Falling Debris

Today's Deal of the Day on Amazon Gold Box is last year's smash music hit, DJ Hero. It originally listed around $100, but has since gone down to $60. However, today's your chance to get the addicting music mixing game for only $40! The deal is gone at the end of the day, so you better snatch it up while it lasts!

While I was wandering the exhibit floor, I stumbled across a small Sony booth (keep in mind, a small booth) where single guy was demoing 3D on the PS3 with Killzone 2 and... Playstation Move! Seriously, out of nowhere, Sony rents a tiny "you can literally walk around it in 10 paces" booth to showcase the two features that are supposed to keep the PS3 competitive. They had a 40" TV for a single person to play Killzone 2, with 2 extra sets of glasses so 3 people total can get the 3D experience. I didn't want to interrupt the yuppie larva who takes his video game technology for granted, so I just donned the glasses for a few minutes. Given the nature of the FPS game, the visible depth was basically to separate your current position with the distance of objects in the background. Well sure, that's what 3D is supposed to do, right? The thing is, I can tell how far away objects are. While traveling, I can approximate my distance from building and enemies. You don't need depth perception for that; it's just a novelty. How can I prove it's a novelty? The most 3D utilization I saw was when you're injured, blood splatters on the screen (not a new concept). The blood projects itself outward, obstructing your vision. How game developers are using 3D right now, utilizing TVs with active shutter filters, is no different than horror movies that used anaglyph stereoscopy. Let's have things pop out at you!

Aside from that, I was able to get my hands on Playstation Move and test The Shoot, a demo game that comes with the bundle. Watching the kid before me, I wasn't too impressed with the use of tracking in this game. It's just an arcade style rail shooter where you aim the orb of the controller at the screen and fire. That in itself is not exactly impressive. The point of PS Move is not only does it track the controller, but it tracks bodies with the camera, much like XBOX Kinect (formerly Natal). So when this giant robot started hurling bags of money (from the bank it just robbed) at me, I was supposed to lean left or right to avoid damage. I don't think I was leaning right, because it didn't register and I got hit (with bags of money). If I can't intuitively lean to the side, I don't think the technology works. We're talking real time motion tracking. There's no time to read directions on how to use the controller (or your body) to interact with the game. It should come as naturally as, well, leaning to the side. I left the booth unimpressed and glad that I haven't pre-ordered the Move bundle yet. I'm going to wait for a real game to utilize it. If a big budget game can't sell the device, it's not worth it.Does that mean I'm going Kinect? Maybe, but not immediately. I don't see any game that I play using it that well, not to mention I live in an apartment where I don't have that kind of space. The motion wars may be in their final stage as the big three contemplate their next consoles, which should be a reality in less than 5 years.

Just now, on Kotaku, someone commented on an article reporting that the popular puzzle game Portal will be "taught" at Wabash College. More accurately, it will be part of a new curriculum "engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community." The commenter was using an Internet meme to joke about Portal being "art". Not being familar with the meme, I had to add my academic background to the discussion.

Video games as art is another debate saved for the likes of Roger Ebert. What matters in this context is that Portal is a literary text. If you don't understand what I mean by that, but want to, I suggest reading Jacques Derrida, who argued that "everything is a text". While the playing mechanic of Portal isn't too valuable in this scope, the story, thus GLaDOS, is very valuable in a discussion of ontology.

Of course, someone had to go and ask what values Portal could have in an academic context. While I should have been doing real work, I came up with this ten-piece nugget set that explains how the game can be analyzed in a literary and philosophical context.

The ramifications of the:
1) First person narrative...
2) ... silent protagonist, who...
3)... through the efforts for self preservation (at any cost)...
4)... effect the stages of grief in...
5)... an artificial intelligence, who...
6)... resents humanity for giving it life and trying to extinguish it, by...
7)... forcefully placing the protagonist in a survival environment, in which...
8)... the environment (or reality) must be altered to fit one's needs, and...
9)... the artificial must be sacrificed for the real (person) to survive, all under the pretense...
10)... that there will be cake. Which is a lie. 

What I love about this news is that videogame blogger Michael Abbott, who was chosen to join the committee for designing the curriculum, was reminded of an article on Gamasutra and thought to include Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life into the reading list. He's not just making students play a game because it's a head scratcher. He's integrated an interactive, non-literary material into a course that is based around reading books from guys who've long been dead. Students need the material to be accessible to them or at least have the instructor go out of their way to bridge the gap between the students and the material. It took me three attempts at a rhetorical studies class before I passed, all because of a grad student (who shall not be named) integrated The Matrix into the material. I get The Matrix. And I can identify tropes and other values when assisted. Once I've digested that, the academic studies and essays become so much clearer when I was guided across gap instead of thrown over it.

Your homework: Play Portal. You don't have to beat it; you just have to think about it. Then talk about it.

Source: The Brainy Gamer via Kotaku

Rather than review. I thought I'd provide the audience with a lesson to learn for PS3 owners. Something that Sony has advertised over for the XBOX 360 since its launch is the ability to replace the hard drive. They didn't so much advertise it, but it was certainly a well known feature, along with the late ability to install Linux. While Microsoft puts 2.5" hard drives into a proprietary enclosure and releases higher capacities through bundles before selling them individually, the PS3 mounts the bare drives into a bracked and slides them in through an easily accessible bay on the side of the console. Of course, much like Microsoft, Sony has released several SKUs since its launch in 2006. As it stood, it was just a superfluous feature that few people utilized. I bought a launch model with a 60GB drive, and it was time to upgrade.

Note: While all PS3s have this ability, the hard drive tray varies from hardware wave to wave. The one depicted here, as with the Phat 60GB model, slides before pulling out. Other models slide directly in. Regardless, all models use a tray of some sort and the backup/restore process is all the same.

The great thing about the console is that it uses a standard SATA 2.5" (laptop) hard drive, one that you can buy off Newegg or anywhere else. In fact, I was able to get a 500GB drive for $50 (that's good for a laptop drive). The only issue that many owners may not realize is that the PS3 only supports FAT, so you won't be able to upgrade it to 2TB+ drives should they ever come out. Really, this limitation only affects the use of removable media such as USB drives; it won't read NTFS used by Windows now. Regardless, 500GB is fantastic and gives you plenty of room to grow. The backup utility is rather slow during both backing up and restoring, but it's forgivable. You can back up individual files to a flash drive, but if you want to back up the entire drive, including game installs, you'll want to use a larger external drive. The problem is, Windows won't allow you to format large partitions as FAT by default. I had to use SwissKnife, an abandoned partition manager that does the job. For simplicity's sake, I took my 250GB external drive (a WD Passport) and just made a 60GB FAT partition, since that's how big my original PS3 drive was anyway.

What isn't well known is that the screws that hold the drive into the try are small, tight and soft. If you're not careful, you can easily strip these screws and reduce the chance of separating them. I was able to get three off without issue, but I just happened to strip one. They're too small to grab with needle nose pliers and the round, shallow edge makes them impossible to wrench. There it is. Between a rock and a hard place when all you want to do is replace a hard drive. This is where we get into Sony's support for this issue. After poring over forum threads regarding this very issue, I found that originally, Sony was unofficially providing replacement trays, either for free or cost. Wonderful! It's not technically supporting the modification of the console, but provides owners with a harmless component that really doesn't cost them anything. Unfortunately, Playstation support was unable to provide any support whatsoever, since they just replace HDMI cables. That's what they told me. I was forced to resort to eBay, where I found a single person selling trays for $6. It was steep for just a piece of metal, but when it's your only option, you can't complain. Sob story aside, once I got the new tray, the new drive went it without any trouble. The console recognizes the unformatted drive and prompts you to format. Once that's done, you use the utility to restore data, then enjoy the new drive.

Let this be a lesson to all thos PS3 owners out there. If you buy a new PS3, you've probably got a nice 250GB drive to store all your stuff on, but for Phat owners, this is definitely crucial information. Back up your data when you begin considering, then confirm that you can remove the drive from the tray.

A new Spider-Man game has been announced, but will it break the curse continued by Web of Shadows?

Beenox Studios, a developer with a short history that includes Monsters vs Aliens and a Guitar Hero game, the franchise changes hands yet again after Shaba Games fumbled the ball. Called Shattered Dimensions, it takes Spider-Man through four different "dimensions" or rather, four different Spider-Man titles. In this case, main continuity Spider-Man (Earth 616) experiences life as it is in the mini sereis Spider-Man Noir and Spider-Man 2099. This is quite refreshing, as the film franchise games have exhausted how much fun players can have with normal Spidey.

With Noir, 1940s Spider-Man has less emphasis on acrobatic combat and more on stealth. Spider-Man 2099 emphasizes on flying through a futuristic city with technological enhancements. It has a lot of promise to provide a varying experience for players, with separate-yet-convergent story lines. The art style is definitely a new twist on previous games, showing hints of the MTV animated series.

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions hits stores September 7, 2010. Be sure to pick it up on your preferred console, but from the cover art, it looks like the XBOX version will be Kinect-enabled, however that works.