thomas fitzgerald.net

From Ripten:

Home was revealed some time ago now, but the vast majority of users haven’t been able to experience the ambitious virtual environment yet. Those eagerly awaiting the opportunity will have to wait a bit longer still, says Sony

[Read PS3 Users Have To Wait Longer For Home]

Technorati Tags: Playstation, Sony, Home, Virtual, Online, Internet

This is a classic example of a straw man argument. You put up an article with a completely baiting but pointless central argument just so you can tear it down. iLounge, an online publication I generally respect, posts an editorial entitled:

Can Sony Trump iTunes With New PlayStation Store?

It then goes on to highlite the new aspects of the improved Playstation store. Now, if you don’t have a PS3, that headline may lead you to wonder if sony has started their own music service or movie download store for Playstation owners.

Nope.

The Playstation store is an online store primarily to sell games, deliver game demos and some other content to Ps3 owners. The only way in which it even compares to iTunes is that it offers some movie trailers.

So does iLounge suggest that Sony might start offering music and movie downloads through the playstation store?

Nope.

So with absolutely no comparisons between two totally different services the article finishes with this gem of wisdom…

“Sheer customer base aside, there are a few other non-trivial ways in which Apple has Sony beat, though. The PlayStation Store offers no music, podcasts, or real video content—you get trailers for Blu-ray Discs and theatrical releases, but not movies to purchase or rent”

What planet are you people on. It’s not supposed to compete with iTunes. The only thing it has in common is that it’s an online store. By that logic iTunes is a miserable failure because it doesn’t offer downloads for the playstation and xbox.

I would expect something like this from random Joe’s mac blog, but not iLounge.

It amazes me every time I read a biased or completely uninformed article about the Playstation 3 as to just how similar it is to the things people used to say about the Mac and the iPod when it first came out. I just don’t get where much of this is coming from, and why there is such a determination by certain segments of the gaming and technology press for Sony to be a failure. Anyway, here’s some of the (exaggerated or not entirely true) stuff that may sound familiar to long time mac users: (Mac equivalents in brackets)

1. It’s too expensive. They should have left out the blu-ray etc. [Mac’s / iPods are too expensive - I don’t want firewire etc or My other music player is much cheaper]

2. There are no games available. [There’s no software available for the mac]

3. The xbox is just better [Windows is just better]

4. Nobody is buying the PS3, it’s a failure. [No one’s buying macs, the platform’s its last legs]

5. “The Troubled playstation devision.” [”The beleaguered computer company”]

6. Xbox users trolling Playstation sites. [PC users trolling Mac Sites]

7. Xbox version of (insert title here) is much better that PS3 version. [The PC version of (insert software title here) is much better]

8. It’s too hard to develop for the PS3 [It’s to hard to develop software for the mac]

9. Poor ports of Xbox games blamed on Sony. [Poor ports of PC software blamed on Apple]

10. You’re not a ‘real’ gamer if you don’t buy an Xbox [You’re not using a ‘real’ computer unless you buy a PC]

I could keep going but you get the idea. If you look too at much of what was said about the iPod when it first came out too there are also striking similarities. The funny thing is, if you say the PS3 will be a success and try and explain why you’ll be written off as a fanatic. But the thing is, much like those of us who could see huge potential in the iPod, I can see huge potential in the Ps3. It’s not just a game console, it’s something completely unique, it’s the convergence device we were all promised but no one ever delivered. No one seems to have realized that yet. I find myself using my PS3 instead of my Apple TV now all the time and I hardly ever turn on my 360.

You can dismiss this as fanboyism if you want but I am absolutely confident that the PS3 is the next iPod in terms of a genre defining device. The best is yet to come.

PS3 Fanboy reviews Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

Usually, I open my reviews with one or two vague paragraphs about the game, but this time I’m not going to beat around the bush. Uncharted is the best PS3 game, nay, one of the best games, I’ve ever played.

That pretty much sums up my impressions from the demo. In fact I would go so far as to say it blows away expectations of what a game, any game, on any platform can look like.
[Read PS3 Fanboy review: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune]

Despite Toshiba’s attempt to flood the market with cheap high-def players and buy off movie studios, the consumer still seems to prefer the blu-ray format according to the latest Nielson VideoScan numbers latest Nielson VideoScan numbers which show a 71% to 29% split in favour of blu-ray.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. There is no way Toshiba is going to win this war on its own. They may be selling more standalone players, but by selling them off at $100 the people most likely to buy them are those who think they’re getting a good sd dvd player for a bargain. If you think about it, the average consumer who buys in that price range, doesn’t have a HDTV, doesn’t care about HDTV or even know what HD is, so by focusing all your marketing efforts on that segment of the market you avoid the actual target consumer for such devices. It’s completely crazy. I would be willing to bet that 40 - 50% of people who have bought a HD-DVD player bought it to primarily play SD-DVD’s.

The people mainly interested in high-def content are home cinema enthusiasts, many of whom have strong brand loyalty to their existing electronics providers such as Pioneer and Sony, all of which are in the Blu-Ray camp. Toshiba has never been associated with high end quality home entertainment equipment, and as long as they continue to push into the lower end of the market they never will.

You know a format is on the losing path when they have to resort to tactics like flooding the market, pretending that game consoles don’t matter and paying off studios for exclusivity.

The Official Playstation blog details some of the new features coming in tomorrows PS3 firmware update.

Update: PS3 Fanboy has screenshots of the forthcoming update.

Ha this brings me back to the bad old days of the Apple / Windows flame wars where people in the mainstream technology press used to write massive amounts of untrue rubbish every time Apple did anything, in their best efforts to paste the mac in a bad light. Since those same people now can’t seem to get enough of Apple they have turned their attention to Sony. Of course certain “blogs” are leading the charge. Take this gem from Joystiq (Talking about the forthcoming firmware update to the PS3)

“The update, well, it’s, um, it’s … (how to put this?) … it’s lame it’s not gonna ‘un-lame’ your crippled PS3. What, you cry, but it was supposed to trump the Halo 3s, the Mass Effects — the best Mario game in more than a decade! We know. Sorry, folks. At least you can finally use your Canon printers.”

I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware my PS3 was lame or crippled. Talk about flame bait. This from an online games publication in their supposed Playstation section. Why the hell would you put someone writing about a console who clearly doesn’t like the console.

But wait, it gets better….

Engadget, reporting on the same story uses it’s own brand of nerd sarcasm it seems to think it’s readers find amusing:

“Sure, 2.00 might sound like a magical milestone, but in reality there’s not a whole lot here that’s going to revolutionize your gaming experience, and sadly nothing yet to bring online communication and play to parity with Xbox Live and Xbox’s handy dandy dashboard. “

Are you kidding me? parity with Xbox’s dashboard? The same dashboard that shoves ads in your face on every section even though you’ve paid for the console and paid for the network service. Sure, I want parity with that.

I’m not trying to rain on any xbox fans out there. Hey, I have one myself. For me, the issue here is brutally bad journalism. Why do these publications insist on qualifying every piece of news about the PS3 with how much better they think the xbox is, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the story. It’s the same crap mac users have had to put up with for years, and it’s as untrue about the PS3 as it was about the Mac.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I can not understand why for some people, in order for a particular product to be a success, the competition must utterly fail and all but cease to exist. Is the game market not big enough for more than one player so that people actually have a choice as to how they spend their money.

Ok, rant over.

Sony is finally about to properly advertise the capabilities of the Playstation 3 with a series of pretty cool new television commercials. The console’s lack of advertising has been a bone of contention among many supporters, but these new slick and hard hitting ads directly target the console’s strengths rather than the obscure vague attempt of brand emotion of the previous “This is living” campaign.

For High Res Versions See Here.

Technorati Tags: Sony, Playstation 3, Advertising

Check out Logitech’s new and seriously cool bluetooth keyboard for use with the PS3 to save serious frustration with the web browser and all those text entry fields!

For all those nice people who think the Playstation 3 is underpowered here’s a behind the scenes developer walkthrough of Killzone 2. (Courtsey of gamespot) All I can say is Oh my God”

This game will be a Game changer, pardon the pun. It is so far ahead graphically of anything that came before it that other developers will be scratching their heads trying to catch up. There are a number of interesting things being done in realtime on this engine that are impressive from a nerd point of view, such as real time color grading (on a 1080p picture while actually generating the graphics is bloody impressive). Even if you’re not a fan of first person shooters you have to watch this from the technology point of view.

So Electronic Arts, or as they’re more commonly known EA Games have been pissing a lot of people off lately. Fist off, they blamed Sony for their rather poor ports of games to the PS3, even though other studios seem to be getting to grips with developing for the platform just fine.

It was a rather pathetic cheap shot at Sony and even worse PR on their own part because they openly admitted one of their products is inferior.

Then they went and backtracked a promise they made at WWDC to release new games for the Mac, all of which seem to have been delayed. A fascinating article on Appleinsider has some classic quotes from EA:

“When pressed for an explanation, the EA spokesperson said there were no definitive reasons available for the delay but alluded to a possible lack of experience with Mac development. This was possibly prompted in part by the company’s years-long absence from the platform.”

Oh come on, so you can’t develop for the PS3 because of Sony’s hasn’t given you development tools that are exactly the same as your xbox development tools, and now you can’t get mac games out the door because you’ve no experience with that platform either.

but wait, it gets better.

In the same article….

“In speaking to AppleInsider, the spokesperson nonetheless claimed that four ports of previously released titles — Battlefield 2142, Command and Conquer 3, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Need for Speed Carbon — were already available in stores. As of press time, however, EA was unable to provide the name of a single store at which customers could purchase any of the titles.”

What the hell is going on over there?

If I was paranoid I would think that perhaps EA has taken a sudden and dramatic shift to being overly pro-microsoft, and saying and doing some rather inexcusable things with regard to platforms that might compete with said company. But I’m probably just being paranoid, right? I mean, it’s not like the former head of Microsoft’s Game devision just took up a job as the President of one of the major devisions at EA Games….. Oh , no, wait…..

(Hey, I’m just sayin’)

Sony has posted a demo of Colin McRae DiRT on the US Playstation store. I have this game on the xbox 360 so I was eager to try out the PS3 version. A lot of PS3 ports of 360 games have been somewhat disappointing. Fortunately DiRT is not one of them. The 360 version suffered from some serious frame rate tanking. It wasn’t so bad playing the game but it was still noticeable. On the replays though it was horrible with both the frame-rate dropping to 15fps or worse and with noticeable horizontal tearing.

The PS3 version is perfect. Well, at least when it comes to frame-rate. The game is noticeably smoother and the replays are perfect. A big “thank you” to the folks at codemasters for putting some effort into porting a game properly rather than just moaning about it.

[Update:] Ok, maybe I spoke a bit too soon. I was so excited this morning playing it I just couldn’t help myself. I had another try this afternoon and It’s not quite as good as I thought at first on the replays. However, I do definitely feel it’s better than the 360 version.

Keep up to date with new blu-ray releases in iCal. Pretty cool and good to see a large company embracing the open calendar format. Get it here.

This is one of those things that you come across completely by accident. A user on ps3forums.com has created a “new look” for Sony’s playstation store, which is far more in keeping with the systems xmb interface. It’s pretty cool. Well done. Sony should pay attention. This would be a far better design for the store. And while you’re at it get some more demos on there.

Technorati Tags: Playstation3, Sony