TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: PS3

Playstation 3

  • New TV – 3D games, here I come!

    I needed a smallish TV for my bedroom, but when I saw a good deal on a Vizio 42″ 3D TV at Costco, I had to buy it. I didn’t think I really NEEDED a 3D TV, but it had all the other features I wanted, so I got it.

    I hooked a PS3 and Xbox 360 into it and then fed the TV’s optical audio output into a Pioneer AV Receiver. That was my first mistake. The TV’s audio support is lousy and it doesn’t just pass through audio signals it can’t decode. Instead, it forces the source to 2 channel stereo PCM or Dolby Digital 5.1. This means all the fancy Blu-Ray sound outputs are useless. I couldn’t even convince the PS3 to use Dolby 5.1, but the XBox did so. Though my receiver is a couple years old, I hooked the PS3 HDMI port straight into it to get the best sound and it passed through the 3D HDMI signal to the TV, so a win all around. Shame on Vizio for messing with the audio, though.

    I haven’t watched any 3D movies, but I tried Uncharted 3 and Killzone 3 in 3D and I’m not going back to 2D games if 3D is available. The Vizio TV is passive 3D, which means it uses polarized glasses and half the resolution is used for each eye, but the quality is still quite good and the 3D adds a lot, at least to those 2 games.

    I had resisted 3D because of cost and because I figured it wouldn’t be very effective, but in this case, passive 3D is comfortable and works very well. I’m now sold on 3D for gaming. I’ll post after I watch a 3D movie on it to let you know my impressions. But if you are thinking of a new TV and have a PS3, get a 3D TV!

  • Trying out Nier for PS3

    A friend loaned me Nier for PS3 since he had just achieved all the trophies and liked the game. Since I love RPGs, he suggested I check it out.

    I have mixed feelings about Nier. I think I could really like it, but it didn’t grab me so hard in the first hour or so that I need to keep playing. So I probably won’t, since I have so many other things to play that I know I really like.

    The story in Nier seems compelling. It starts in a dystopian future where the world is crumbling. There, you fight a bunch of ethereal monsters while rapidly gaining levels and abilities while trying to protect your sick daughter. Then, somehow (and I would hope this would be explained later in the game), you fast forward to a medieval future where you are a peasant/hunter trying to protect your sick daughter. And all the fancy abilities you had when fighting earlier: gone. Back to a simple sword. Presumably, you will learn the abilities as you level.

    As Yahtzee says in his very entertaining review, the villagers are pretty useless, so you need to kill things for them, do their shopping, etc., as you level and gain abilities and money. This wouldn’t be so bad but the guy runs sort of awkwardly, which I didn’t like. Every stop was a skidding stop, which is silly. The controls are ok, but not as natural and fluid as some games.

    The game is visually attractive, but not amazingly so. The characters are well done, as usual with Square Enix, but the landscape and animals are fairly simple and cartoonish. In the first mission, you need to kill some sheep that look like child drawings of sheep. Perhaps it’s an “artistic style.” Or not.

    So Nier has a lot going for it, but not enough to draw me away from LOTRO and Portal 2 and Dragon Age 2 and all the other great games that I haven’t finished…

  • Burnout Paradise sale on PSN

    PSN has a sale on Burnout Paradise for PS3 along with some addons for $7.99. Not sure when it ends, but I like Burnout Paradise enough that I bought it. If you don’t have Burnout Paradise, check it out – good fun!

  • Take a look at ggamdori’s Uncharted 3 beta multiplayer movies

    My friend ggamdori has posted a number of movies showing the Uncharted 3 beta multiplayer game features.

    Take a look at his YouTube page. I will link to one of his popular videos below, but take a look at all of them!

    Uncharted 3 looks like good fun!

  • Sony PS3 updates stink

    I haven’t written in a while because I’ve been very busy with work. I haven’t not been playing games, however. In fact, LOTRO has been taking my all my minuscule free time. But more on that later.

    This weekend, I decided I want to check out Assassins Creed Brotherhood, which I’ve had since about when it came out, but haven’t even put into the PS3. I fired up the old PS3 to play and discovered an update, even though I updated a week or two ago.

    As usual, this stupid update takes ten or fifteen minutes to download (even though I have a very fast cable connection, so surely Sony is throttling or underprovisioned) and then a few more minutes to install.

    These things never happen on the Xbox360. Updates there are quick and painless. Sony has taken more of a Windows approach (big download and reboot), but at least with Windows the download and much of the install can happen in the background.

    Clearly Sony doesn’t get it. We want to play games on the PS3, not have to maintain it, like we do our PCs. Sony makes updates tedious and punishes the user by preventing anything else from happening. C’mon, at least let us play space invaders while the download happens. Can’t the SPEs in the Cell processor do anything other than download? As usual, Sony hardware is great, but their software leaves a lot to be desired.

  • Too many games!

    Gosh, it’s a real problem that I have too many games to play and not enough time. Lord of the Rings Online had a recent update that fixed Lore Masters a bit and made positive changes to crafting. I’m really enjoying LOTRO!

    But now, Star Trek Online has put out the Season 3 update, so I need to check that out, perhaps with a new character, as they too claim to have improved crafting, among other things.

    I haven’t even had time to get back to Alan Wake for a week now, let alone Pocket Legends, Pocket Frogs, Dragon Age DLC, and all the other games that appeal to me. And I haven’t turned on either PS3 in over a month! Well, perhaps I’ll get some time over the holidays!

  • Too Many Games, Not Enough Time

    While I have spent what little free time I’ve had lately enjoying Star Trek Online‘s great Weekly Episodes and Lord of the Rings Online‘s vast virtual world (and skirmishes), I have acquired or ordered some new games that I don’t know when I will have time to play.

    I bought Alan Wake a week or two ago when Buy.com had it on sale. It arrived, but I have yet to put the disk into my Xbox 360 (or even turn on a console recently).

    Now I’ve ordered Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood for PS3 because I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed II so much and I had some game credit from Amazon.com.

    It’s an exciting time to be a gamer with all the seemingly great games coming out and well-reviewed older games coming down in price. Now if I could just buy some free time…

  • Game Console Video Capture post by ggamdori

    Take a look a gamer ggamdori’s post on various capture devices that can be used to capture gaming videos from PS3 and Xbox 360. His post compares 4 devices from 2 companies and shows the strengths of each. http://www.ggamdori.com/?p=189

  • Gaming Video Capture

    There are lots of people, including me, that post gaming videos on YouTube. The trick is to figure out how to capture the video. On a PC, we can use utilities like FRAPS to capture frames and make a movie from it. This works, but burdens the system a bit while you are playing the game. Another option is a capture device to capture HDMI or component video (we’re talking HD here, none of that low-res SVideo or composite junk). An internal card, like the Blackmagic Intensity Pro, can capture either HDMI or component and has a pass-through so you can play the game with no delay (capture devices always add a delay because they are busy compressing your video), but the HDMI capture is not useful for PS3 (or Blu-Ray players) because of HDCP encryption.

    I chose an external USB device, the Hauppauge HD PVR 1212, which has component input and pass-through, as well as optical audio in and out, SVideo and composite inputs, and front and back analog audio inputs and pass-through). It captures straight to H.264 compressed video with 3 different wrappers, one that plays well on XBox 360, one for PS3, and one for general video editing. The software can apparently make DVDs that will play back HD in Blu-Ray players, though I haven’t tried that. The unit itself is a plastic rectangle a little bigger and taller than a Mac Mini and it has funky blue “bling” lights that glow when recording (can be turned off). The software is minimal, but seems quite functional, and that’s what matters. The great thing is that the hardware does the compression into H.264, so you can use a laptop or other weak PC to control the unit. I’m using an Atom&Ion-based “Nettop” computer to record the files from the HD PVR and it works great.

    I also discovered that my NVIDIA GTX 280 card in my PC has component video output, so the HD PVR can record 1080i from my PC. I am uploading videos as I write this showing the results. They aren’t great, because of the analog capture and interlacing, but they seem pretty good and it didn’t slow my PC like FRAPS would have. I do think the captures from the PS3 look better than from the PC, perhaps because of better cabling or perhaps because the lettering and such on the PS3 are made for TV viewing so are bigger and smoother, while PC text is small and sharp on a digital monitor, but not as great on analog component video.

  • Star Ocean Plot

    I’m still really enjoying the battles and exploration of Star Ocean:The Last Hope. I was also getting into the plot, thinking how imaginative and interesting it was, until last night when the plot took a right turn to reality. Whichever game designer thought up this moronic scheme to deny the SRF existed is severely stretching the bounds of credulity. And this criticism is coming from a Star Trek fan, where all sorts of crazy plot devices are used all the time. Anyway, that crazy idea has not ruined the game play, but it does make me wonder about what other silliness will be forthcoming…