In case you don’t know or have been living in a cave for some reason, the PS3 is the hot item this holiday season. I have an opinion on this and here it is: Let’s Get Ready To Rumble. it seems there are many, many, many reports of fights breaking out in lines across the country (ok, mainly New York and San Francisco because they have Sony Stores, who each have about 800 PS3’s I might add) The fighting seems to be stemming from the fact that when the lines grow to a certain size the security guards move the line and people try to cut in line. So then fights break out, as soon as I find a YouTube video of a PS3 fight I will post it here, until then good luck to all the PS3 warriors out there and Godspeed!

Oh, one more thing, the entire country of Taiwan is getting only 500 PS3’s, can you really call that a launch? Good Luck to them as well.

It has come to the attention of Linden Labs that someone has created a program for Second Life called Copy Bot which allows the user to copy any item in Second Life without paying for it. While this is great news for cheapskates (including yours truly) it is horrible news for the “economy” of second life. The Second Life economy is one of the greatest social experiments taking place online right now, it will be interesting to see how this turns out, if it will crash, thrive or if the person who invented this bot will acquire mass wealth. This all remains to be seen but nonetheless will be cool to watch.

WiiWii.tv has written a fun little article about the top 100 reasons to love the Wii. Personally, I don’t think you need 100 reasons to love the Wii and even more than that, some of their reasons suck, but oh well.

Read

Do you feel like dancing? Do you feel like loving Nintendo’s Wii? If you are like me than you can answer yes to both of those questions. Anyhow, even though it’s been reported everywhere seemingly twice, Nintendo’s first Wii commercials are airing tonight during dancing with the stars. I don’t like the show, but I might watch it anyhow. Then again, maybe not. The vids are on YouTube as well and I think that maybe just maybe the commercials will be airing elsewhere soon enough.

P.S. Dance Dance Wiivolution would be an awesome game, just strap the remotes to your ankles and you’re good to go.

See the title. Yep, the Project 8 demo is a lot of fun. Unlike some games(Viva Pinata I’m looking right at you), THP8 is a fun demo and gets me a bit excited about Tony Hawk. I’ll admit that after THPS2 on the Dreamcast that I played way too much, I was tired of the whole genre. I know that I missed out on some games inbetween, but frankly, Tony Hawk is still Tony Hawk and that’s not a bad thing really. At some point I’ll have to check this out, but kudos to the developers on making a demo that doesn’t suck and I can enjoy.

See the title. Yep, the Project 8 demo is a lot of fun. Unlike some games(Viva Pinata I’m looking right at you), THP8 is a fun demo and gets me a bit excited about Tony Hawk. I’ll admit that after THPS2 on the Dreamcast that I played way too much, I was tired of the whole genre. I know that I missed out on some games inbetween, but frankly, Tony Hawk is still Tony Hawk and that’s not a bad thing really. At some point I’ll have to check this out, but kudos to the developers on making a demo that doesn’t suck and I can enjoy.

I’m not one to bash on people, but yesterday I spent part of my afternoon watching Gamespot’s live Wii marathon. It was fun at times, but it was also a huge eye-opener. See, I haven’t really read Gamespot for a few years because I can’t really stand wading through the pages of crap on these huge gaming sites. It annoys me to no end, so instead I read Joystiq and Kotaku for most of my gaming news and info. Anyhow, so gaming mags online and offline tend to get a bad rap for being dumb and I’m not sure if that is entirely fair, well I wasn’t sure until yesterday. Now I am quite sure in my stance that Gamespot editors are lacking brain cells in masse.

See, watching a half dozen so-called “gaming experts” sit and attempt to play the Wii was pretty sobering. Seeing them play Super Monkey Ball wasn’t that bad because they at least had one of the developers there to help them through it, but Wii Sports was another adventure altogether.  Wii Sports is a sports game that emulates real sports to some degree and it was very easy to tell that these guys didn’t play sports, maybe ever in their life.

First, there was tennis, a game where all you do is swing the racket and it does the rest. Apparently these Gamespot editors had never played it or hadn’t read any previews for it because they didn’t even realize that you don’t move yourself. Just about every preview out there mentions this and I would assume that one of these guys would have had some knowledge of the game, but apparently as a game editor you aren’t required to be knowledgeable about any games before you play them. The sad part is not even one of the 6 editors in the room seemed to know.

Then there was bowling. Bowling is a sport that I know quite a bit about, but apparently the Gamespot editors have never been bowling before in their entire lives. Why? Well for one they couldn’t figure out how to swing their arm straight, so their ball kept curving to the left. Then, instead of compensating for this by moving their character to the right, well they just kept doing the same dumb thing over and over again hoping for a different result. Every time the same thing happened and I think only one editor ever figured it out. Sad.

Last on the list of horrible idiocy was golf. I’ll admit it, golf is a hard sport in real life, but in video games it isn’t so hard. By now I would expect that these guys would be reasonably acquinted with Mario Golf or Hot Shots Golf enough to know how to play reasonably well, but again, my asumptions were wrong and they suck at Golf too.

I’m not even going to go into Baseball and how one guy’s character was batting right handed and he was using left handed motions for that and it wasn’t working for him. Boxing was also a travesty, but it at least was fun to watch since both were just swinging at each other relentlessly.

All in all, I have to say that the Gamespot editors should not be allowed to drive or even walk down the street. I’d be amazed if they could even tie their own shoes. Maybe instead of playing so many games and pretending to be experts, some of the editors should take up a sport or read a book that doesn’t involve pictures.

A lot of people have made a lot of comparisons of the three next-gen consoles - price, games, fun factor, and even screen resolution have been compared, but I’ve got one more metric to throw out there. Price per “p” or the price per line of progressive-scan resolution. All three consoles seek to provide the most value to their customer. PS3 is high priced, but more featured. The Wii is the cheapest and has less technical prowess. Sitting somewhere in the middle seems to be the Xbox 360, or is it? Which system really delivers the most technical/graphical value for your gaming dollars? Hopefully with the price per “p” metric we can decide once and for all which system is the “best value”.

To start with the formula is very easy. Price per “p” is calculated as the price of the system divided by the lines of resolution it will output in progressive scan mode. I chose progressive numbers because those are easier to do a direct comparison on. The Wii supports up to 480p, the Xbox 360 supports 720p, and the PS3 supports 1080p. (note: the 360 now supports 1080p via an upscaler, but that is just upscaling the games’ native 720p resolution, so it’s not a fair comparison).

Based on the cheapest bundles, here are the scores:

Wii - 0.5208333 ($250/480p)
Xbox 360 - 0.4166666 ($300/720p)
PS3 - 0.4629629 ($500/1080p)

Based on the more expensive bundles, here are the scores:

Wii - 0.5208333 ($250/480p)
Xbox 360 - 0.5555555 ($400/720p)
PS3 - 0.5555555 ($600/1080p)

So, the best graphics value of the cheaper bundles is the Xbox 360 core system with a price per “p” of just under 42 cents per “p”. Surprisingly, the PS3 $500 edition beats the Wii in price per “p” by a few cents. However, looking at the full-priced systems the Wii gains the lead in graphics value again, which is no real surprise.

Now all of this is assuming that you have a HDTV, but what if you are among the 90+% of people who don’t have a HDTV? Then all you are getting is 480i or (240p by comparison), so a new calculation is needed:

Wii - 1.041666 ($250/240p)
Xbox 360 - 1.25 ($300/240p)
PS3 - 2.08333 ($500/240p)
Looking at how things fare on a SDTV, which is still the standard for the vast majority of video gamers, the value proposition for the next gen is completely different. The Wii wins hands down.

In conclusion, the Xbox 360 is the best HDTV value and the Wii is the best SDTV value, but before you start arguing some of the finer points of this comparison, I’ll head them off right now. Yes, I realize that the PS3 game library will be mostly 720p and not 1080p, but even giving the PS3 the benefit of the doubt in the 1080p arena doesn’t make it that much better of a value. Also, the Wii is bundled with a game and the other systems are not, so it’s probably an even better value than the numbers show.

Just for kicks, let’s calculate what the numbers would be for the 360 doing 1080p. The  scores would be 27.777 cents per “p” for the 360 Core and 37.037 cents per “p” for the 360 Premium. For you 1080p users out there that makes the 360 a WAY better deal than the PS3.

It’s been a while since I wrote about Sony. However, this article needs a rebuttal because frankly, I think the dude is wrong. The article pretty much lays out the idea that Microsoft has squandered its potential 10 million unit head start and that Sony is going to go ahead and squash the 360. Unfortunately, this doesn’t take into account the biggest key to hitting the #1 spot in the consumer electronics world - price.

Price is a big deal. We all know that. Sony has never been able to sell a console at anything more than $199 and hit the mass market. Even when the PS2 did launch it was only $299, so it was able to sell well. Considering that the PS3 is almost TWICE As expensive, how do people expect that it will sell the exact same. In no situation ever has a product that is twice as expensive as its predecessor sold as well, especially in consumer electronics. Thus, even if the Playstation brand is the strongest brand in gaming, that doesn’t mean that gamers all of a sudden be willing to spend twice as much money before they buy a game.

Microsoft is going to try and sell 10 million before consoles before it drops the price. That’s a pretty lofty goal at $400 a console, but I think they can come close. Next year we should all see a $300 Xbox 360 and Halo 3 to boot, so that will spur things on for Microsoft, but even at $300, the Playstation 2 only was able to sell 10-20 million at that price. Microsoft knows that and at one point Peter Moore said that to sell 100 million consoles, you have to hit the $199 price point. Once Sony hit the $199 price point, it was able to sell 30 million units a year on both the Playstation and Playstation 2. So, it becomes a race to $199.

So, who is going to get there first? Sony, no. Microsoft, no. Nintendo, yep. Nintendo could launch at $199, but they didn’t because they want to get to $199 eventually, but not start there. Nintendo is delivering enough value to either break even or possibly make a little bit on each Wii sold. Microsoft is going to be the second system to hit $199 and it’s possible that the core system might get there next year. The Playstation 3 is probably 2-4 years from hitting the $199 price point. Think I’m joking?

It was 18 months between the PS2 launch at $299 before it dropped to $199(then $179 a few days later). So, with the Playstation 3 we can expect 12-18 months between each price drop. Can the PS3 get to $300 in 18 months? Maybe, but not likely. I’d say that the PS3 will drop about $100 a year until it can get to the $199 mark in 4 years. That sounds crazy, but the PS2 took 3 and a half years to go from $300 to $150. For the PS3 cut its price in half is going to take just as long.

Where will the 360 and the Wii be in 4 years? In four years we won’t be talking about the 360 anymore. We will be hearing about the next Xbox system. In four years Microsoft will be unveiling their plans for the next next gen. In four years the Wii will be about $100 and the next Nintendo handheld system will be dominating the market. In four years the Playstation 3 will maybe have sold 30-50 million units while the 360 and the Wii will probably sell a combined 100-150 million units.

I’m not saying that which system is going to be the most popular this next generation. However, I can say that price is always going to be a major factor in how many systems sell and that is one war that Sony won’t win this generation. By the time that Sony’s Playstation 3 gets to a mass-market price point(one that parents and teenagers can afford), the game will already be over for Sony.

Ok, so I signed up for a GamezNFlix account and I have to say, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I’m starting to get games and I’m really loving on the whole thing. However, I have to say that recently I’ve been renting FFVII: Dirge of Cerebrus and I’m not impressed. In fact, it bored me out of my freeking mind. I sat down and got half way though the game and I found myself playing only to be able to finish the game, not because I like the game. I know, for those who haven’t played it and love Final Fantasy 7 you might be upset, thinking I’m crass and stupid. However, I too loved FF VII. It’s a freeking classic and Dirge of Cerebrus is not what I would consider a worthy successor.

It’s not even because it’s an action game. I love action games and at first I enjoyed the game. as an action game it’s not terrible, but unfortonately the Final Fantasy conventions seem to get in the way more than anything. The storyline is boring and the Final Fantasy style of slow story progression and slow storytelling drags the game down to the point that I don’t even want to finish it. That I find to be quite depressing.

The worst part of my experience with this game is that I feel compelled to finish it because it’s a Final Fantasy game, yet I can’t bring myself to waste another five or six hours to get to the ending. This brings up a question I have. Have Final Fantasy games always been this boring or is it just this game? How does this game barely hold my attention for 5 hours when other Final Fantasy games keep my attention for 40+ hours? Where did Dirge of Cerebrus go wrong?

I’ve thought about it and I think it has to do with the mixed-metaphor of an RPG and a action-shooter. The designers did a good job of managing shooter gameplay that is fairly fun and almost satisfying, but the designers didn’t push the envelope on the storytelling. Instead, they kept the traditional Final Fantasy storytelling which is just too slow for this game type. Dirge of Cerebrus should have just stuck with the simplicity of shorter story segements and more action.

In short, avoid this game unless you just can’t help yourself but do yourself a favor and rent it. This game is NOT a keeper. Look elsewhere. Anyone else suffered through this dirge?