I’m not really big on the whole PSP homebrew scene and I couldn’t be even if I wanted to because the white PSP ships with 2.00, but I’ve really been blown away with how fast people have started to exploit a small bug in the 2.00 firmware. Looking at PSP Updates, they went from a buffer overflow on Friday evening (link) to the traditional “Hello, world!” on Saturday (link) and through some basic demos on Sunday until some enterprising individual came out with a fully functional version of Pong on Monday evening (link).

Whether you follow the homebrew scene or think of it as a euphemism for piracy that speed of development is seriously impressive, and surely it’s a matter of time before someone makes some kind of loader to run more complex software on it, returning us to the boom when the KXploit for 1.5 was discovered. It seems like every time my RSS reader updates there’s some new development on it.

The time is almost here! By this time tomorrow I’ll be ready to head over to Eynon’s house ready to leave at 5am the next morning, so this could be my last update until I’m on the other side of the world. I’m also excited to think that in a matter of days I’ll have my white PSP and will have played the PS3 and Xbox 360 as well as seen MGS4 in action.

As I type this I’m starting to get stuff together for my carry-on which is going to be interesting to show to all the security people at the airport. I’m packing my iBook, Bluetooth mouse, Nintendo DS, digital camera, MP3 player, a few DVDs (to be decided), my UMDs, Xbox Live headset (for Skype), a spare laptop battery, and a small jungle of cables and chargers. If that doesn’t look like a bomb when it’s passing through a security machine I don’t know what will.

I’ll probably put off the actual packing of clothes until tomorrow morning since I really can’t be bothered and then I’ll be ready to finally visit Japan after years of waiting. Can’t wait!

I’ve just been regressed to 1998, sitting in a crummy little Internet cafe to watch the spoils from the unveiling of Sonic Adventure with some friends since our 56k connections were so woefully futile. Yes, Sega have unveiled their next-generation Sonic title to hit PS3 and Xbox 360, and if you have access to certain press release sites (or just know where to look) you can find some absolutely stunning 1080p shots.

I’m still weird about having a Sonic title without a Sega console to play it on but seeing a character as beloved as this looking so incredible just makes me think that this generation really is going to be the huge step that the rhetoric is telling us. I was blown away in Sonic Adventure at that moment when you passed through a tight tunnel and emerged in a huge valley split with a vast chasm, and then found a whole forest to run through at Sonic’s blinding speeds, and the above shot looks like that turned up to eleven. Green Hill Zone; only looking like you could reach out and touch it. I just hope they stick to those wonderfully fast Sonic levels and don’t stick in crap like the Big The Cat fishing games or Knuckles’ horribly protracted scavenger hunts.

Either way, this baby just shot up my wishlist.

Issue 36 of GamesTM was delivered at work today and it’s the first – hopefully of many – with some of my stuff in it. I’m fairly light on the ground (the only time you’ll ever hear that used to describe me) but this one was nearly finished when I went for my work experience so I only really got to pick up a few loose ends, but the next one due in October will have more. Anyway, for anyone who actually cares enough to look for stuff that I had my hand in this is all of it and the pages on which you can find it:

• Pages 10-18: Datastreams – the small news stories in the sidebars.
• Pages 80-85: A Tale’s End – feature on the death and future of point-and-click adventures; most of the screenshots were taken by me.
• Pages 136-139: A Breed Apart – retrospective on Alien Breed for the Amiga; screenshots taken by me.
• Page 176: Text Life – the text messages that I had to make up in a fine display of journalistic integrity.
• Page 177: Contributors – I’m listed in the list of contributors, although it’s annoyingly under the name “Ollie Dean”. My cousin, Matthew Dean, is also listed as a design contributor as he’s on design at Highbury.

It should be available at all good newsagents across the UK in the next few days for the fairly reasonable price of £4.

Damn, that thing is gorgeous. We’ve been expecting updates to the iPod shuffle and mini for a while now but Apple seem to have cross-bred them and created something that has the best parts of both of them. They’ve made it absolutely tiny, and given you the choice of cool white and sexy black. In making it flash-based they’ve also given a real benefit to picking it over the standard iPod – it might have a relatively small amount of storage but it’s significantly smaller (unlike the mini), is entirely skip-proof (unlike the mini), and has a screen and enough storage for a decent amount of music (unlike the shuffle).

Despite the fact that I’m an Apple fan I’ve actually never owned an iPod and at one point was downright hostile towards them. I have an iRiver iHP-120 which I still think is a far better player for the same price – driverless operation, Ogg Vorbis support (far better than both MP3 and AAC), longer battery life, FM radio, line-in recording, voice recording, better sound quality, etc – but I’ve recently gone off the idea of a complete music library in a slightly bulky player and have been looking at a possible flash player. The 4GB nano looks ideal for that and I think it also works as a pretty huge USB flash drive. Much bigger than my current 256MB drive, at least.

I’ve been planning on paying a visit to the Shinjuku Apple store in Tokyo which is supposed to be one of the, if not the, biggest Apple stores in the world (on a related note, check out this video of the queue for the opening of the Ginza Apple store). According to the Japanese online Apple store the 4GB model costs the equivalent of £135 compared to £179 that it costs here, so something tells me I might be buying it there.