Category Archives: General

Common or garden posts.

Games, General, PlayStation

The Saga Continues…

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I swear the ongoing saga of the PS3 launch gets more and more interesting every day. The latest update comes as financial analysts Merrill Lynch predicted that the PS3 won’t make a spring launch (shock!), and that the manufacturing cost will hit $800. This slightly uninspiring news was quickly followed by a statement from Sony which claims that it’s all rubbish and it’ll be out in the spring. Still uninspiring, but things get more interesting when Sony apparently also told the BBC in this report that hardware issues could force a delay.

Thinking about this, the spring begins in early March which is a couple of weeks away. From that time they have until late May – a period of three months – to make that launch window. It’s not going to happen. This is why:

  • We don’t have a solid release date.
  • We don’t have a solid price.

Those two are pretty essential for a major hardware launch, don’t you think? Or are people going to walk into Akihabara one day and find the PS3 in stock with price available on application? Not to mention these other important facts that need to be considered:

  • The hardware design and controller haven’t been finalised.
  • The final hardware features that it’ll be able to do out of the box haven’t been released.
  • They haven’t even shown in-game footage of any games whatsoever. Some of the demos are apparently real time, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a corresponding game that looks like that.
  • Nobody outside Sony and a handful of developers has even played the thing.
  • There isn’t a major show at which to announce the details of it until E3 in May.

Considering all that there’s no way in hell that we’ll see it anywhere in the next three months. I’d like Sony to prove me wrong there but it was a pretty impressive turnaround for Microsoft to go from finally unveiling the details of the 360 to release in six months and look how that went. I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I say that we just want them to come out and let us know what’s going on. Come on, Sony!

Games, General, PlayStation

When Pigs Fly

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Apparently Sony are now saying that the PS3 is not yet ready for market, without actually telling us when it will be. That’s what you think. The quote is actually telling us exactly when the PS3 will be coming out:

“Our No. 1 competition is not other companies but counterfeiters. We want to work with governments to stop this.”

So it’s coming out when they manage to stop piracy. I can only assume that it means, therefore, that the PS3 is never coming out. The Xbox 360 has won before the first shot has been fired, and Sony are teh d00med. It’s all in their secret code, I tell you.

Games, General, Movies & TV

Pyramid Head

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Information on the Silent Hill movie is scarce and pretty much limited to a few photos and a trailer, but the more I see of it the more it looks like it could actually be a decent game adaptation. It’s fairly true to the game which is a good start and seems to be taking the Japanese horror route which is popular at the moment. Plus of course Uwe Boll has no involvement whatsoever.

The promising trailer was one thing but what’s sure to set fanboy tongues wagging is the first image of the series’ most famous enemy, the Pyramid Head, last seen…uh…raping mannequins in Silent Hill 2. It remains to be seen how much of that the movie rating boards will stand for (not much is my guess), but they’ve very much got the look suitably macabre and without a hint of CGI – always nice to see. This may actually be one to watch.

Games, General, Impressions, PlayStation

PAL Colossus

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The PAL version of Shadow of the Colossus is finally released tomorrow (today if you know people who don’t mind slipping you a copy) and it’s quite a nice release, even if you own the US version like I do. Like they did for the original PAL release of Ico they’ve packaged it in a cardboard case which folds out with artwork from the game, and it has a small collection of art cards with it as well. In addition to that, the main menu now has bonus features – a “making of”, an art gallery, and a trailer for Ico.

This is where I’d usually post some pictures, but I bought mine as a collectible which I won’t open since only the first batch are limited edition. My crappy NTSC version is for playing, and this one is for ogling.

They also re-released Ico today for £19.99 which is well worth it if you don’t have it. It’s not the special edition one so you can still expect to pay through the nose for that on eBay, but thankfully they didn’t put it in an ugly Platinum case. I picked up a copy of this as well since I didn’t already have it and I’ll be playing it since for some reason I never went and finished it.

Staying on the subject of the Ico universe, take a look at this interview with the team. It’s a good read.

General

Deliberate Windows Backdoors?

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Not that you want any more than Microsoft will no doubt leave, but I’ve just seem it reported on Slashdot that the UK Home Office is working with Microsoft about the possibility of putting in backdoors to the encryption systems in Windows Vista so that they can bypass it during criminal investigations, getting around the fact that people can conveniently “forget” the password and render any incriminating data lost.

It’s an obvious concern with all the terrorism investigations and the stuff that certain people probably have filling their hard drives but it’s incredibly pointless to encrypt the data and build in a backdoor so that it can be bypassed easily. The vast majority of people who use it will only have the innocent aim of protecting themselves from things like identity theft. It’s yet another draconian anti-terrorism measure; a thing that’s getting worryingly common. Like the news story says, they can let refusal to give the passwords count against them just life the refusal to answer a question does at the moment.

Besides, it’s not like this will solve anything. Criminals who want to keep their data safe can still encrypt individual files and OS X still has support for AES-128 encryption built-in. I doubt a serious cyberterrorist would be stupid enough to rely on nothing but the protection included with Windows anyway, and this is just a major security issue in case a hacker finds out the backdoor.