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I love maps especially Google Maps and Live Search where I can happily spent time scrolling around and viewing the maps. Well I only realised today that Glasgow now has some Birds’ Eye photo’s on Live Search.

I’ve thrown some more up on Flickr. A glorious time waster.

With all the Yahoo/Microsoft talk back on the agenda, I was thinking back to the first Microsoft announcement that they wanted to buy yahoo and the reaction on Flickr. Much like when Yahoo bought out Flickr but 10 times worse. People would leave, service will go to rats etc etc etc. Then I watched this video from TED on Photosynth. Jaw dropping. Would a Microsoft take over really be any different for a lot of the Yahoo services?

Loved the developers reaction to the crowd applause in the video too.

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.

Announced today, there’s a new PS3 for £299 with no backwards compatibility, a smaller hard disk and only 2 USB ports, no media card drives. A pretty good price. The 60GB model drops to £349 and includes two first party PS3 games. So that’s what they are doing with Lair then!!

It’s a good price drop and takes it into 360 range especially as the features dropped aren’t essential in my opinion. However it leaves just one little question. Where’s the fecking games?

The table show the top 20 games on the PS3 and XBox 360 according to the average ratings as shown on Metacritic. I thought this would be the fairest way as biased reviews would be averaged ut across platforms. Doesn’t make very good reading for the PS3, does it? Where are the AAA exclusive titles for the PS3? They’ve been and gone and weren’t that good. It’s poor that the best rated exclusive title is Resistance which was a release game. It was good but that review score was very generous. Compare with the top 3 on the 360 and it makes for a compelling reason not to pick up a PS3. Even cross platform games are picking up the same score if not better on the 360.

If Sony wants to pick up sales it needs to address the games. If the PS3 had the AAA titles that the 360 has enjoyed then price wouldn’t be an issue and there wouldn’t be an entry level console launched today.

Via Binary Bonsai

Amazing video.