Category Archives: PlayStation

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

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Ever since Subsistence revived my interest in the Metal Gear series, this one has been high up my wishlist. It fulfills both the need to continue the excellent Big Boss saga and the more pressing requirement for something to play on the PSP. I got my US copy this morning and, after a couple of hours spent trying to get the 3.02 firmware emulated so I wouldn’t have to upgrade, I gave it a crack.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

The immediate concern when playing this game is the control system. One of my criticisms of MGS3 was the convoluted controls and although they still take some getting used to here and are overall inferior, Kojima’s team has done some much-needed pruning. The lack of buttons eventually stops feeling limited, and I hope that the lessons learnt here are carried over to MGS4.

The 3D camera obviously doesn’t control as smoothly on a D-pad as on an analogue stick, but is still a welcome transplant from the last game. The frustration of unseen enemies is further alleviated by a permanent radar/sound sensor thingy (no worrying about battery levels) and a full map of each area on the pause menu. I still got spotted by an enemy that I missed in the first room but that was my fault for not realising how the radar worked.

The fundamental change to this game comes with the recruitment system, where each mission can be played out with a squad of four allies. Almost any enemy in the game can be recruited into your little rebellion and then their unique skills can be utilised – uniformed enemies are less conspicuous when infiltrating a base, for example – in your efforts to complete the game. It even uses the wi-fi function of the PSP to generate random recruits, meaning that just stopping in a coffee shop can yield an S-class supersoldier. I’ve taken my PSP out with me a couple of times with the sole intention of visiting a known access point to see what I can get. Continue reading Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops →

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation

Megaton!

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The announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be a DS game, despite the size of its new host platform, could end up being one of the biggest news stories of recent years. It represents a huge shift in development trends right up there with the mass exodus of Nintendo’s oppressed minions to Sony circa 1995.

The movement of Dragon Quest back to Nintendo – for this instalment, at least – comes over a decade since the last ‘proper’ Nintendo Dragon Quest and may not have the impact of Final Fantasy in the West, but in Japan this is, infamously, the game that cannot legally be released on a school day because of the effect it has on productivity. It’s second only to Final Fantasy and, when coupled with the insane popularity of the DS in Japan, has the potential to smash sales records. I was in Japan when the FFIII DS remake came out and the only units I saw on sale were expensive import models from Europe. This should be even bigger.

More than anything this is a slap in the face to Sony. One of their bigs guns has gone portable, and it’s not on theirs. This is going to put even more distance between the DS and PSP, in fact. And if this is as big of a success as it should be I’d bet money that Dragon Quest X turns up on DS or Wii. Low development costs and colossal sales are an irresistible combination for any company, and I’m sure they’re quite aware of how much a game on the scale of DQVIII would cost to develop on the PS3.

I’ve seen the complaints the people expecting this to be a PS3 game and can understand them (although I think the DQIX screenshots look great), but Square Enix won’t be able to hear them. They’re too busy filling up a swimming pool with money.

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Whatever Happened to Plug and Play?

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Remember when a new console had to be connected to power, connected to the TV, and that was it? Those were the days…

With all of the big three espousing network connectivity and, to wildly differing extents, higher resolutions, will those days ever come back? Getting the full experience from a games console is no longer a case of picking up a SCART cable along with the new hardware. As well as needing an expensive TV, just setting it up relies on an intimate knowledge of your TV’s supported inputs and resolutions as well as the favoured sound formats of your audio setup. I’m a technical masochist and so actually like fiddling with settings, but I doubt the average person does. We all must have cringed at friends with nice widescreen TVs but with their DVD player set to 4:3.

Networking is just as bad, requiring either a wired network within range of the console or a headfirst dive into the world of wireless networking – encryption protocols, DHCP servers, MAC filters, SSIDs, keys, and other such fun – to get what can be the main thrust of the hardware in the case of the 360.

And then there was firmware. The risk of completely killing your hardware aside, it’s more than slightly annoying to find yourself unable to play a PSP game because it has a mandatory firmware upgrade on the disc and your machine doesn’t have enough battery power to let you flash it. So much for ease of use there. Since its release the PS3 has had two firmware updates weighing in at nearly 100MB each, which is no quick and painless download on a 2Mb connection with a bandwidth limit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the stories of firmware updates killing 360s and Wiis, as well. Don’t even get me started on game patching and modern developers’ inability to notice players randomly disconnecting from online games.

Necessary evils though these may be if we want these new experiences, surely someone out there can come up with some kind of standards. Why not make TVs that can tell your devices what resolution they want? Why not test your bloody games before you ask us to pay for them?

Games, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

More Hours in the Day, Please

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One of my favourite arguments for why emulation is usually a bad thing is that, when you have a few gigs of SNES games, you don’t appreciate them and never get to give them your full attention. I can’t say I enjoyed spending £60-70 per game, but at least I’d play the hell out of them and enjoy them all.

What I’m discovering now that I can afford to buy more than a handful of games each year is that I’m having the same problem. I mentioned back in October how hard it was going to be to buy everything I wanted and, having bought a good chunk of them (seven, according to a quick count), I’m now finding that it’s just as hard to do them all justice.

Okami sits abandoned at the 20-hour mark, I rushed my way through Call of Duty 3, I’ve barely scratched the surface of F.E.A.R., fifteen songs through Guitar Hero II, maybe a couple of hours into GTA: Vice City Stories, ran through Splinter Cell once (unusual, given my track record with the series), and I’m lagging behind the rest of my friends list on Gears of War. Thank God I don’t have to juggle the PS3 and Wii at the same time. Anyone else having trouble with too much of a good thing?

I guess I’ll have a nice backlog to work on in the slow summer months, but then I’ll be too busy complaining that there are no new releases to play any of this old stuff.

Just chalk this up as another reason to stagger releases throughout the year.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

PlayedStation 3

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I got to have my way with a Japanese PS3 earlier today. First thing I should point out that this was just connected through composite so I can’t claim to talk with any authority about the graphical acuity that people will get through component and HDMI. Unless they’re on a 1080i TV, of course. Ba-dum tish!

With the obligatory bash out of the way, on with the impressions. First, the hardware itself:

  • This mutha is mahoosive. Imagine the monolith from 2001 with an HDMI port. It’s slightly bigger than the 360, and a similar size to the original Xbox. Where are all the jokers who made the size quips when that came out, I wonder? Queuing for their PS3s, I’d assume.
  • It has the same shiny finish as the PSP. Thankfully you’re not required to touch it and therefore smudge the hell out of it as you were with that, but it looks nice.
  • (whisper quiet). A very good thing. A bit louder than the near-silent slimline PS2, quieter than the 360…not that that’s difficult.
  • Slot loading disc drive and touch-sensitive buttons are extremely slick.
  • If you’ve used a PSP you’ve used the “XMB” dashboard-thingy. I wasn’t that keen on it then and I’m still not, but it’s a dramatic improvement on the PS2’s frontend…not that that’s difficult.
  • The web browser is decent but a mouse and keyboard is a necessity. The controls for it are even more convoluted than on the PSP.
  • 100MB firmware updates? Let’s not make this a regular occurrence when some of us have bandwidth limits.
  • The jury is out on the SIXAXIS. I’m not a huge Dual Shock fan anyway, and although the sticks have a nicer finish than the DS2, they’re still not nearly as accurate as Nintendo and Microsoft’s analogue sticks. Rumble is one of those things that you miss when you don’t have it. It’s not as light as I’d heard, and so I was expecting to hate it since I’d been given comparisons to the SNES controller; it’s still a bit on the cheapy side, but not bad. I’ll talk about the motion sensitivity where relevant in the games.

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Games, PlayStation

The HD Era Begins When…

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…you buy a component or HDMI cable. Why the hell doesn’t the PS3 come with anything better than a composhite cable?

Cue lots of people being bitterly disappointed when they get it, stick a Blu-Ray in there, and find that it looks the same (or worse) than their DVD player. Or the same reaction when those whose knowledge of high definition is limited to the fact that their TV is “HD Ready” finds that it looks shockingly bad on their LCD. Believe me, composite really does.

I know that I haven’t said anything positive about Sony in a while and I’d like to be able to, but apart from the good move of adding HDMI to the cheaper model what have they done to make themselves some new friends?

This is supposed to be the ultimate high-end gaming experience with no expense spared but it comes to a cable that could only be worse if it was RF, they dropped the rumble apparently because of cost (a motor must cost them pennies), and they don’t give it an IR receiver so that even the most expensive of universal remotes can’t control the PS3; you need to buy its horrible Bluetooth remote. That last one, in particular, won’t convince the AV community with their £150+ remotes that this is a legitimate choice for their new HD movie player.

Can someone convince me that this isn’t a ridiculous move?