I’ve now got a photo gallery section for the site which for now will serve as a repository for my random photographs but has the ultimate purpose of being my way of keeping a photo diary when I’m in Japan. It’s running on the excellent Flickr Gallery WordPress plugin which, after trying just about every other WordPress image gallery solution, seems to be by far the most versatile and customisable. I’ll make a post whenever I have new updates to the photographs to check out but in the meantime it’s available in the sidebar.

Thanks to Collin from Command-Tab for the help in getting the plugin to work and for drawing my attention to it in the first place. Give his site a look if you’re an Apple fan.

I’m sure everyone was as blown away with the Killzone 2 demo that we saw at Sony’s conference, and it certainly succeeded in bringing a lot of people who thought they had seen the light with the Xbox 360 over to their camp. Now it seems all but certain that the demo, along with most of Sony’s other stuff, was pre-rendered and simply “indicative” of what their machine would be capable of.

That’s all well and good, but I can’t be the only one who has very clear memories of the unveiling of the PS2 as well. Sony’s rhetoric told us how it would be the entertainment hub of our homes (it turned out to be a crappy DVD player), that it would deliver graphics beyond our wildest dreams (was it really that much more powerful than the Dreamcast?), that it had the “Emotion Engine” (a link to the PS3’s “Reality Synthesizer”?), and that it would render CG quality in real time. They showed the ballroom scene from Final Fantasy VIII and told us that the PS2 could do it, and I’m sure that I heard Toy Story mentioned more than once.

Somehow they managed to pull exactly the same tricks this time and, as expected, everyone ate it up and it stole the thunder than Microsoft had built up with some real-time footage of games for their machine. I’m shocked that MS haven’t been making as much capital out of this as they can by making sure everyone knows that they showed genuine footage of their stuff that still managed to stand up to Sony’s nifty CG work. It makes me wonder if the PS3 is actually going to come out of the gate with any more power than Microsoft will do later this year.

The time is nearly upon us when we’re going to sit down to watch a new Star Wars movie for the last time ever, and the Skywalker saga in the galaxy far, far away will draw to a close. The buzz is positive (more so than the other two prequels, at least) and in some parts of the world the hallowed day is already here. I’ve got my tickets and my Jawa T-shirt is out for the first time since Attack of the Clones.

Like everyone else I’ve read some of the more negative reviews and so I’m trying to go with low expectations so that I won’t be disappointed if it does turn out to be bad, but it’s impossible to do it. It’s fucking Star Wars! It has Darth Vader! It has Anakin vs Obi-Wan! It has Chewbacca! It has the birth of the twins! It has Clone Wars! It has the Jedi purges! No matter how shoddy the dialogue might turn out to be it has to have a lot more redeeming features than Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones. Either way I’ll be posting some detailed impressions tomorrow, and I might even review it when I’ve had a chance to ruminate on it or see it again.

One last thing that I’m wondering about it how impossible it’s going to be to get tickets in LA. As if the film wasn’t anticipated enough and LA wasn’t busy, most of the geeks of the world are in town right now. They must be rarer than rocking horse shit.

Every gamer’s favourite newspaper, the Daily Mail, took a leaf out of everyone’s book with a little piece of coverage on the PS3. I saw no mention of the Xbox 360 so I can only assume that Microsoft employs too many young gay Labour-voting Muslim gypsy asylum seekers to qualify for coverage in their “news” paper.

I’d love to know which sites they “researched” in finding a rumoured £160-200 price point because not only was the PS2 £300 at launch, not £200, but I’ve yet to see anyone even entertaining the notion of a sub-£300 price point at the UK launch. Two minutes with Google could have turned up that information, but obviously it’s quicker and more profitable just to make it up and assume that your audience doesn’t know any better.