDD, and replace it with a 5400 RPM SATA drive and you are almost back in business.

Follow the steps in the link for the replacement activates and then restore your backup to your new HDD and you are back in the game.

HDD backup is easy
The actual HDD backup process is easy. The PS3 has a system tool that will allow you to plug in a cheap portable USB HDD and backup the entire PS3 HDD. My 60GB HDD took about 120 minute to be fully backed up, and the restore to the new 250GB HDD also took about 120 minutes.

Proprietary HDD format
If you plug in your portable USB HDD into your computer and attempt to read the contents of the PS3 system backup you will notice that the backup contains a series of files. The assumption I am going to make is that Sony uses some sort of proprietary compression format and encryption techniques. You cannot take the files in the full system backup and open them on your computer to play videos, view images, look at the contents of saved data, etc.

Failed backup
Full system HDD backups are not compatible across different PS3. This is where I ran into a lot of pain and suffering. My PS3 shows the same model and serial number information before and after the Sony repair service, however when I put my 250GB HDD back into the PS3, and attempted to restore my backup, I was told that the backup came from a different PS3.

Full system backup contents
In case of a system repair, what can be recovered from a full system backup? My full system backup restored my videos, images, themes, and user data, but the user data was under a generic name (i.e. user1). My previous reports said that I lost all my PS3 game profiles (i.e. high scores, time played, unlocked goodies, etc), but that was actually incorrect. I renamed the generic profile to be jcalvert and started exploring the contents – all of my game info was present.

Because my PS3 failed to realize that my backup was from the same system, or perhaps because Sony swapped out the guts of my system, only leaving me with the original outer shell, everything was not restored. System settings, PSN downloads (games and Qore episodes), game data (different from the game profile info), and PSX and PS2 memory cards failed to be recovered.

File-by-file backup
If I had it to do all over again, in addition to the full system backup, I would have spent the time to do a file-by-file backup of my memory cards and PSN downloads. Of course this process is an absolute pain if you have a large number of files to individually backup.

While the downloaded games and Qore episodes were easy to recover, it was time consuming. PSN downloads have never exactly been fast for me, so it took a while to go into the PSN store, select my previous downloads from the download menu, and then download all the stuff a second time.

I am still bitter over losing years and years of PSX and PS2 saved data. That one really hurt.

Sony should make this process easier
Sony should either allow you to key in your PSN user account and password info as part of the save and recovery process, or Sony should create a third backup and restore option that lets you select what you want to backup from a menu.

The former would prevent their fears over piracy, which I assume is why Sony will not allow you to transfer a HDD to a different PS3 system. In the end I was penalized for something that was not my fault. I thought I followed the backup and recovery instructions to the letter; it was only after I received my PS3 back from repairs that I realized that I was completely screwed.

The latter would be much simpler than spending time to backup individual files.

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Spin game quickies.

I wrote early this morning about spinning the numbers. Here are a couple of interesting quotes from PlayStation LifeStyle. The writer believes that Sony has finally put itself in a winning position.

On face value this appears that Microsoft is still besting Sony for yet another fiscal quarter, but this may be short sighted, considering Sony’s momentum.

Forget for a moment that PS LifeStyle is a PS centric site. This is the first time I have noticed anyone using financial data and positive momentum for Sony in the same sentence.

The real winner here is Sony, who has driven more revenue, while selling 100,000 less consoles than its closest competitor. Profit on the other hand, is a different story, since Sony is allegedly still losing money on every console sold. Sony has already lowered some of the manufacturing costs with more changes in the pipeline. Once they lower the price, there is no stopping the PlayStation 3.

I guess that is one way to look at it, but sooner or later the red has to turn to black to prevent shareholder revolt. I guess if Sony can turn the PS3 into BigMacs then the write may in fact be correct, but I would hardly go out on a limb and say that there is no stopping the PS3.

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Spinning the numbers.

Console sales data is always a hot topic at N4G, so it is no surprise that this article from Gamezine [UK based] is burning up the charts. What I find surprising [actually this should come as no surprise] is the ridiculous spin everyone puts on this type of data. For example,

Although it’s odd to tout that the PS3 wasn’t that far behind the Xbox 360 during the quarter, it’s surely relevant for those who toot the horn that the Xbox 360 is beating the PS3 with a stick.

Microsoft’s console only sold approximately 100,000 more units than Sony’s PS3 (since the numbers are rounded to the nearest 0.1, the difference could be as little as 20,000 units) and though neither have had a great quarter, the differing price points for the consoles might raise some questions for Microsoft.

Compare that to this article from Gameplayer [an Australian based site] that takes the same data and comes to a somewhat different conclusion.

While Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all reported a fall in total profits, it was only the latter that still showed a year-on-year increase in the sale of its console. Where 8.7 million consoles were sold during the same period in 2008, 11.2 million made it out the door in 2009. By comparison the once dominant Wii has seen sales more than halved in Q1 of 2009, dropping from 5.17 million units in 2008 to 2.23 million this year. The PlayStation 3 followed suit although not as dramatically dropping from 1.6 million sales, to 1.1 million in a Q1 comparison.

No matter how you spin things, the Wii still has a substantial market share, the 360 is still dominating the next generation market, and the PS3 is still in desperate need of a price cut.

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Tomorrow is the big day.

It is hard to believe, but finally, after a long, long wait [you got me, it was not that long a wait] the Madden 10 PS3 demo is finally here. And something about a Fat Princess.

This can only mean one thing. It is time for the weekly PlayStation LifeStyle PSN rumor post. Tomorrow will be a big day.

Can you believe that I actually did not pay extra, preorder from a special location or any other nonsense just to get the Madden 10 demo a few days early? Just for the hell of it I am not even downloading the Madden 10 demo. I say screw ‘em! That’s an attention-getter.

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More PixelJunk Shooter Goodness

The Official PlayStation Blog posted a nice 6 minute clip of PixelJunk Shooter. This video is of an ice stage and does nothing to deter me from my opinion of putting this one on my wanted list. The PixelJunk series is all about high quality gameplay and solid production value. Sure Shooter will not contain the big budget wiz-bang of a GTA, Madden, or Resistance title, but it will be an excellent gameplay experience.

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Madden 10 slows down and lands a new cash cow.

I have only been casually reading Madden 10 news. What I have seen does have me cautiously optimistic about the game. Last week IGN posted another interesting article about the game. Of particular interests: the game will run slower and there is a new premium DLC called Elite.

To kick things off, let’s talk about gameplay. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, this is the slowest moving Madden in quite a long time. I’m not talking about framerates, nor is this a knock of any kind on the game. Rather the overall speed has been reduced by 5% so it’s more in line with what we see from actual NFL players. This – believe it or not – has a huge impact on what happens on the field. I found that holes in the offensive line are easier to spot and hit, tacklers easier to juke, and the finite movements in animations that might have been lost in the frenetic pace of past games can now be seen in detail.

This is actually encouraging. Now for the cash cow …

It costs five bucks (400 points on XBL) and it unlocks what is essentially a VIP online world.

This exclusive club of sorts gets you into the Elite online community and you’ll get your own private lobbies and private leaderboards. Beyond that, EA Sports is planning on allowing for some sort of avenue for these hardcore fans to easily communicate with the Madden development team. Beyond that, Elite players will also be the only ones in the Madden online world that will be able to play a ranked match on the All-Madden difficulty setting. The standard ranked match difficulty setting of All-Pro will still be available, but these hardcore fans can take the game to the next level. As an added bonus, the players who pay for the DLC will have their online name colored in gold so everyone in the lobby will know when an elitist enters the room.

I wonder what percentage of Madden 10 owners will sign up for Elite status. What sort of badge of honor will this give online users? The dynamics of watching this play out will be a ton of fun. EA just found a cash cow and I bet we see this thing milked to no end in their other popular franchises.

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