Golf seems like a pretty a relaxing sport. I don’t hit the links too often, but I have seen it played on television. I did play once, but I spent more time slugging brews and driving the cart than I did swinging a club. However, I assume that if it can be played by senior citizens, it can’t be too strenuous.
Unfortunately, we Americans despise any form of exercise. For many, walking from the cart to the tee would be an arduous task. Luckily, for us burger-loving Americans, the sport can be played from the comfort of our living rooms. The only problem is that I find virtual golf to be as exciting as smacking myself in the face with a rubber mallet.
However, even I got excited when Sony revealed the newest addition to the “Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds” roster. (more…)
Today’s PlayStation Store update looked pretty magnificent. There was the usual collection of new Rock Band and Guitar Hero III downloadable songs, some pointless-but-thanks-anyway Nascar ‘09 car skins, lots and lots of pretty wallpapers and a rather special PlayStation Home theme that, much like the one that launched on the Japanese store last week, gives those who download it the chance to participate in an brand new expanded beta of the application.
All looking fantastic then! Except I’m not talking about my own PlayStation Store. I’ve had to go and praise the one on the other side of the Atlantic in my constant battle to try and say something nice about Sony, and as you can probably tell, it’s not going very well.
Oh, and Qore’s out too, but that’s Qore and nobody cares. Jump time.
“Great news!” I cry. “What?” replies the community in unison. Is this to be some fantastic, ground-breaking news changing the future of gaming? A new console? Equality in Sony’s provision of content? Nah. Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is getting an update on August the 1st. Silence falls across the Sarcastic Gamer community.
Why does this happen? Speculation, conjectures, hypotheses, theories and another word that means the same thing: they’re all after the jump.
If there’s one of many, many things Sony are notorious for (among other things) it’s not telling us much. If they’re not telling us why Europe’s shunned when it comes to network content (and I’ve tried asking so many times) they’re not telling us the full story of what’s coming in a large number of the firmware updates that both the PS3 and PSP receive from time to time.
Firmware 2.42, released today for the PS3, is no different: hit the jump for more.
Yesterday, Sony held theirE3 conference and it was a pretty interesting affair. It was boring at the start, pretty boring at the end. (save for the MAG announcement, which looks to be a pre-rendered Killzone 2-style affair all over again.) In the middle there was intruguing announcements coming one after the other. Resistance on PSP, emphasis on the PlayStation Network and the surprise announcement of the movie store being launched imminently.
For a PS3 owner Stateside, all of the news at E3 was pretty exciting, right? What about elsewhere in the world?
The folks over at the PlayStation.Blog (still new to the concept of how to use full stops properly) have listed what US users can expect in the coming week as E3 takes place. Stateside PS3 owners can not only look forward to the usual weekly update of games and add-ons but can also expect daily presentation videos straight from E3 in slightly-unnecessary high definition.
Hit the jump for what to expect from the PS Store during E3.
If any of you have ever been on any PlayStation-related blog at any point in time since the PS3’s release (and let’s be frank, that’ll be a fair few of you) you’ll have noticed that the demands for an in-game Xross Media Bar have been ever-ongoing. Every single post on the the PlayStation.blog (still not understanding the need for that dot) has received streams of comments from the rabid PS3 owners complaining about a lack of service and a lack of respect for the consumer base who’ve splashed out several hundred dollars/pounds/Euros/et cetera on their shiny black behemoth.
The thing is, I’m wondering why, as a collective, they don’t seem to have a single brain cell between them to share some sort of common sense when it comes to developing features such as the in-game-XMB, which we’ve just received after months and months of demand. Even after we’ve picked that up, we’re still baying for more. My ultimate slating of PlayStation fanboys continues after the hop, skip, leap, jump.
Playstation Blog announced Qore today. Qore, for all intents and purposes it seems to be a cross between an interactive magazine and the old-school Playstation Underground subscriptions. I used to subscribe to Playstation Underground back on the original Playstation and you’d get two discs about every three months for $30/year. On those discs, you’d get game previews, interviews, and most importantly, game demos. For what I got, I felt it was frequently worth it. I say frequently because occasionally they’d focus on content that wasn’t really that interesting to me and I’d have to wait ANOTHER three months for another dose. Why it really worked though is because it was the only real source of video game related video and demos I had access to on a regular basis. As we all know, the landscape has changed a LOT since then.
Sony’s bloggers are following some sort of template for their blog posts. That or they are brainwashed. Either way, my excitement over their new blog and their discovery of humility, is waning.
A whole lot of their posts seem to start with “Hi, I’m _______ and I am so happy to work at Sony.” Or some slight variation on that. It makes me wonder if all of the posts aren’t being written by the same person.
Hey I’m not saying that’s what IS happening. I am just throwin it out there.
BTW… I don’t hate Sony. I don’t hate PS3. I’m just really sad to see such a great franchise wallowing in the ranks of mediocrity because of bad management. But then again, maybe everyone IS happy to work there. Who knows?
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A letter to the idiots upset by Sony’s promise to aggressively “pwn the hax0rs”:
by Sean Workman
3. Bluray media and burners aren’t exactly cheap. Not to mention the rather large disk images you’d need to (presumably download or manage on your own if you ripped them from say a rental game). It’s most definitely not so easy and cheap that everybody and their brother will run out and buy (or as with the 360’s DVD discs, already own) equipment just to copy games.4. It’s SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS worth of junk if you hose it up and/or get kicked/banned from PSN. If it was $199, people might be willing to buy one and intentionally keep it off the grid in hopes of using it to pirate games on one, and play legit games and/or online on the other.
But I digress. You insist you’re not a pirate. You want HOMEBREW software, nothing more. If you were able to pirate, you’d only use that unimportant ability to legitimately backup your software in case your cat decided to sharpen its claws on your copy of MotorStorm, right? We’ll ignore the fact that unless you own a Bengal Tiger your cat probably CAN’T scratch a Bluray disc.
What is it about homebrew that’s so appealing to you? What do you really want? Emulators? I won’t even touch on the fact that claiming you aren’t interested in piracy but ARE interested in emulators is a bit… oxyMORONic. I’d wager MORE than 99/100 people that use emulators are pirating the ROMs they’re playing. I’d up those odds to 999/1000 quite comfortably. Okay, so we’ll ignore emulators. What DO you want homebrew for? Media playback with codecs of your choice? Homemade games? Porting over Firefox for a proper web browser? I mean COME ON, the PS3 officially supports Linux. You can already officially DO all those things… even run emulators! Does the fact that it’s there, for free, supported by Sony somehow take the fun away? Are you not happy until your homebrew launches from the XMB itself? You can’t be fussed with booting into Linux and actually, I don’t know, use a PROPER development environment to write REAL applications with no overshadowing sense of rebellion to the entire process? Does degrading to just “a programmer” instead of “a hacker” somehow cause what you’re doing to lose whatever it is that appeals to you? I’m sorry, I can’t follow this hypothetical train of thought any longer…
Why again are you up in arms over Sony promising to aggressively pursue people found hacking their PS3’s?Sean Workman is a free lance contributor to Sarcastic Gamer and many other websites.
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Sean Workman takes on critics of Sony’s agressive anti-hacking initiative.
A letter to the idiots upset by Sony’s promise to aggressively “pwn the hax0rs”:
by Sean Workman
Sony has announced plans to “aggressively pursue” hackers of their flagship Playstation 3. Is this news? No, not really. Any company that had invested as much money and risked so much of their future on a single product line would want to protect it. So if this isn’t news, why is it getting so much press in the gaming media? I’ll tell you why. You want free games. Piracy. There, I said it. You may not admit to it. You may actually actively claim to be against it, but THAT is the driving cause behind the buzz to this topic. Sony fights this battle on their PSP and has ever step of the way been losing. They’ve lost control of the PSP and in my opinion it’ll take a hardware revision and writing off all existing PSPs as “hackable” until it’s resolved, but for the PS3 it’s still a relatively locked down system. Locked down for a few (very important) reasons.
1. When you turn it on, if you’re connected to the internet, it checks for updates and won’t let you connect to the Playstation Network unless you update and are completely current (so avoiding that rules out any online gaming, purchasing DLC, and especially firmware updates. If you want any of the compelling advanced features offered by later firmware versions, you (at this time) simply have to keep updating your firmware. As a side effect of “shipping lean” on features, they’ve got SUBSTANTIAL bait to lure people into staying current with firmware updates. Staying current means letting the Sony carpenters spackle any holes in your system for you (whether YOU knew they were there or not). Notable features you’d miss out on if you never updated your launch PS3 sytem… PS1/PS2 backwards compatibility updates, PS1/PS2/DVD upscaling, Bluray downscaling to 720p, network streaming, internet-ready Remote Play to your PSP, and many, many others. Those are just some of the more tangible updates. At the end of the day, you may subscribe to the “I paid $600, I bought it and I can do with it what I want!” line of thought… remember, you’re accessing THEIR servers and services. They have every right in the world to keep you from doing that if you’ve done something to YOUR system that is outside the realm of what they deem legit. The online presence of both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 is only going to grow over time. Opting out means a larger and larger portion of their offerings will be off limits to you. 2. Nobody has (proven the have) successfully copied/hacked/played Playstation 3 pirated games “in the wild”. There have been claims by people (that I do tend to believe) that under certain circumstances and firmwares, they’ve been able to pirate games and play them but if only one or two or a hundred people can do this, it’s not even a blip on the radar. There are most definitely disc images available. But until people “in the wild” are able to actually boot and run them, I might as well archive up 14 gigabytes of recorded static and name it HotNewPS3Game.iso and let people wait in anticipation for the day some way to USE those images comes.
Read the rest of Sean’s letter tomorrow, right here on Sarcastic Gamer.
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One Day….. One Day… I will be proved right about this!
Now the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair has jumped into the fray, along with, possibly, all the Christians in Japan. Today, PM Blair said, and I am paraphrasing, that Sony was bad and shouldn’t have allowed Resistance: Fall Of Man to be set in an alternate reality, that happened to include the Manchester Cathedral.
Although I doubt that Sony envisioned this getting so out of hand, I just know in my heart of hearts that this is part of the new “Humble” Sony. Sony that’s been kicked around by gamers, critics, and now the country of England. Sony who we should be running to the defense of waving anti censorship banners. We should run out and buy their consoles to show solidarity with the company. If we already own a PS3 perhaps we should get one for downstairs.
Before I exonerate Sony of any hand in leaking or antagonizing the Church to rally public support, I want answers.
1. Why did this story break on the same day that Sony discovered humility (and blogging)?
2. Why don’t they direct the Church to the developer (Insomniac)? You think Microsoft is gonna take the heat for GTA4 when people find Hot Coffee 2.0?
3. What took the Church so long to find this? It’s the hottest game for PS3 so far.
4. Sony’s got enough money to bring back Jesus, so why wouldn’t they hush this up with a big check in the offering plate?
I’ll tell you why… Because this is the best thing to happen to Sony and the PS3 since electricity. Censorship-minded gamers are rushing to their defense, despite their differences with Sony.
If I sound a little pissed off, think again. Whoever thought this up, is the most brilliant public relations mind in the history of the profession. Someone should make a movie about this. If Sony continues to execute such brilliant moves, they could indeed give Xbox 360 and Wii a serious run for their money. You had me for a minute Sony. You had me for a minute.
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Editorial–(SG)- I have to admit, I fell for it. As a gamer, I am constantly on the look-out for censorship in any form. When I heard that the Church of England was persecuting poor Sony, I rushed to Sony’s defense…. sorta.
The more I mull this over, the less sense this whole thing makes to me. First of all, Resistance has been out for a LONG time in game lifespan. It’s been arguably the most successful PS3 title to date. Why did it take so long for the Church of England to find out their Manchester Cathedral had been replicated in a fantasy world surrounded by gun violence?
Incredibly, I first read about this controversy on CNN, which means that SOMEONE sent them a press release. I would be very interested to see who appears in the FROM line of that release.
Since when does Sony reply to negative PR in a public forum? These guys are professionals at playing dumb in the face of bad news. But their new blog is awash with opinion pieces defending Sony. Hmm and the blog launched the same day that this controversy surfaced.
It’s just too convenient. I don’t buy it. There’s a little voice telling me that something stinks here. Could Sony have instigated, directly or otherwise, the Church of England controversy to play the victim card and rally support for its otherwise unremarkeable public relations effort? Hats off to SCEA if they did. You had me there for a minute.
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