alt dot me

The two big consoles have still failed to win me over. XBox 360 still seems to be horribly rooted in franchise titles that I have no interest in. Reports of the ‘Red Ring of Death’ haven’t died down which leads me to feel that the hardware problems weren’t just confined to the first batches and the desgin has some seroius heat related problems (MS and the retailers refusal to clarify the failure rate doesn’t help). Mass Effect could change my mind. Bioware basically hit the ball out of the park with Knights of the Old Republic and this new title looks as if it’s taking the genre to a whole new level. Their RPG titles typically appear on the PC 6 months after the console but if it was kept exculsive it might force me to buy but not until after the die shrink to the 360’s chips later this year.

 Playstation 3 is moving in the right direction with the latest firmware updates (DVD and PS1&2 upscaling to 1080p) but they still lack games. There is still only one game I would definitely buy (Motor Storm). There’s a whole lot of promising looking stuff on the horizon but I’m not buying a console for a game that might turn out to be good in a year’s time. Sony need titles like Heavenly Sword, Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4 on the shelves as soon as possible. Games are how they dominated the last generation. The reason the PS2 continually outsold the technically superior XBox (even when XBox was cheaper) was that it had the games people wanted to play. If they don’t start to build some momentum more developers will go multi-platform or change sides completely.

 My relationship with the Wii is in a bad place. We still see each other for some Virtual Console now and again but, post Wario Ware, the spark has gone. Mario Strikers doesn’t really appeal to me and Super Mario Galaxy seems a long way off.

 On the PC things have been good. I jumped into Sam and Max Season 1 after the reviews improved at episode 4 and it was good to get back to some old fashioned point and click adventuring. Command and Conquor 3 has been fun and despite the flashy new engine the gameplay felt closer the the original than the sequel which was a step in the right direction. On the horizon Hellgate:London looks as if it will own my ass for a month but I’m not sure about the freeplay and paid for eilte content. I’m waiting patiently for more Half-Life 2 episodes but I suspect I’ll die of old age before they finish this.

Finally, the impossible has happened: there’s a good PSP game. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops isn’t just a good MGS game, it’s a good handheld game. Nice quick missions that take about 5 mins tops alowing you to jump in and out of the game.

I’ve found an anti-bot plugin that might allow me to turn comments back on safely. Well I guess I’ll try almost anything once.

It’s the only way to be sure

I’ve implemented a fairly drastic solution to the 3000+ spam comments I found on the site on Tuesday. I little piece of SQL has wiped all the spam and about 1/3 of the real comments (I consider that to be acceptable collateral damage). A while back I installed a plugin called WP SpamAssasin which is supposed to give me an extra layer of defence by automatically rejecting lots of the comment spam. What it actually did was bypass the existing rules to throw all spam into moderation and allow the all the comments through.

I’ve pulled it out and shut down comments on all past and future posts until I can come up with a solution that doesn’t involve having to moderate 80 comments a day. A strange side effect of the way I killed the comments is that some posts say they have some when they don’t but I’m too lazy to fix that.

To be honest I’m thinking not, at least not at launch anyway. As with the 360, I’m just not turned on by the launch titles. The one thing that might have persuaded me would have been Gran Turismo HD but that has been downgraded from a real product to a single track, ten car downloadable tech demo (although it will be free). If Metal Gear Solid 4 actually makes it to Europe before the end of this year I will be utterly stunned and the first Final Fantasy for PS3 won’t be here until ‘08 at best. So I’m left with The cost difference doesn’t really bother me as if you add 4 years worth of XBox Live subscriptions to the price of Microsoft’s console you arrive at a similar price.

Firstly I’d like to make it clear that overall I’m loving the Wii, gestural input via the Wii-mote works even in more tradtional games (Zelda). In fact I find it easier to memorise than some of the torturous button combos in many games. Standing and moving around while playing seems to burn calories so I’ve abandoned that.

 The main gripe I have is that nowhere in the manuals and leaflets in the box does it mention that the remotes will burn through the supplied pair of AA batteries in one week. I have a wireless desktop that can go through six months of FPS and WoW raids on one set of batteries. I’m told that 20+ hours of performance for a wireless controller is not too bad but that’s comparing to controllers that are rechargable. Also there was no real warning of the battery failure, it just kept losing contact with the console. It seems to be a Nintendo tradition that every device they launch must have at least one flaw that should have been perfectly obvious. I’m just glad it wasn’t too major this time.