iand.net

So only a day after picking up GT5 Prologue I decided that the PS3 pad really had to go…and that meant ordering an import Dual Shock 3 from Hong Kong. A couple of days later and the pad was delivered. It certainly doesn’t address many of the flaws of the PS3 pad but it did do at least two vital things - add weight and provide rumble support.

The rumble feedback makes all the difference and add’s to the realism in GT5 (thoughts on this soon). It also makes gaming on the PS3 feel more familiar. When rumble was first added to the PS1 pad’s it all felt a bit odd at first but it then became default for all consoles and it’s taken as a given. Gaming on the initial PS3 pad just felt…empty. This has now been resolved and it’s also good to get back to a pad with weight which also feels more rebust than the creaky original.

It’s a real shame though that Sony didn’t think to redesign the appalling triggers, fix the dead zones on the sticks and tweak the design so that they are less cramp inducing. Many can debate on which console is the best. Little will argue that the 360 pad is one of the best ever which smacks the PS3 pad silly.

The whole point of a console is to provide great looking games that are guaranteed to work without the hassle of installing the game, patching it, opening up firewall ports and configuring server and friend lists on a per game basis. It’s what I’ve become used to with the original Xbox and then the 360. So why is the PS3 so fucked up?

Before I rant on I should say this isn’t a Microsoft fanboy love in post. The PS3 is a great media player and there’s lot’s of things I really like about it compared to the 360. However the amount of firmware updates it’s now had are bordering on the ridiculous. Even worse, I still can’t access my friends list, chat to friends, playback music or easily swap to another game while in a current game. I need to quit and go back to the XMB and then I can chat etc. It feels so backwards when compared to the 360. Sony are promising in game XMB this year but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Another growing trend on the PS3 is installation of games. If you download anything from PSN then you then have to install it. This applies to all games, from the small 40Meg games up to gigabyte installs for Warhawk and GT5:Prologue. However more and more games insist on an install before you can even play the game. Most Capcom games and now GT5:Prologue want to install content on the hard drive. While this allegedly improves performance this step is taking up to 20 mins - hardly a console experience. Makes me chuckle when I think back to MS launching the original Xbox and how Sony sneered that it used a hard disk and was really just a PC. How times have changed.

Further annoyance with GT5 was an update you had to download before you could play the game. This took about an hour for me to download but I was lucky. I know a couple of people that had to try many times before the download actually worked. Grrrr. Once in the game GT5 lists ports that should be opened as well for online play. I’ve not had to do that for a game in years. How many people would know what to do?

I think that’s my major annoyance on the PS3. It feels bitty compared to the unified experience on the 360. It feels like PC gaming. Simple tasks on the 360 are made difficult or impossible on the PS3. Headset’s are a given on the 360 yet on the PS3, because they aren’t standard, you get issues. Quiet games or worse, compatibility issues within games. It’s for all those reasons, plus the fact that the majority of friends are using the 360, that non platform exclusives are always purchased for the 360 and there is nothing that Sony are doing that look like changing my mind. Shame.

Gran Turismo 5 prologue hits the UK at the end of March. £24.99 for the Blu-Ray disk out on the 28th but available for the same price as a download on PSN for…£24.99. So the same price for the same game but one that I get to own on disk and one that lives as a download on my PS3. I could pay the same price and get it a day early. Cool. Not really…just flawed logic.

I can order the game from Gameplay or Amazon for £17.99. So I can get the physical media version cheaper than a download. I’ll also probably get it on the 27th as Gameplay ships early. Surely a downloadable version of the game would be cheaper for Sony than distributing a physical blu-ray disk? You really do wonder sometimes.

Bungie updated the Halo 3 playlists last week and added Grifball. I hadn’t heard of this mode before but it is great fun.

The full rules are here but basically teams of four play 5 rounds trying to pick up a ball and score it at the other end. Every player has a gravity hammer and sword, health reduced, damage increased and whoever had the ball has 150% speed, 3 * overshield and turns orange.

It’s total carnage for the whole match and there are some great tactics to the game. It’s also a killing frenzy and I got my first Killimanjaro (kill 7 opponents within 4 seconds of each other). If you’ve not tried Halo for a while then it’s time to dust off your copy…it’s hammer time.

…and other shorts. Been pretty busy since switching jobs. Enjoying getting my teeth into Oracle tools again although once thing that is VERY frustrating are Oracle application installers. Unless you have full admin rights to your Windows client then installation is a pain. In fact I’d go as far as saying installation is impossible. At our work our rights are pretty limited and even with what are called ‘developer rights’ you don’t have full client admin. It made installing Oracle, BI Publisher and a couple of other tools a nightmare last week.

To get round it I now use a VMWare image at work that I full rights over. Installations are now almost painless…although then you get caught up in some nasty bugs. Hey-ho. Performance isn’t ideal either but at the moment I don’t have much choice.

Anyway…head in the clouds. I’ve moved away from a couple of desktop tools to some hosted options. The first issue was tasks. I’ve been using iGTD for around a year now and it’s been great. A couple of time the syncing between machines got a bit screwy but it was easy to recover. There’s a big but though - I could never see my tasks at work as they were separate and in Outlook. Not ideal. So I tried Tracks and installed it on my domain. It was a lovely app, did most things I wanted but I couldn’t find a couple of key features and I had to hack in things like e-mail support. Then I remembered the milk.

So I know GTD using Remember the Milk. I can get access to my tasks and lists from Mac or PC and in future they look to have a fabby interface for iPhone users. I also like being able to subscribe to tasks in iCal and the Google Calendar plugin is excellent. Sorted. Just need to do the tasks now.

I’ve also got my own wiki installed now. Helps me have one area for notes, procedures etc. I tried a couple of hosted options but preferred my own MediaWiki install with plugins.

My final ‘find’ was Zoho. I can’t believe how feature rich this set of applications are. Very handy and they also have a wiki…I just don’t believe that my firm won’t ban access to these app’s eventually.

I guess what I’m realising is that putting more info on the cloud rather than on the desktop is a reality, is pretty easy for all and that it’s no longer a pipe dream. Not a startling conclusion but it’s been good to take more advantage of some of the web 2.0 app’s than normal.

Anyway, other stuff. Burnout Paradise is a cracking game and one that shouldn’t really be missed. I haven’t played as much as I would want to over the last couple of weeks but the few sessions I’ve played have been great. It does the online side of things really well.

Sold my old amp on eBay. Quite pleased getting £150 for it. Still to post up some thoughts on the Onkyo 705 which will probably take another couple of weeks but so far it’s been excellent, especially Blu-Ray. Thank goodness one of these formats has emerged on top. Hopefully that will lead to better hardware and cheaper prices.

Apple updates - there’s been something new in the store every Tuesday this year. The Macbook Pro updates today were pretty small - increases to processor speeds, hard disk sizes, graphics card’s and the addition of multi touch which I guess is more extensive than the current model’s use of two fingers on the touchpad. I’m pretty pleased as the laptop I bought 15 months ago hasn’t really changed much apart from the expected speed increases. I still have no regrets with the hardware…touch wood.

Finally, a rant. I do wish Virgin Media would piss off and stop calling me about their inferior TV service. While I’m happy with their broadband reliability (although not always with speed which can be pathetic sometimes) I really hate when they try and sell me TV and even maintain they have a better HD service than Sky. Liars. Better package - don’t make me laugh. Well, they eventually do but only after annoying me. I’ve asked a few times now never to call again but they still do. Time to take the matter further.

when I am through with you there won’t be anything left

Did I say finally? If you recognise the quote you’ll have been watching Damages. If not, then try and catch up with it via downloads as it’s the bet thing on TV at the moment.