Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Praise the demo-downloads!

One feature that I've found very nice on the PS3 is that I can download playable demos of games from the PlayStation Store. When games cost as much as they do these days it's really a great thing to be able to take them for a little test drive before forking over my hard-earned cash for the real deal.

Yesterday I downloaded the demo for "Conan", and oh boy am I ever glad I did. You see, if I'd paid actual money for this piece of crap I'd be livid!

First of all: the graphics. Hello? Isn't this supposed to be an HD-capable console? I've got PS2 games several years old that look way better - "God of war" and "Killzone" to name a few.

Secondly and probably most importantly: the gameplay. You have basically no friggin' moves and the game seems to respond very slowly so combat is both frustrating and a bore. The minute elements of puzzle-solving that was featured in the demo was also laughable.

Thirdly, the demo is way too short for an action-adventure game. I mean really, I played through it completely in minutes and afterwards I wasn't one bit interested in seeing more since the demo left me thinking that this was what the game was like, only longer.

So thanks Sony for helping me steer clear of this turd of a game.

Demos I have been enjoying though and that made me wanting to play the game for real are "The Club" and "Uncharted: Drake's fortune". Now those left me salivating slightly and definitely wanting more!

The free download of "Lemmings" (full game!) also put a big smile on my face. What an awesome game in all of it's simplicity and how missed it ever since I played it ages ago on the original GameBoy.

I've also download "Kane & Lynch" and "Stranglehold", but I haven't gotten around to trying them out yet.


Sunday, January 6, 2008

66.666%

The following is taken from the latest newsletter from J!NX and makes me even happier that I went for a PS3 and not an Xbox360:

As a public service, we'd like to provide this brief rant: Nine people in the J!NX Office ponied up a hefty wad of female deer for an Xbox360. Of those nine, six of us now have a broken Xbox360. For the math-impaired, that makes 66.666% (repeating, of course) bitter J!NX gamers. So sad... We have consoles from 20 years ago that still work perfectly, apart from a few cartridges that need a blow now and then... (heh, blow...)

The Xbox360 has the largest amount of awesome games of any of the next-gen consoles, but this whole thing with them breaking is just embarrassing. There's no other console in history that has as bad of a track record from breaking as the 360.

And now when I think about it, I've never even heard of a PS3 breaking without someone doing something pretty stupid to it.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Eating my own words, and loving it!

Yes, it's true. Only a couple of month after my latest spewing of foul language over the PlayStation 3 I went and bought one for myself and you can view it in all it's expensive glory to the right of these words.

So what made me change my mind? Well, a couple of things. First and most importantly, the games are finally starting to pop up. That has been my main problem with the PS3, the lack of good games. But now there's plenty of games worthy of my cash out there; "Resistance: Fall of man", "Uncharted: Drake's fortune", "Ratchet & Clank: Tools of destruction" and "Call of duty 4: Modern warfare" to name a few.

Secondly and also very important, there are even more awesome cames on the horizon. I'm speaking of upcoming masterpieces like "Dead space", "Killzone 2", "God of war 3" (OK, it's set for release in 2009, but it's "God of war 3" doggammit!!) and "Metal gear solid 4: Guns of the patriots".

Also, it's looking more and more like Blu-Ray is kicking HD-DVD in the ass and killing it slowly but steadily. So I decided that for my HD-needs, I'm taking my chances with Blu-Ray.

What finally tipped the scale completely was that I got quite a big lump of cash back on my tax returns so suddenly the high price of the PS3, which has been my second biggest complaint, was no longer a problem.

On top of that, I managed to procure one of the last remaining 60GB machines available in Europe. One of the many perks of working for a large retailer of music, movies and games I guess ;-)

I've only had my PS3 for about a day but I have no regrets what so ever. I've already played several hours of "Ratchet & Clank: Tools of destruction" and "Resistance: Fall of man", downloaded movie trailers, game demos and such and am enjoying my new expensive toy very much.

Unfortunately I'm not having much of an HD-experience so far since it turns out that the single HDMI-port (which has never been used before) on my Samsung LCD-TV is broken! I still have a year to go on the warranty on the TV so it's not a huge problem since I'll get it fixed for free. But while it is being fixed I'll be without a big-screen TV and have to settle for the 23" LCD-TV in the bedroom (which actually has a functioning HDMI-port) for several days, maybe even a couple weeks, and that sucks a bit of ass.

But on the upside of things, until I get my big-screen TV off to the repair shop "Ratchet & Clank: Tools of destruction" kicks some serious ass in 576i too I can tell you!