With summer coming to an end, it is time to wrap up the events of the past few months from different aspects. Lets get started with the gaming wrap up.
PS3 Games Bought: 6
Titles: NBA Street Homecourt, The Orange Box, Warhawk, Metal Gear Solid 4, Super Stardust HD, PAIN
Of those, how many were played: 5
Which one wasn’t played: Metal Gear Solid 4 (not until I have the time to dedicate to it)
Most Played Game Online: Call of Duty 4
Most Played Local Title: Grand Theft Auto 4
PSP Games Bought: 1
Titles: Crush
Saturn Games Bought: 4
Titles: Madden 98, Sim City 2000, Wipeout, Virtua Racing
Saturn Peripherals Bought: 1
What: NiGHTS analog control pad
NES Titles Added to Collection: 15
Titles: I am not going to list them all.
Arcade Trips Taken: 1
Money Spent on Street Fighter 4: $2
Stay tuned for more Summer 2008 wrap-ups
A couple of weeks ago, I made an upgrade to the actual gear that caries my uhhhh… gear. I moved on from my 3 year old laptop backpack to a green and shiny laptop carrying Messenger bag. There were a few reasons why I had to make the move. The biggest was what a fashion statement it makes.
I’m kidding
The backpack, a gift from a few Christmases ago from an ex, served it’s purpose well these past few years. But over it’s main downfall came not from wear and tear, or not being able to hold my stuff, but the number of shirts that it left in it’s wake.
You see, the padding on the back of backpack would rub against every shirt of mine and eventually wear away the lower part of the shirts where the ass meets the shirt. It would leave little fuzz balls all over the place and make every article of shirt clothing I wear look like I just picked it up from some type of Goodwill collection center for people with worn out shirts. Finally I had my fill. The hunt began.
Out with the old, and in with the new! (the new one is on the right)
I settled on this bag from a company called Gravis because 1) it didn’t look like a regular boring laptop bag and 2) it was able to fit a laptop and other crap in it. Plus it wasn’t so big that I would be able to fit all the shit in there that my backpack had. I call it forced downsizing. I did this when I moved from PA to NJ as well. I made sure that the smaller place I lived in would force me to get rid of a bunch of crap. Lessen the load if you will.
Anyway back to the bag. Upon receiving it, I proceeded to fill it up once again with my crap. But trying to weed out the crap. In the end I wound up with:
- 1 Laptop with charger
- 1 Notepad, legal sized
- 2 Pens (one with laser pointer built in)
- 1 Folder for misc crap and paperwork for job sites
- 1 Treo charger
- 1 Obscure Motorola charger (for my crap work phone)
- 1 Crap work phone
- 1 iPod cable with wall charger
- 1 Firewire Cable (6 pin to 6 pin)
- 1 USB cable (mini to normal)
- 1 CAT5 cable
- 1 lighter
- 1 Thing of mints
Believe it or not, this is LESS than what my bag had before. Right now, the new laptop bag is weighing in at about 10 pounds fully loaded. This is a 50% difference from the 20 pound behemoth I would carry on my back on a regular basis.
I do have gripes though. The padding in the laptop compartment, just doesn’t meet my needs. I am a very paranoid person and the thought of my MacBook getting damaged somehow frightens me. So I headed over to Tekserve one day after work and picked up one of those soft cases (think a big iPod sock) to secure the book even more. It is made by a company called WaterField Designs.
Unfortunately, it seems to make my laptop bag even larger and more lopsided since I am carrying it on a side rather than a back.
I just can’t win.
I got one of those emails the other day form Sony asking if I want to participate in some online survey about new Playstation 3 features and current features as well and how much I like them or would like to see them. Usual marketing stuff. But one of the questions seemed to stand out as to new features Sony may have cooking in the lab.
The topic is how I would like to see my PSP interact with my PS3. The first three options are pretty generic:
- Using the device to do side missions for the full game.
- Transfer media wirelessly from the console to the device
- Use the device while playing for extra optons (ala the Gameboy Advance linkup to Gamecube)
The last option is pretty interesting though:
For those who don’t like images, it says “Record console gameplay video for display on the device (showing off your high scores or “cool moves” to friends).
Alright while I doubt we will ever actually see this option in use (although the promise of sending videos straight to YouTube sounds like a promising start), I voted that it would be “Very Appealing”
We can always wish right?
So let me get this out of the way first, I bought Playstation 3. Originally it wasn’t in my cards to get one until the price dropped a couple hundred bucks. But thanks to L.A. connect extraordinaire Dustin and Pennsylvania Jay, I was able to land a freelance job in Texas that paid me a good amount of money for almost zero work (I will save it for my new “Tales of Freelance” category). Anyway, I can’t have money burning a hole in my pocket. It’s a known fact. Sure there are more viable options like putting it away into a savings account, or using it to pay off existing debts. But Grand Theft Auto 4 was coming out in a week and I needed that game. I needed it NOW (well a week from NOW). So off to Circuit City I went (there is only 3% sales tax since it is a “development” area) and purchased a shiny new 40GB Playstation 3. The last one in the store for that matter. This clearly was a disappointment to the gentleman behind me who was in line to get one too. After throwing down the cold hard cash, I was on my way home with a PS3 in one hand and the first two seasons of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in the other.
The Playstation 3 really is an amazing machine. I don’t regret the purchase for one second. I could go on and on about all the things I like about it. The wireless controller, the Playstation Store, the visualizers, the support for DLNA servers (I am using MediaLink right now and it fucking rocks), DIVX/MP3 support, videochat, the interface (well not entirely, I want the in-game XMB NOW), and my absolute favorite feature, Remote Play (you mean I can access all my media from my PSP wherever there is a wifi hotspot even if my PS3 is off?? awesome).
But there is one glaring negative. The online support. All of my friends have 360’s and I am impressed by how Microsoft handled the online gaming portion of the system. It really is a community for gamers. Then I look at my PS3. I have about 8 friends at this point on my PS3 and most of them are never on. So usually I have to rely on the in-game matching. For the awesomeness known as Call of Duty 4, finding a game is never a problem. But with Grand Theft Auto 4, that is another story…
Single player Grand Theft Auto 4 shows that Rockstar can still deliver the ultimate sandbox experience. Anything you can think of doing in the GTAIV universe is possible. Well almost anything. The aiming system is much improved, the driving is a blast, the soundtrack has some really great channels. And then when you want to play some multiplayer, you pop open your cell phone and select the multiplayer option. That is what I did 5 minutes into the game, just to wet my whistle…
And nothing…
I was thrown into an empty room and every so often one person would join and and then promptly leave when they see no one else is in there. Since that point almost two months ago, I have played in about four matches of Grand Theft Auto 4 online that had more than 8 people in it. It has come to the point where I just stopped trying to even play a multiplayer game. It is THAT bad.
Meanwhile my 360 using friends regale me with tales of their multiplayer antics in 16 player matches and games that are just insane. All I can do is feign interest and talk about how no one plays on PS3 and just accept the laughs.
Can anyone please explain WHY the multiplayer portion of Grand Theft Auto 4 for Playstation 3 sucks? Is it just me? Am I not being invited into the good games?
Anyway, I have given up on the GTA IV multiplayer and I am working towards finishing the game. I took a break because I am going to be making the jump to High Def soon and want to be able to enjoy some of the game in 1080…
Thanks for treating PS3 users like online second class citizens Rockstar. The single player rocks though.
Oh and if anyone is looking for me on PSN, my handle is “utterer” (no quotes of course).
I always set my hard drives to spin up when needed. I figured that would be the one small thing I could do to extend the life of my precious hard drives. Of course my main boot drive is always spinning since I never put the damn computer to sleep, but my media drive (Dig Ol Bisk) would happily go and spin down after a few minutes of inactivity. It was like this for the past 2 years or so for the amount of time that I had the drive. It was an external Firewire drive, 180 gigs, that I picked up at Comp USA (God rest their soul) when it was on sale for around 125 bucks.
Flash forward to two weeks ago. The drive is loaded with over 4000 audio tracks, countless movie files, and tons of other stuff. I am down to about 13 gigs available. I never really planned for the drive to die out. I mean sure, my main hard drive is backed up via Time Machine, but my media remained mostly untouched. I had physical copies of most the stuff on there and figured a worse case scenario would be that I restore it back… By hand…
I tried to play some tunes in iTunes one day after work. It was one of those days where I just wanted to kick back, play some PSP (God of War owns for it) and listen to music as I gradually pass out. The drive didn’t spin up. I tried opening the drive in the Finder and the same result. nothing. I power cycled the Firewire drive… nothing. At this point I am annoyed with the fact that I am going to have to restart my CPU and erase my uptime of about forty something days that I am going on. I figure why not kill a few birds with this stone so I upgrade to 10.5.3 and install the newest version of Palm Missing Sync. I reboot.
As expected, the drive mounts and spins up fine. That was until the first time it spun down and I was back to the start. My drive died. fuck. Now a few years ago this would have bothered me to the point where I would stay up all night trying to resolve it. But I have a job now and can’t do things like that sadly. So I go to sleep, vowing to resolve it tomorrow.
Let me cut the troubleshooting down as little as possible: Sometimes the drive would mount, sometimes it wouldn’t. When I did get it to mount, I copied the important stuff over to other drives. Then finally it just stopped mounting. On a whim I took the drive chassis apart and put in another IDE drive to start rebuilding. The other drive didn’t mount or spin up. I put in another drive… nothing.
Do you see what I am getting at here? The Firewire controller actually died. I proved this theory by brining my drive into work and ghetto rigging it to my QuickSilver G4 work computer. The drive mounted fine, so I target disked my Macbook and copied the remaining amounts of important stuff over.
Now I could have resolved this WHOLE fucking problem at home, except for the fact that my G4 is a Digital Audio model that doesn’t address internal IDE hard drives above 128GB of storage. However, after the fact I did find out about this which seems to alleviate that issue. I don’t know if it requires a drive reformat though.
So on my way home from work, I headed over to my friendly Circuit City and picked up a 500GB Western Digital MyBook USB2 (yes, I have a USB 2.0 card in my computer). I copied all the data back, and everything is right with the world.
Except for the fact that I have to keep this disk named “Dig ol Bisk” or else all of my iTunes tracks get messed up. But that will be another weekend of troubleshooting.
