Playstation Update

At last, Resident Evil 4 is upon us! I haven’t picked it up yet, but I’m definitely going to. Reviews have been nothing short of fantastic across the board. The latest PSM gives it a perfect 10, a rarity for those guys. Gamespot.com gives it a 9.3, along with an “Editor’s Choice” award.

Originally released for the Gamecube earlier this year, Resident Evil 4 has arrived for the Playstation 2, in all its gory glory. It features an interesting new perspective. Your view is over the shoulder of the main character, Leon, whom you may remember from RE2. Pressing the R1 button will zoom in even tighter, allowing you to perform nifty stunts like blowing weapons out of the hands of your opponents.

The game is more action packed than previous iterations in the series, without losing the superb adventure elements that made the previous games so good. There are also plenty of good, interactive cinema scenes. On note is an entire boss battle that involves lots of precise button timing moves, along the lines of those found in God of War.

In addition to superb gameplay, the game is simply amazing to look at. It features full widescreen progressive scan support, if you have the TV to support such a thing. Gamespot.com has a whole slew of great screenshots. I’m definitely going to be getting this one.

Eidos announced today that the game previously know as Roll Call, will be redubbed Zero Tolerance. The game is described as a “high-velocity action shooter.” In it, you play Nick Mason, who has just joined the T-Zero anti-gang squad of Franklin City. The goal is to take back the city using all sorts of high-tech weapons and devices.

Currently Eidos is planning to release the game in Europe in 2006. Official plans for a US release have not yet been announced.

I’m not terribly into soccer sims personally, but particularly for those in parts of the world that (more rightfully) call it “football”, this is apparently the game to have. The most realistic Pro Evo title to date, this game has received rave reviews across the board. GameSpot users give it an average 9.4/10, and the reviews across the web are similar. “Revolutionary”, “masterpiece”, and “addictive” seem to be common among the reviewers.

Where Gaming is Oxygen has the following to say:

Where player awarness and tactcial play is crucial in winning the game. There are noticable improvements in off the ball running and even on the ball battling for the ball. Where players animations are even more life like than before. The grappling for the ball in midfield, injured players limp off who are not even involved in the play, with strikers going through to goal and end up clinging to the net further to add to realism of the game.

Sounds like I might need to look into the soccer sim thing.

Symantec announced on October 6th that they had discovered the first “virus” for PSP. I put virus in quotes because technically the malicious program is a trojan horse. This simply means you have to download and run the beast to have it cause any problems. If you do run it, however, it will delete critical system files, rendering your PSP useless.

The evil program, named Trojan.PSPBrick by Symantec, is advertised as being a hack to modify the PSP’s firmware to allow you to play pirated games. As such, if you destroy your PSP using this technique, Sony has said they will not be covering the damage under warranty (not a big surprise).

So, bottom line is, don’t download strange files claiming to hack your PSP. Especially if they don’t come from a source you consider reputable.

Uhh, just in case you already “brick-ified” your PSP:

More info at Games Digest.

This is actually a bit old, but in case you don’t have them pasted on your wall yet, here are some of the core specs for the PS3, still supposedly to be released next spring:

CPU: Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for edundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

More details at News.com.

Note that Sony has since proclaimed that the HDD will be nixed. I’d expect to lose a few other bits and pieces before the final hardware comes out.

From the team that created the fabulous ICO in 2001, comes a new fantasy adventure, Shadow of the Colossus. As with ICO, the attention to graphical detail is impressive. It’s truly a work of art. The collosi (is that the plural of collosus?) are intricately rendered, towering beasts, and they’re really the stars of the show.

This is not your traditional RPG, where you must battle hundreds of insignificant foes before taking on the bosses. Here, right from the outset, you are pitted against these huge beasts. The challenge is determing how to defeat each one. In this respect, the game becomes more of a puzzle than a traditional action game or RPG. You must climb up to the top of each collosus in order to figure out how to destroy it. Oddly enough, the creatures don’t much like this, and as such, they will try mightily to throw you off. By pressing R1, you can (usually) manage to keep from being thrown. After you defeat each colossus, it’s normally a fairly trivial matter to find the next one. This sounds a bit repetetive, but it’s strangely not. Each collosus is different, and requires a different strategy to defeat.

As in ICO, the play control can take some getting used to. Your character can stumble, and mounting your horse can be a bit awkward. The character animations are quite impressive and realistic, but this does translate into some delayed reactions. The character doesn’t change direction instantly.

The game itself is rather short. Because you need not spend hours wandering around defeating hordes of lesser enemies, you can probably finish it in under 12 hours. Still, those will be 12 hours well spent. And would you really rather spend 30 hours beating on minons, or 12 figuring out how to defeat creatures that tower hundreds of feet above your head?

This is a truly original game. It probably won’t get the attention that the mega sequels will get, but it’s definitely worth playing.

Official Playstation Site

According to Kagan Research, the XBox 360 is set to dominate console sales in 2006, taking 54% of the market share. By 2008, however, PS3 is forecasted to be back on top with the same share, 54%. Source: GibThis.com

I don’t know exactly how accurately anyone can predict what console sales will be like in 2008, but I imagine the numbers for 2006 won’t be far off. The official word from Sony is that the PS3 will be available both in Japan and the US in spring 2006. This would be quite a feat, and I wouldn’t start lining up just yet. This will give the XBox 360 plenty of time to build market share without any serious competition.

The past has proven that being first doesn’t mean you win, however. Look what happened to Sega with both Dreamcast and Saturn. 3D0 anyone? All of these platforms were ahead of their competition, and all of them pretty much failed miserably. (I owned most of them at one point. That 3D0 sytem cost about $700 if I recall).

I’m inclined to agree with the experts on this one. XBox may gain a temporary lead while Sony hurries to release the Playstation 3. If the PS3 is half as good as we all expect it to be, however, I think it will quickly close the gap and resume pounding Microsoft. As it should be.

More commentary on this at ps3blog.net.

P.S. Somebody leave a comment. Though I do enjoy talking to myself, I’d love to hear from you.

-Gary

As you all likely know, Microsoft’s XBox 360 is being released next month. The Playstation 2 is no spring chicken, by console standards. In fact, it’s pretty much the oldest thing out there. Certainly the oldest thing out there in its price range. You can get a new Nintendo Game Cube for less than $100 now. Used ones of course are much less. Sony’s already done the “look, I repackaged the system in a sexier and tinier box” trick, so what’s the plan for the holidays?

Microsoft told analysts that they are forecasting selling between 4.5 and 5.5 million XBox 360’s between its release next month and the middle of next year. Probably a good chunk of those they’re planning on selling before Christmas. Sony isn’t one to stand by and lose market share, even in the short run. True, even the “cheap” XBox 360 will cost $299, twice the current asking price for a PS2. The pimped out XBox will go for $399. Still, the PS2 has been holding steady at $149 MSRP for about a year and a half now, so many expect a price cut to boost sales for the holidays.

No official word from Sony yet on any of this, so stay tuned if you’re holding out for a $99 PS2. Maybe I need a second PS2. Maybe I need one for each room in the house…

Details from CNN.com

The PSP was introduced with one of the strongest starting lineups of games of any system I can recall. Since then, we’ve been in a sort of slump. No great games to speak of while we wait for the holiday rush (which will soon be upon us).

X-Men Legends 2 is an exception. It’s really one of the best action role-playing games out there currently. Very good graphics and sound for a PSP game, and an impressively long play. Publisher Raven managed to cram pretty much every detail from the full size console game onto the PSP version.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the story is basically this. The Brotherhood and the X-Men are forced to stop squabbling and join forces to defeat the baddest of the bad guys: Apocalypse. This Apocalypse character has kidnapped some particular mutants, with plans to extract certain special DNA bits, to make him even more powerful, so he can take over the world. Not exactly a brilliantly different story, but really better than most.

The best part of the game, really, is that you can play such a wide variety of characters. You can of course play as all of your favorites, but there are a few more obscure characters, like Sunfire and The Scarlet Witch. There are even a few unlockable characters. Nice! Put together a couple of your favorite X-Men with a Brotherhood character or two, and you can come up with some pretty cool combinations.

Your party consists of four characters. You control one at a time, but switching between them is quick and easy. You’ll find yourself doing this often, since certain puzzles and activities require the attention of specific characters. Of course the best way to play this game is cooperatively. The game supports both ad-hoc and online modes, where each player can control a character. Better this way than letting the AI control 3 characters, unless of course you get stuck with someone who doesn’t really follow the rest of the party, in which case the camera gets pulled back to such an extent that it’s difficult to see what’s happening.

A great game overall, I’d say. Plenty of bad-guy-bashing action fun to be had. And definitely the best PSP game to surface since the original lineup in my opinion. Check it out if you haven’t yet.

Official Site

Burnout Revenge is the latest in this action racing series. As always, the focus of the game is on the absolutely beautiful crashes. This sequel manages to keep what was good about the previous games, and add a few things to make it even better. Everything is faster, which is always a good thing in this genre.

Any car going the same direction as you are can be turned into a weapon. This is known as checking. If you hit one just right, you can send it into the oppostie lane, hopefully into an opponent, taking him down. You can also send checked traffic flying off behind your car, creating obstacles for other racers.

Even more interesting perhaps than the whole checking thing are the new track layouts. There are many more choices to make in running a track now. There are shortcuts, and various alternate routes that allow you to fly down on top of another car for a stunning vertical takedown. When playing online, these shortcuts can also server as hiding places.

As with previous incarnations of the game, loading screens tend to appear too frequently, although in crash mode loading time is at least made a bit more entertaining with a “rewind time” sort of feature.

Official EA Site
Review from GameSpot.com