Archive for the ‘Video Games’ Category:
2010 Tech Predictions
It was fun doing this last year. So I thought I would have another go at it and see what I come up with.
Computers:
1. Netbooks/sub-12″ laptops will be even bigger than before because they will finally be useful. Atom/ULV processors, Ion/Tegra graphics, and touch enabled devices will make having a 17″ laptop a bad thing. Oh and used/refurbished laptops might play a big role in killing desktops once and for all.
2. Windows Home server will have a big update (based on server 2008 r2) and will include Windows Media Center backend and Zune software so you can plug your tuners directly into your WHS. This will also allow for great integration in Windows Mobile 7 and begin a new wave of extenders. I don’t think it will be out till Q3/Q4 though so extenders won’t make a push until 2011.
3. Someone will finally offer a true alternative to cable TV. It will probably come from Apple/Netflix/Boxee/Hulu/Microsoft and it will still be an expensive monthly charge but it will be possible to disconnect your cable/satellite. I am thinking Microsoft will begin a Zune Pass for TV which will integrate into Windows Media Center when WHS 2 and WM7 come out.
4. Apple will begin talks of their new OS, Microsoft will stay quiet about what they are working (and ride the good wave of Windows 7) on as long as possible, and Linux will be in a transitional phase while KDE and Gnome both get big updates.
Video Games:
1. Nintendo won’t come out with anything new. They are going to milk the Wii and DS as long as they can and plan for the Wii HD announcement in 2011. Microsoft will do the same with the Xbox 360 but they will probably hint that they are making something new before the end of the year.
2. Sony will hopefully focus on finishing their projects (home, media codecs, 3D, etc.) and open up the PS3 to 3rd party programs in 2010. Things like Netflix and Pandora streaming I don’t think are too far fetched and I really hope to see a decent browser come to the console along with Vudu streaming.
3. A new mobile console will come out. Probably in the form of a phone, but I expect a lot from Microsoft with Xbox Live on Windows Mobile 7.
Cell Phones:
1. Verizon will begin its rollout of LTE and Apple will announce a device for Verizon. I have always thought Apple would not make a CDMA device until Verizon starts rolling out LTE and that will happen in 2010. This also means that the device will work on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in the US and many GSM carriers around the world once GSM networks start updates. With a device on Verizon Apple will have a huge hold on the mobile market. It won’t go unanswered though.
2. Android will become number 3 in the mobile world. That is no small feat however. Android is currently the bottom in market share, by a lot. They will win in 4 ways, 1. Cheap devices 2. Multiple options 3. Any Carrier 4. The decline of RIM and Windows Mobile. Windows mobile has already been stagnant for the past 5 months and RIM is losing it’s customers. I don’t think RIM is smart enough to announce something big so they will die off but will still hold a good portion of the market share through most of 2010. Oh, and an official Google phone and a crap load of more updates to the OS won’t hurt either.
3. webOS will gain market share thanks to Verizon but will still fail to make the impact that the new Apple device will. Palm’s only benefit will be that they will be on Verizon first because they will support CDMA. I really hope they come out with a new phone, but if anything I think they will only announce a new phone in Q3 but not release anything new.
4. Windows Mobile 7 will have features built in that will make any iPhone user gelous. I am not just talking about cool games, I am talking about ZuneHD player integration, amazing hardware, and media streaming galore. I think they will integrate with the new Windows Home Server/Media Center and will really make seamless media playback better than ever. Not only that but WM7 will be heavily integrated into social networks allowing you to be always connected to your facebook, twitter, email, etc. even more seamless than Android or webOS.
5. Apple Tablet will be huge at first, and then go the way of the Apple TV. Yes the device will be really cool, yes fanboys/blogs/tech sites will long for the chance to gaze upon the amazing apple logo on the back, and yes it will do really cool things with media playback and music streaming. But if even 1/2 of the rumors are true the device is destined to fail. A ~$800, 10″ tablet you carry around to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, and play games on really just sounds lame unless I was at home sitting on my couch. And in that case I will just use my laptop or get a netbook preferably with Google Chrome for less than 1/2 the price. I feel weird talking about it when it is really only about a month from being announced. But in all honesty, I don’t see how this would be any better than a device you can actually carry in your pocket like say, a Google Phone. Oh and the tablet will have hardware issues in the first generation.
Other:
1. 3D in TV’s will have a big push. There are finally standards to allow for it and sales will be slow at first because there won’t be much content and prices will be ridiculous. Interest will rise when cable providers announce 3D cable TV offerings for launch in 2011.
2. Retail stores will begin to push online sales and start to lose services because consumers are getting smarter, or at least more resourceful. With Amazon having as big of a year as they did, stores like Best Buy, Barns n Noble, and Sears just can’t rely on people coming into their stores as much.
3. The Automotive industry will finally push for a standard in electric/hybrid cars. With so many companies going out of business, automotive makers can’t stay fragmented for long. They will have to agree upon something or they will lose to a up and coming company like Tesla.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Mostly I feel 2010 will be a year of recovery and not innovation. Although necessity is the mother of invention so maybe I am wrong.
2009 Predictions Follow-up
I thought I would follow up on my predictions for last year and see how I did.
Computers:
1. Multitouch – While this didn’t make as big of a push as I hoped, hardware development is very slow in a recession, there have been announcements of hardware coming out in 2010 that defiantly take advantage of multitouch inputs. Project Natal and the PS3 motion controller did surprise me though.
2. Linux Market Share – I cannot find a good answer on this one. But lets just say market share boomed but not where I thought it would. Android and webOS are both Linux based devices that saw a huge jump in market share from where they were in 2008. And there were also reports of Linux having a 30% market share in netbooks. Those numbers are good enough for me to say this is confirmed!
3. Microsoft Solutions – Windows Mobile was a failure still because WM7 got pushed back, the ZuneHD made huge progress and if weren’t for apps would be preferred over the iPod Touch in the tech world. Just the fact that I had 4-5 people ask me about the Zune this year makes me think it was a success. A year ago if you said Zune nobody knew what you were talking about. Windows 7 was a success but I think more than anything Microsoft no longer is the joke of the tech world, Apple is. Just getting their reputation back was a huge success for them.
Video games:
1. Wii – No it didn’t crash, sales are still relatively strong but with addons upon addons for the console and no new games that are any good. This will remain a console that collects dust in peoples entertainment centers.
2. PS3 – Totally confirmed! With the launch of the PS3 slim and a couple big games that finally came out sales jumped tremendously. From what I could find the PS3 actually surpassed the Xbox 360 in worldwide sales. And that is saying a lot considering how much the US and Europe loves the Xbox 360 and how much of the market share that accounts for.
3. Online play – Was it key? Not anymore than previous years. But the PlayStation Network is growing in popularity, and usefulness, and casual Xbox 360 games even needed to sign up for accounts for Netflix streaming, which I think is lame BTW.
4. PS3 3D – It is later than I thought but it is sill coming.
Other:
1. DTV transition – Wow, that was uneventful. I guess people were more prepared than I thought. It also helped that a good portion of OTA users switched to cable or satellite.
2. Streaming video – While this probably wasn’t because of the DTV switch. Many online video sites flourished, and some failed.
3. OLED – Besides a few mobile devices, OLED was unheard of in 2009. I blame that on the recession, that crap is expensive to develop. All in all though, there was no projector built into a laptop and pocket projectors just started coming onto the market. Stupid recession.
4. New site – Nope, didn’t happen. Twitter really took off but nothing to surpass the growth of facebook. Although MySpace is finally bleeding users.
PS3 Repair Log
I had to send my PS3 in for repair due to an error I was getting when trying to read disks (Blu-ray movies and games). I wanted to post my experience to help anyone in the future that needs to send in their PS3 for repair too.
First up was getting to the point of needing to send in the machine for repair. I called support (twice for troubleshooting) but when all troubleshooting failed I was told the PS3 would need to come in for repair and, to my surprise, I was sent an email to put in the request online instead of doing it over the phone. The link I was sent was https://service1.us.playstation.com/ and I was told to put in my information there and I would be sent a box. I was happy with this process because I received 2 emails saying my request was complete and within 3 days my PS3 coffin was at my door.
It came with a handy page that said what to do before sending in the PS3. First they recommend backing up your PS3, then deactivate your master account, then delete all users (lame), and finally format the PS3 system hard drive (double lame).
After all that was done I laid the PS3 in it’s temporary home for it’s long trip to Texas.
2009-04-19 – Received error 80029906 when trying to play a Blu-ray movie and error 80010514 when trying to play a disk based game. Games on the Hard drive worked just fine.
2009-04-19 – Submitted request for repair.
2009-04-21 – Coffin arrived at my door.
2009-04-22 – Shipped PS3 to repair center.
2009-04-28 – Email confirmation that the PS3 was received by the repair center. The email said repairs usually take between 7-10 business days.
2009-05-04 – Looks like they tried to deliver the system today. I got a call this morning but didn’t pick up cause I was driving. We will see if I get it tomorrow.
2009-05-04 – The driver came buy again at 6:00 p.m. to deliver the system. That sure was nice of him. As he dropped it off he asked if I play Xbox. I laughed a little and asked him if he had been delivering a lot. He just said they have needed a “little service lately”. When I told him it was a PS3 he was surprised and asked what happened. I just let him know the Blu-ray drive was having problems and signed for the package.
With the system is finally back and I was able to finish the movie I started three weeks ago. I haven’t restored my information yet but we will see how that goes.
And for anyone curious, I did get my exact system back (not a refurbished replacement). The only thing that looks changed is the fact that they flash firmware 2.60 and reset all the settings to default. I needed to update the firmware back to 2.70 and once I did that everything appears to be working just fine.
How-to format a disk to FAT32
When backing up my PS3 for repair I needed to plug in a external hard drive to back up the system. My PS3 is only 40 GB but even that is larger than any USB flash drive I have so I needed to pull out one of my USB hard drives for the backup. I started the the backup process and when it asked for a hard drive I plugged in my terabyte external hard drive but nothing happened. I soon found out that the PS3 will only read FAT32 formatted hard drives. I did not think this would be as much of a problem as it was.
First I tried the format tool built into Windows but I found out that Microsoft decided not to let any drive larger than 32 GB be formatted in FAT32 because…well because they suck and wanted everyone to move to NTFS. So I tried formatting from a command line with: format d: /fs:fat32But I got an error saying the drive is too large for FAT32. I know that isn’t true because FAT32 is technically able to format drives up to 2 terabytes. So I decided to try gparted in Linux. Of course gparted wouldn’t have any problems right? Well in gparted I only had the options for ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and unformatted. That’s a bummer. So how about from the terminal? I tried variations of mkfs and mkfs.vfat but I know there was something I was doing wrong because each time it would just give me a error.
Finally I found a way to do it! There is a program called Fat 32 Formatter. This is a command line program that works in Windows XP/2000/Vista and all you need to do is open a commend prompt and type in:fat32format.exe d: You need to replace d: with whatever your drive is currently mounted as. Once the process completes you have a fully formatted FAT32 drive for your PS3 backup needs. There is a mirror of the fat32format tool here just in case it is removed from online.
And yes this was far more complicated than it needed to be. If you have the commands for completing this task in OSX or Linux please leave them in the comments.
MediaSmart server advanced Twonky settings
With a new MediaSmart server I was excited to get the TwonkyMedia server up and running to be able to stream all my music and videos over to my PS3. I have some experience with Twonky from my Buffalo NAS and it was the best DLNA server I have ever used. I was a bit disappointed that the server configuration was dumbed down and limited to the MediaSmart console.
Access is restricted to MediaServer configuration!
To enable to regular Twonky configuration pages you need to do the following steps.
1. RDP onto the server using mstsc.exe from a run command. If you have a version of Windows without remote desktop you will need to find a way to install it (I don’t know how) and open up C:\TwonkyMedia\twonkyvision-mediaserver.ini
2. Locate the line
# Web access
enableweb=1
3. Change it to
# Web access
enableweb=2
4. Save the file
5. Restart the TwonkyMedia service by opening services.msc from the run command, find the service on the list, and click restart on the left column.
Now all you need to do is browse to your home server in a web page and go to port 9000.
http://hpserver:9000
You should be greeted with the normal Twonky configuration settings now.
I hope this helps someone, it certainly helped me.
Pineapple Express Blu-ray extras
Beth got Pineapple Express from Netflix this week and while I think the movie is funny it is not for everyone. That of course is not why I am writing this post. When I put in the Blu-ray disk I noticed something very unusual on my PS3. There was a bubble under the game section like I had downloaded something and it was waiting to install. Sure enough the extra was a Pineapple Express wallpaper for the PS3 that was stored on the disk. I of course “installed” it and the wallpaper changed to a background that was way better than the Pineapple Express wallpaper available in the PlayStation store.
My question is, does anyone know how to extract the picture from the Blu-ray disk or how to save just the image to the hard drive instead of having to install it on the PS3? I would like to have the picture on my computer but I don’t have a Blu-ray player on my computer and couldn’t find a way to explore the pictures on the disk.
If you know how to do it please just leave a comment. Oh and by the way, the deleted scenes aren’t that great. I haven’t watched the extended version but please let me know if you did.
Excel Board Games
A few weeks ago I thought to myself. “Hey self, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could program Monopoly into a Excel spreadsheet?” I let the thought echo for about 2 weeks before I actually wrote anything down and started figuring out how I could make this a reality. But then I had an even better thought to myself. “Hey self, don’t you think someone else probably had this idea and actually acted on it before you?” I didn’t let this thought echo as long as the first, about 30 minutes, before a Google search found exactly what I was looking for. Turns out someone not only made Monopoly but there is also games like collect 4, Sudoku, and Othello.
While the games don’t work in Open Office, at least not the ones I tested, they seemed to have no problems in Office 2007 even though they were obviously made in earlier versions of Microsoft Office.
I attached some of the games I liked to this post. You will have to enable macros for them to work and I take no responsibility if the person who programed the game hid a few billion virus downloaders in the VBA macros.
Click here for the download excel-board-games
Enjoy!
My 2009 predictions
I have never done this before but I thought I would take a swing and making some predictions at what I think is going to happen this year with technology.
Computers:
1. Smaller, faster, better. Duh. That is obvious but I think there will be some big improvements in “alternate” input for computers. Apple is rumored to release a multi-touch imac. Windows 7 has multi-touch support and is just waiting for hardware/software to take advantage of it. In 2009 I expect to see the biggest improvements in multi-touch software. Games will probably be first, with the iPod touch and iPhone helping with lots of ideas, and then we will get some cool browser and media solutions. I for one would love to see cooliris with some multi-touch support. After multi-touch will probably come touchless input but I don’t think that will gain a lot of ground in 2009.
2. GNU Linux will gain at least 1% (double) market share (putting it up to 2%) before the end of the year spearheaded by Ubuntu. At this point I believe every major computer retailer (except Apple of course) offers GNU Linux on at least 1 model line, and when people see the boot speed and stability improvements of the next Ubuntu release more and more people are going to start “giving it a shot”.
3. 2009 will be the year of Microsoft solutions. I know Apple is gaining on Microsoft’s market share and they still will for a good part of 2009. But I don’t think market share ever really tells a full story. All I hear about now is how Apple is the coolest thing since super cooled capacitors, but I sense a bit of a change in the wind. I think Windows 7 will launch in 2009 and will greatly restore faith in Microsoft as a company. I also think that the next version of Windows Mobile will finally catch Microsoft up in the mobile platform market. The Windows Mobile OS won’t surpass what is currently out with Android or iPhone but it will make it respectable in what it can do and how it looks. I also think that the Windows Home Server market will gain popularity and the Xbox line will continue to grow. Finally, I think Zune sales will skyrocket (mainly cause Zune media player will be in Windows Mobile 6.5). Right now the Zune is in spot 3 behind Scandisk and Apple. I think as more and more people become unhappy with their iPods but they don’t want to upgrade to iPod touches or iPhones they will turn to the Zune. Last I checked Zune had 5% market share, but by the end of the year I see that number doubling to 10% of the mp3 player market. A big jump but it is truly a worthy mp3 player in my book.
Video games:
1. The Wii will crash. They have enjoyed a crazy amount of sales for far too long and they haven’t come out with any good software for months. I am so glad this day will finally come because I haven’t liked the Wii from the start. They will quickly be outsold for a few months by the Xbox 360 and the Wii will drop in price (my guess is to ~$180). Either way it will be hard to recover and it will probably just die out until Nintendo unveils the Wii HD or something ridiculous. By this time the Wii will not be “the console to have” and most people will finally see the console for what it truly is.
2. The PS3 will jump in sales. I already see this at my work. Two of my co-workers who previously bought Wii’s finally want to either A. Play real video games again or B. Watch Blu-ray movies. Their obvious choice was the PS3. Although the price is a big jump, people will finally realize all the features you get out of a PS3 and will start buying them mainly for Blu-ray players and eventually for gaming systems. The PS3 will also start to gain popularity because the Xbox 360 will run out of juice (aka. storage space) and the PS3’s potential will finally start to be tapped into. Sony will begin to push out better programming tools and maybe even Valve will come to the dark side and program their own crap for the PS3.
3. Online systems will be key this year. Xbox Live is fantastic but costs money. More and more people are getting tight on money and Xbox Live will probably suffer because of that. The PSN has been mediocre at best, but at the cost of free I think more people will sign up for this than ever before. Also Nintendo will realize the error in their ways in not offering a online service and will make plans for it with the Wii HD.
4. I think the PS3 will offer 3D gaming to some extent. Most people don’t realize their Samsung HDTV can display the 3D content and the market is ripe for the picking. I think the PS3 will be the only console that can really handle the amount of power it will take and storage space to contain 3D content.
Other:
1. February 17th will be a very dark day for a lot of people. Best Buy will be crowded as hell, and people will be very upset their antenna doesn’t work anymore. The biggest impact will be in low income/minority neighborhoods. There will probably be some bill passed to make sure they are not forgotten about in the future. HDTV sales will continue to decline until after February 17th when they will get a small kick in the pants until the economy levels out.
2. Because of the DTV transition online television distribution systems will benefit. Hulu, Vudu, Boxee, Apple TV, Windows Media Center will all see a lot more users than ever before. It is going to be a big quantity over quality issue but the amount of free content online will win in the end. After online distribution systems gain some ground they will start to push better quality to the users.
3. Displays are going to rock. Not just TV’s either. Laptop displays, computer monitors, projectors are all going to improve. OLED will make a big push (“organic” isn’t just for your foods) and I think we will probably see some sort of built in projector for a laptop this year. Pocket projectors will also finally become something worth looking at.
4. The internet will have a new awesome site. There will be some new MySpace/Facbook site for 2009 and it will include all the other sites in one. It will finally truly be able to combine your online accounts (at least social accounts) in one place. I have a feeling this site will be run in some way by Google (or at least bought by Google in the end). I think the first step to this will be Google NOT buying Facebook. If they do buy them then there would be no point in making an all inclusive social site. Their new site will easily tie in with YouTube, Blogger, Google Calendar, etc. The next step would be for Google to buy Twitter.com. As more people don’t have time to blog, they will turn to Twitter to allow them to blog on the go.
Well that is it. I know it was a heck of a lot of reading and I thank you for reading it (or at least skimming it). I will hopefully follow up 1 year from today to see how these predictions were met.
Let me know your predictions in the comments or if you agree/disagree with any of mine.
Happy Halloween
I had the chance to carve another pumpkin this year and of course it had to be nerdy in some respect. Well, with LittleBIGPlanet out this week I thought it was pretty obvious what I should do. Let me know what you think.
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Motorstorm
Funny thing about Motorstorm…
It doesn’t seem to care that you have been cheating on it with Rock Band.
It will still pound your ass to the dirt the next time you pick up the controller to start up where you left off.
On a side note, what do you think of the new theme? I think I like it but it is a bit confusing to pull down the little thing at the top to get to more options.