The list of cool stuff happening while I’m in Japan grows. Sony today announced that the long-rumoured white PSP will be released in Japan on September 15th, the day after I get there and the day before the start of the Tokyo Game Show. It’s definitely good for the part of me that’s planning on picking up PSPs to sell cheaply over here, but I’m not actually sure which version I want. The white ones won’t be dirt and fingerprint magnets in the way that the black ones were and will probably more desirable for a time, but I think aesthetically I prefer black.

Either way it looks like I’m going to be buying at least a couple of each.

The other good news was the announcement of PSP firmware 2.0. It will fubar any homebrew/emulation developments for the time being, but the web browser is definitely cool as are features like wallpaper and wireless photo sharing. The thing I’m happiest about however is the addition of support for WPA which means that I won’t have to drop my security on my wireless network to the swiss cheese WEP. It’s not WPA2 which I’m using now, but it’s better than nothing and is less likely to cause the wi-fi apocalypse predicted here.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I’m approaching the news that EA is to distribute Valve games including Half-Life 2 with some trepidation.

As far as I know it’s not a publishing deal as some are reporting, presumably putting 2+2 together to make 5, but simply a distribution deal. Still, I don’t like EA having their foot in the door at one of the few remaining independent developers with enough clout to remain independent and have some creative freedom. EA started with publishing/distribution deals at both DICE and Criterion, but both are now owned by EA and are churning out nothing but Battlefield and Burnout games. We’re approaching the fourth Burnout game (plus the “best of” on the PSP) in four years and we all know about how rushed both Battlefields have been.

I’m really hoping that Valve really have made this agreement on their terms and have the financial security to stay independent because the day that EA takes them over will be a truly dark day for gaming. One of the most respected series’ and a proven and fully developed online distribution system which has shown itself to be capable of distributing millions of copies of one of the biggest selling titles ever is an attractive acquisition for anybody, after all.

The planned trip to Japan in September has been at the back of my mind for the best part of six months and now that it’s been booked it actually feels like it’s really happening. I’m going to have a load of money to spend as well because we’ve got a pretty amazing deal on it – if we’d gone for direct flights we’d have paid something like £500, but by making a 45-minute changeover in Paris we pay a little over £200. That’s for a return ticket to Tokyo from London.

In total for ten days in Tokyo in a very nice hotel (Hotel New Otani) and including transport to and from Heathrow we’re paying £790 which is a fucking bargain. We’re going to the Tokyo Game Show where we’ll play Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, visit the Ghibli Museum (loads of great pictures in English here, including the best DVD player in the world), and generally spend copious amounts of money on tat. Not forgetting that Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is out the day we arrive so I’m going to try to nab a couple of copies of the limited edition DVD.

I’ll have my laptop so I’ll be keeping this updated for the benefit of the folks at home, but the countdown begins here. 60 days to go!

As I’ve said before, Battlefield 2 is still bug-ridden and they’ve somehow managed to make it worse with the v1.01 patch, and I don’t think anyone’s surprised that they’ve already announced that an expansion pack is coming before the end of the year.

If I hadn’t seen EA do similar things countless times before I’d be frankly disgusted that they can charge £30 for a game and then have the nerve to start working on more content which they’ll charge another £20 for when they can’t even be bothered to fix the broken and unfinished product that they’re already pocketing the money for. Fucking scum…

The furore over the Hot Coffee mod just gets more and more ridiculous. They’re being baited over it by the Australian government, the ESRB, numerous parents/Christian/moral crusader groups, and now Hillary Clinton, amongst others. I’m surprised that it’s the BBFC (the same ones who can’t handle a headbutt in Star Wars) are the ones acting as the voice of reason in this situation by not being particularly bothered. I remain in my original position (no pun intended) that it’s an adult game which is rated as such and so it shouldn’t matter, and why is consensual sex in a game where you can commit mass murder a problem in the first place?

Anyway, the hurdle at the moment seems to be for Rockstar to prove whether or not the content was in the game originally and was simply unlocked by the mod (I’m slightly skeptical that a 2MB patch is necessary to edit one preference file, personally) or if it was a complete fabrication by the online community. Either way I don’t see that it matters that much – if it was the mod maker then there’s no problem, and if it wasn’t it doesn’t matter because they’d disabled the minigame in the code itself. It’s not like it was a prominent gameplay feature that they hid from the ratings boards; they’d actually made it inaccessible and it was as good as gone.

If I was the creator of Hot Coffee I’d actually come out and say that I made it from scratch, whether he actually did or not. Whatever happens this is going to make developers very nervous about letting the community modify their games as they could be held responsible for other people’s work. Rockstar are no strangers to controversy and are probably loving this boost to sales for San Andreas on the PC, but the likes of EA are never going to risk this kind of backlash.