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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Brief Incommunicado

We're going to head to NY for the long weekend and hop the plane tonight. Internet access will be spotty, so I'll see you all sometime next week.

A few quick thoughts about stuff in general:

Haze Demo
I didn't spend much time with this game, to be honest. I first downloaded the demo as another test to see how a PS3 games hold up on an SDTV. Then it peaked my interest when the less than stellar reviews hit. I really like Free Radical's stuff, huge TimeSplitters fan actually, so I was curious.

The good: It's fairly good looking, even on SD. The bad: It's dull. The nectar "mechanic" is way overblown - it's basically just a merged version of every Quake powerup. Not to mention it makes no sense, narratively, to send a bunch of mercs into a jungle with a drug that can both make them powerful and insane.

A Day In The Life Of Niko Bellic
We've more properly settled into life in Liberty City and so far everything is a positive. The short version is that Rockstar shows an impressive ability to modify their previous work - to cut things which worked somewhat, change things that were working without breaking and them and overall build a better experience.

The PS3 In General
Surpassed our expectations. Not only has it performed quite well on the SDTV, with everything I can throw at it: menus, GTA IV, Haze, Stardust, fl0w (which The Girl walked in on and asked if I was playing a constellation) - but it's really lived up to being the digital hub of our living room. Not just replacing my aging Toshiba (although it still produced excellent picture) - but also streaming movies and music from the MacBook. As I've said, the quality has been as such that I'm strongly considering a 720P set over a 1080P one at this point, but we'll see.

Gaymer Tags
You know - I get that these communities are hard to manage, but I think Microsoft is in the wrong here. Not just the whole "Dick Gaywood is his real name" thing - which, OK, if I had name that was also porn name I'd probably use it as my handle too -but if someone wanted to tag themselves "TheGayAgenda" (props to Three Panel Soul) or "Lord StudMuffin" or "BlackPower" or whatnot, if these words don't have any intrinsic wrong to them until someone else's prejudice comes to play - then let them stand and let those people who get all riled up about them go play elsewhere or get some character development themselves and learn to deal with it.

It's not like "PopeFan1" or "IMAGaymer" is in the same field as like "HolocaustApologist" or "ThirdReichWarrior" or "YayKKK". There is a pretty distinct line in the sand and it's idiotic to treat "Dick Gaywood" like it's the same offense as "TitsAndAssMan".

2 comments:

psu said...

I have had no luck streaming video to the PS3 from my Mac. What's your setup? Is it a wireless or wired link? I suspect that the PS3 wireless is just too anemic to allow this to work well.

Josh said...

I'm using MediaLink from Nullriver.

At first it looked like a bust. It found everything fine, but couldn't actually play anything. But then I put the laptop to where it had a better wireless signal (this is all wireless, PS3 and Mac) and it started to click.

Now we haven't watched a full show yet, I just saw some of the beginning of an episode I had torrented and played some music. The music sounded a little odd, like make the streaming had an odd cadence to it.