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IGN confirmed Uncharted 2 as GOTY today. It’s probably more relief than anything. It almost seemed like they were going to go against it because it was too obvious, but in the end Naughty Dog got the award they so richly deserve.
Well done to the team and I’m sure Uncharted 3 will have a similar impact.
Earlier today I was about to use the new data transfer tool to move all our downloadable games, dlc, saves and patches over to our new slim from our original 60gb. Literally as I was going to press start transfer after hooking the two system up by ethernet, the 60gb turned itself off and it kept doing so as I tried to turn it back on multiple times. Essentially it’s totally finished at this point and it picked a very inopportune time to.
It seems that what we originally thought was an error effecting the blu-ray drive exclusively, may be an issue with the whole system. While we did already buy a new system to replace it, it’s like adding insult to injury when the old one dies before it can at least transfer our data across.
I suppose for some lighter users it would be not such a big deal, but we have a lot of content that we’ll have to download again, game saves lost which may make me not want to go back in those games and patches which can take hours upon hours to download.
Then there’s game installs. Those can be monstrous in size and although at this point in the system’s lifecycle, developers have figured out how they can avoid huge installs, they can still be a problem, especially for the older games.
What I ended up doing was just accepting that the old PS3 was dead and just put it away in its box and set up the slim. I do like the slim a lot more than the original in design. Below is a breakdown of the good and bad points.
Good
Bad
I’ll have more soon when I get a chance to play more, but so far, despite not wanting to replace the PS3, it is a nicer machine to own. I just hope that this one can last until the next generation of consoles roles around.
Sony have announced the latest update for PS3 on the blog. It does two interesting and useful things.
Seeing as we may have to get a PS3 Slim soon, the new data transfer utility will help a lot and make things much easier. It allows you to hook up two systems by ethernet to move games and save data over.
You will also be able to play minis on your PS3 with the update, which may sound weird but I suppose it can’t hurt really.
edit: Maybe it can hurt. What if Sony use this to overprice content that should be cheaper, and justify rising prices for all other PSN games which used to cost around £4-5 and end up at £8-12.
The PSP go continues to frustrate me. This whole HMV price cut thing today can probably only hurt Sony in the long run as many people will just refuse to buy one now until it is officially £150 which may be quite a while.
The quick couple of hour sale HMV pulled today that took the black PSP go from £200 down to £150 showed me a few things. The first of which is that at £150, the PSP go has the potential to be an enticing prospect, but not to everyone.
When I saw the sale I instantly thought of my brother rather than myself. The reason for this was that he has only a few UMD games that he plays at the moment. Those are Resistance: Retribution and a couple of others. He recently made the decision to go totally digital and only buy from PSN, and put up with the price increase over traditional media.
Myself, on the other hand, since the PSP go was launched, have stuck even more rigidly to UMD based games, despite the fact in general I am a huge fan of digital downloads of games. I buy almost all my PC games on steam unless they’ aren’t available there and I buy a lot of PSN and iPod touch games.
In other words, Sony screwed up the great concept of PSP go so much that it turned me, a huge digital download supporter off it almost entirely. Yeah, that’s a massive screw up by them.
But as far as this sale goes, it made me realise that £150 may just be the magic price point that Sony need to get to in order to sell a lot of these devices, rather than marketing it as a premium device when it clearly lacks the premium qualities of the iPod touch, while certainly not skimping on the price tag.
£150 may be the magic price point, but I think it will be for only a select group of people unless they can work out a way to let people copy their UMDs over to the go. For someone like me, it’s hard to really imagine myself splashing out on a go at any price because I want all my games on the system’s memory, and until that’s a possibility the device in general is useless to me.
What I really wish Sony had done is simply kept with the 3000 until the PSP 2, and roll out the digital content alongside UMD (which they are doing now) for the current system rather than introducing a whole new one which would sour the whole PSP brand, in a similar way to how the PS3 originally made people dislike Playstation.
I recently gave my first impressions of LBP PSP a week or so ago. I haven’t updated recently because I was waiting for the issue where my PSP would crash when attempting to go online in the game was fixed. Luckily, in the end they released a patch which you download by using triangle on the UMD icon and clicking update.
Now that I can go online, I can tell you that this is one of the best PSP games yet made and you should definitely own it. As a big fan of the PS3 game that Media Molecule made last year which was amazing, this one surprisingly doesn’t feel diluted to a point where it spoils the experience. With a game like this, you have to accept that to fit the game on a PSP you have to cut some corners, it’s inevitable. With that said, there are some corners cut. Most notably multiplayer of any kind. This is disappointing because I’m sure my brother would have bought the game if it did have ad-hoc play.
If you asked the question, which would you rather have? Online community level sharing or ad-hoc multiplayer, I think about 90% of people would take the former, because not only does it extend the life of the game endlessly but because most people play their PSPs alone anyway, it would seem like a far better idea to have a constant stream of user created levels.
The graphics and game play both feel like the PS3 game which I’m sure was no easy feat for Studio Cambridge to achieve. I think this game is surely going to put them on the map as a high level PSP developer and it is very well deserved. I’m interested to see what they do in the future.
While we wait though, go and grab yourself a copy of this game. Oh and before I forget, I paid £20 at GAME for the UMD, well technically I got it free with my saved up reward points. The PSN downloadable version is £21.99 I think, so £2 extra which is weak really, but it may be worth it for you, especially if you have a PSP go and have no other option. I think it’s worth taking. What you might want to do though is buy a PSN card from GAME first. That way you get reward points on the card before you redeem it and buy the game.
I’ve been thinking a lot about PSP lately. I’ve been wondering about how the system is settling into the market, and how it fits into the playstation family at this point.
To be honest, my thoughts on the PSP at the moment are still about 30% positive and 70% negative, and that’s being generous.
Here are the good points currently:
The bad points:
So, essentially this list isn’t too dissimilar to the one I did after the launch of the system back in October. Possibly even worse because of how MiniS have been disappointing, in a similar way to how Nintendo’s download services always succeed in disappointing hardcore fans.
Every time I look at the PSN store update, in the PSP section it seems like a few UMD legacy games are being released each week which practically no-one cares about. Sony need to make sure that all the best PSP games are on the store as quickly as possible and it seems like they don’t care to do this most obvious of things. It’s weird how they seem to lack any sense of urgency. I just want them to focus on blowing our socks off each week with tons of new content. That isn’t happening. How hard can it possibly be for a company as large as Sony to produce content to excite people?
So with that said, what can Sony do to reinvigorate the PSP go and make people excited for that device? Well, here’s some obvious tips I hope they realise.
If they did some of those things the PSP go could be a very attractive product. If they did all of them, it would be a massive success. Too bad they might have tarnished the brand by releasing it in the state that it’s in now, unfinished and rough around the edges in many ways.
Before I get to reviewing this game, I just have to say that you really should get this, for reasons I’ll disclose as we proceed.
Firstly, this game is stunning to look at. It runs at full 1080p and you can tell. It has a beautiful hand-drawn art style that lends itself perfectly to this type of game.
Secondly, the gameplay is great. I played this on the iPod touch after I found out about the game through the Playstation Blog. I thought it was fun on the app store, but the controls were a bit iffy at times.
None of those complains are applicable in this PSN downloadable game. The d-pad movement and button control just gives such precision it’s a joy to play. The game features a full story mode, which is very well presented for a game like this. It’s more than you would expect definitely. It also features a variety of other modes like puzzle and survival as well as co-op and versus play both online and offline.
I did manage to play a game of vs online but in the end I liken this to games like street fighter or other fighters where unless you consider yourself very capable, then I would steer clear because it will be difficult for you to win even one game.
The presentation of the game is top-notch. The menus and little details in the game are great. Things like when the main character biggs dances at the end of a level, or when his son smalls comes onto the screen in a comedic speedy fashion, it’s hard not to laugh every time you see those things.
This is so much so that even when I lost a game online and all the critters fell down and got into a scrap with biggs, that made me laugh.
The final reason you should get this game is that it’s by a small independent company, Capybara games and not only should you support them for the game itself, but because they’re charging a very reasonable price for it. £4.45 on the PSN is great considering the recent trend of increasing the prices of most new games to around £7.99 or more.
So in conclusion, if you have a PS3 and you can afford to part with £4.45 then I strongly recommend you check this game out. It’s near impossible that you’ll regret it. I can’t wait to see what Capy do next.
I will probably do a full review on 3DGalaxy, but in the meantime, I’ve played a little bit of the game and I can say the following.
It’s definitely a true representation of LBP. It looks and feels just like the PS3 game which is really impressive on the PSP. It’s clear that this game is only possible on PSP, something Sony like to mention quite a lot for their games.
It’s clear though that even though the online level sharing looks impressive, in the end, the lack of multiplayer of any kind, in a similar way to rock band unplugged, will really hurt this game a lot in terms of its longevity.
Full review soon, not to mention reviews of new super mario brothers wii, F1 2009 and critter crunch.
It seems pretty clear now that after the pretty terrible turn of events over the last couple of months, everything has finally taken it’s toll on Toshiba and HD DVD and they have decided to throw in the towl and let Blu-Ray be declared the winner.
Personally I am pleased because I bought a PS3 and only have blu-ray. However, I also don’t have an HDTV so really its an added bonus for me since I really only bought the PS3 as a gaming system. It’s nice to know that when I do get an HD set I will already have the format I need.
On the other hand, I do feel bad for Toshiba even though I think Sony deserved to win a format war for once. In an ideal world they would have come to an agreement before this even started and just come up with one single format that people could adopt. Unfortunatly that wasn’t the case and Toshiba are forced to go and lick their wounds and undoubtedly come out with a blu-ray player of their own soon.
It’s going to be interesting to see how long it takes for the movie studios and manufacturers that were aligned with HD-DVD to switch to blu-ray if they do at all. Mostr natably for me on the hardware side of things, whether or not Microsoft will bring out a blu-ray adaptor for the Xbox 360.
So anyway It’s nice to finally have a conclusion to this whole thing so we can move on with Blu-Ray as our format of choice for this generation of devices, until theres another war, but I really hope there isn’t.
Also from a personal standpoint, this is great news for me as a PS3 owner and fan in that this is going to surely give PS3 sales a huge boost as it’s still the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market.
One final point regarding the HD-DVD fail is regarding porn and how people said when HD DVD was adopted by the porn industry the war was effectively over. I never thought this because even though it may have been a deciding factor for some and may possibly have triggered some negative press for sony which would make other people thing twice before buying blu-ray, for the most part people these days won’t buy a dvd of porn when it’s so widely available online which is why it wasn’t as much of a deciding factor as it might have been during the betamax vs VHS war where VHS was the format of choice for the porn industry.
The only thing this whole thing has proven is that early adopters take a big risk and people who sit back and wait get the best results. There will always be early adopters though who will be willing to take those risks.