Total Conversion

OMG! This game is insane. I've been playing through the opening level and am being blown away. This is not your normal shooter. Its all about atmosphere and creepy sound and video. Not for the faint hearted. Check the reviews. http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/bioshock

Downloaded some more demo's Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, NBA 08, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. You would think my dsl would cap, but its still active for some reason. While they were downloading, I continued playing Gears of War on the 360. Man, what an awesome game. Funny thing is that coming up over the next month, we have a ton of good 360 games coming up. Bioshock, Project Gotham Racing 4, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 are all coming out in the next 30 days. On the PS3 side its not as rosy with the good games coming nearer to November / December. If I was to advise somebody on a console buy right now, my vote would be for the 360. Will let you know when that opinion changes.

Neat demo. Might even be interested in buying a FIFA game after the last few years of playing Pro Evo instead.

Something really well executed by Microsoft is the XBOX Live Service. It's really a well designed portal to a ton of content for the 360. Playable game demo's, Videos, Songs, Movie Trailers, Downloadable games, etc, it totally dwarfs Sony's offering. Of course, this is due to the headstart that Microsoft enjoys in the next-gen console market, but even so, it really is a huge positive. You can download and play most games on the shelves in stores today and evaluate them before buying the retail game. Considering that the game are averaging R500 a pop, its useful. Of course downloading 500 meg or 1 gig demo's in SA is just a not feasible with our capped & slow internet, so I took my xbox to a friends office where they have an uncapped Internet line which is unused over weekends. I hooked up the Xbox, got an Ip address and was stunned to find out that it did not support proxy servers. For this stupid lack of functionality to exist almost 2 years after the consol...

Lately, my poor 360 has been neglected quite a bit and, I decided to give it some attention in the week. Of course the 3 games I played were Gears of War, Guitar Hero 2 and Colin McRae Dirt. All three of them are just plain awesome and tons of fun. Picking up the XBOX controller reminded me of the differences just in the feel / functionality of the 2 controllers. Big differences are that that the 360 controller is much heavier. In practise, I actually like the PS3's lightness, but that lightness comes at a price. There is no rumble support, so when you fire a gun or crash a car, there is no shake or vibration. Of course rumble is a subtle effect, but when you go between systems it is noticeable. The 360 one is definately more bulky, I suppose to house the extra functionality & motors, but the extra weight is not a problem. Its going to sound wierd, but its like the difference between a small gun and a big gun. Sometimes, size does matter! The PS3 has the tilt-sensitive...

This is a neat feature on the PS3 which has no equivalant on the 360. Basically, you use the wireless capabilities of both devices to stream movies / pictures / sounds / games from the PS3 to the PSP. The PSP in effect becomes a remote screen of the PS3 and the PS3 will send screen output over wireless to the PSP. Tonight I tested an mp4 video I downloaded from the Playstation Store streamed to the PSP. It played instantly with no buffering, etc. Considering that the video is Hidef, the scaling to the psp low resolution small screen was pretty good. To take it to the next level (as one does), I fired up Nero MediaHome on my PC ensured that the PS3 detected the UPNP media streaming server on the network. I then started RemotePlay and the PSP was able to browse video's on my PC's hard disk and watch them. For those of you who don't get the significance I had the following setup: PS3 connected to PC over Wired Ethernet PSP connected to PS3 via Wireless PS3 accessing UPN...

Been getting some complaints that I haven't updated this in a while. Not to worry, just been 2 busy playing too blog. I guess that's a good thing. For the next few posts, I am going to talk a bit about things I like about the PS3 vs the 360. Each system has things to like/disklike and different people like different things, but I'll just talk about the stuff that affects me directly.