Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Darth Vader and Yoda in Soul Calibur IV?

Well, it sure looks that way.

Every day it gets more painful to deny myself a new Console, because despite stuff like the above, I just wouldn't play it enough to justify the cost. I mean, I think I got a grand total of 50 hours out of my PS2... and that was with Amplitude and Burnout and SC2 and a myriad of other games I really really liked. Ah well.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, instead of investing a several hundred dollars on a new console and all the f'ing trimmings you're going to end up thinking you're going to need, PLUS the price of games and such, that'll just end up being "hacked" to meet your long term purposes, hows about picking up a portable game device?

I have my PSP which I would ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY recommend due to the flexability and massive utility of the device.

We bought my son a Nintendo DS upgrading him from his GBA, and while I haven't really had that much of a chance to mess around with it, he seems to like it a lot, AND, the DS is backwards compatible with ALL his GB and GBA games so there's HUGE amount of existing content out there for you to choose from, cheaply, on the used game market.

Besides portable games typically more easily fit into the schedule of someone with bills to pay and a "real life" as they don't typically have the built in 40+ hour (or possibly NEVER ENDING) duration that PC or console games have standard now days.

I can't see myself investing enough to purchase a console that would meet my long term gaming needs better than a similar investment in upgraded PC equipment, and YOU KNOW how much I love collecting console shit!

So... Fuck the consoles man! Take the same money, buy a used PSP or DS and shitload of used games for 'em, or buy fewer games, and sock the rest of the cash away for more RAM, or a better video card, or bigger LCD panel.

Just to give you some idea, the PSP screen is about 20% larger than the Zune or iPod screens. Also, they've updated the OS on the PSP's significantly since they originally released it. Using my 802.11G network at my house I can connect to the net and download updates to it, or in the most recent update, I'm able to use it as a portable internet radio (I was listening to Polish rap the other day, very f'ing weird), and obviously with that sort of connectivity browsing the net isn't all that difficult although I've had difficulty with larger movie files being able to play on it, probably a result of having downloaded all my Bowling for Soup CD's onto the mem card, I'm not sure.

Hell, I'm betting that if I wanted to do online email and the like with it, I could (but hell I have a PC for that and it's easier to type on my big honking Logitech G15 keyboard anyway).

As far as actual portable movie players go it pretty much rocks as there's a significant EXISTING library of movies available for pretty cheap from your normal used game stores. I see 'em for like less than 10 bucks a pop usually, and more than half are priced less than 5 bucks.

The one thing about using it for movies was I didn't like that the volume via the ear buds included with it wasn't sufficient to always understand the dialog on an airplane (last year's trip to Mexico I watched Appleseed, Cowboy Bebop the Movie, and Underworld while flying too and from), but turning on sub-titles helped that out, AND, the convenience and ease of whipping out a PSP as opposed to a portable DVD player is night and day man, AND, you can't play games on a DVD player when you're done with the movie.

It suffers signficant proprietary drawbacks, such as no local hard drive so I'm limited to the largest possible mem-stick (8gb I think) for storage, and the PSP discs, called UMD (Universal Mini Discs) are 100% proprietary (FUCK SONY!!!) such that you can't burn your own content for movies.

It's SO proprietary the dev kit, which costs something like 13k last time I looked, only comes with a UMD EMULATOR, meaning it's an external interface that feeds the program via USB. As a game developer or movie producer, if you want content burned to UMD, you send it to Sony and they do it. As far as I know no one else on the planet is allowed to do burn content to UMD.

There's SEVERAL hacks available for the PSP though no one has documented any significant advantages of a hacked PSP over a standard unit, and since the base non-hacked unit has such utility, I doubt for other than a few 'home brew' games, you'd not miss much.

IF/when someone develops a hack that lets me connect a mini hard drive to the thing, THEN, it might be worth the permanent breakage risk of hacking it, otherwise it's pretty f'ing cool as is.

I can try and extract a DS review from Graven if you like, it might be a bit comedic, and possibly make for good content on the site if you're interested in more details about it, but frankly I enjoy my PSP too much to be all that interested in the DS. BUT, on acquiring a DS, last time I went to the local "used game store" (they have to ante up some ad dollars for you before I'll mention their f'ing name) they were telling me that for most of 2007 they couldn't even give the damn things away, then like the last week before Xmas, it was like everyone in the country up and said, "LET'S GO BUY A DS FOR XMAS!!!" and they sold out and the entire DFW metropolis area has been sold out of DS units since.

I haven't kept my ear to the ground enough to know if there's some "killer game" out there for DS, but I found the fact interesting to make me consider "borrowing" it from him for a few hours.

All this coming from a man who thought portable gaming peaked with the Sega Game Gear (which I still have)!!!

Gas Bandit said...

Holy hell, that's a ton of talk there. All I was trying to say was that I wanted to play the new Soulcalibur but I can't bring myself to buy a PS3 or a 360 :P

Anonymous said...

I know but seriously dude, that's how fucked up the console industry is, they're trying to suck you in with these "onsey-twosey" gimmicks.

It's all bullshit...