Console Ambivalence

Why I haven’t bought a 360:

• The free GTA4 bundles aren’t available any more.
• No compelling 360 exclusive games.
• RROD.
• Rubbish backwards-compatibility.
• Too noisy.

Why I haven’t bought a PS3:

• Too expensive.
• Patchy backwards-compatibility.
• Sceptical about Home.

So the news about a 360 SKU adjustment (60GB for the same price as 20GB) isn’t such a big deal to me (assuming it’ll eventually come to Europe).

PS3 needs to drop £100 before I’m going to move. For now I think I’ll just stick with my Wii (now playing: Okami) and PC (now playing: Psychonauts; Bioshock, CoD IV, GTA IV and maybe Assassins’ Creed when I upgrade my GFX card, and also looking forward to: Spore and Diablo III).

Who says PC gaming’s dead? It’s just available after the consoles and for the unit cost is lower.

CiteULike, Zotero

Anyone using either of these products?

I’ve just created a CiteULike profile (currently empty).

Sounds interesting because the source is available for plugin development.

Ubuntu Keyboard Shortcuts

Some useful features of Ubuntu that I use every day,

Move Window: Hold down Alt + Click and drag anywhere on a window, not just on the title bar.

Lock Desktop: Ctrl+Alt+L

View Desktop (toggle): Crtl+Alt+D

Games Podcasts

Are there any good games industry / tech / research podcasts out there?

The closest I’ve found is Game Theory Show but despite the name there’s almost no theory in that show.

Although there are lots of other games podcasts out there they usually just describe what they dis/liked about recent games, which is less interesting than reading reviews.

 

[EDIT: 2008-12-22] I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but Industry Broadcast sounds like it might be interesting.

IP Filter

My ISP is TalkTalk who provide the following modem / router:

Product Name SmartAX MT882
Software Release V200R002B021 Opal
Firmware Release E.37.5.5
Release Date (2006-05-12)
Batch ID RCC1P2.021.E3755

I’ve been having problems setting up BitTorrent, etc. The web interface has no documentation and according to some forums this modem has some features disabled. So I decided to hit the metal and telnet into the device, setting parameters manually.

Here are the docs I referred to,

CLI Command instructions for Solwise SAR110 ADSL Router
Advanced Reference Guide for Solwise SAR110 ADSL Router
IPFilter FAQ
IP Filter Based Firewalls HOWTO (HTML) (PDF)

Game Sales vs Game Quality

What’s the relationship between sales of the 1281 PS2 games sold in December 2006 and their corresponding Metacritic scores?

High scoring games need good marketing to sell well.

Most games are low quality and sell poorly.

[EDIT: 2008-10-30] Graham passed on an Edge article from 2007 which comments the “Badly reviewed games that sold well were almost all licenses”

[EDIT: 2009-05-31] Jurie Tweets Does game quality translate into better financial performance?