I’ve always liked unique marketing and this is is very unique. Can you spot the all the Playstation shapes? I can’t seem to find the circle. Hopefully we’ll see this is motion later

PlayStation 3 Advertising Art is Impressive

These videos are good for a nice laugh.

100 Reasons Why Fanboys Hate PlayStation

100 Reasons Why Fanboys Hate Xbox

Of interest to PlayStation fans are previews of:

Resistance 2
Just Cause 2
Alone in the Dark
Brutal Legend

Plus reviews of:

God of War: Chains of Olympus
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
Army of Two
Patapon

There’s more but you’re going to have to download it to see for yourself. Leave any feedback in the comments please.

Download D+Pad Issue 6 in PDF or ZIP Here

N’Gai Croal writes that most developers seem to prefer the Xbox over the PS3, not only as a development platform, but also for their personal gaming. Even beyond the tech people, the business side of the industry seems to generally favor Microsoft as well.

He’s got a good point.

Microsoft has been very successful at winning mindshare and cultivating brand fanaticism. This also isn’t just related to the Xbox and their game development software, but all of their branded technologies, whether it’s database software or office software.

Of course this isn’t universal. Many people are equally fanatical about a variety of other technologies, one of which is, of course, the PS3.

But in the game industry, at least in North America and the U.K., Microsoft has a strong mindshare advantage over Sony.

On the other hand, PS3 still managed to outsell the 360 for the entire year of 2007, and has been picking up huge momentum so far into 2008.

What does Sony need to do to regain an equal footing among developer and industry insider favor?

Game journalism seems like the easiest job. It must be nice to arrive at work and hear your boss say, “Here, take these new games, play them all day, and then give me your opinion.” The only job that could be easier is a pillow tester, “Here, try out all these pillows and tell me which one is the fluffiest.”

Nevertheless, game journalism adds a substantial element of pleasure to what is a favorite hobby for many of us, so they deserve some recognition:

Best Game Reviews: IGN

Assigning games review scores is a very tricky job. Enthusiast gamers are notoriously opinionated and are almost impossible to please. A good game review is more than just a snapshot of someone’s personal opinion, it’s an approximation of group opinion. Some sites get swept up into hype and overrate some titles while getting emotionally angry and underrating others. Other sites hire reviewers who can’t write well or don’t know enough about games and their history to convey an interesting perspective. And some other sites take outright bribes in exchange for favorable reviews. In recent years, IGN has done the best job of giving balanced, level headed reviews, with reviewers who know what they are talking about. I definitely disagree with them on many reviews, but overall these guys are the best.

Best Podcast: 1UP Yours

Listening to a bunch of guys talk about video games sounds boring, but this is surprisingly good. Some of the dev podcasts are good (Insomniac’s Full Moon Show is very good), but these guys are the best. They have guys who really know a lot about games and their history, and most importantly have entertaining radio-friendly personalities, and an excellent sense of pace.

Best Interviews + Commentary: Level Up

Most sites spend most of their coverage regurgitating the same stuff on every other site on the Internet. Level Up, has a good record of making unique and interesting commentary, and conducting interesting interviews with questions other sites aren’t asking.

Best Game Previews + Media: IGN/GameTrailers

If you are willing to pay for the premium access, I think IGN does the best job at hosting a good selection of high quality game footage. If you want a free service, GameTrailers does a great job as well.

Public Discussion Board: NeoGAF

There are tons of game discussion boards out there, but these guys are the best. This site has two things going for it: A critical mass of quality contributors (by message board standards) and aggressive pruning policies to weed out most of the garbage that dominates most other popular game discussion boards. There’s still a ton of juvenile comments, but there are plenty of funny or informative threads as well.

Anyone have any other picks? Let’s hear them.

MTV Multiplayer had a chance to talk to Insomniac’s Ted Price about several things, in three parts. The third part, I feel, was the only interesting one. Here’s a snippet:

Multiplayer: How does it compare to “Halo 3″ in the amount of content that it has? Because it seems like this is an attempt to one-up the insane amount of content in “Halo 3.”

Price: Not necessarily. We were not looking at “Halo 3” or looking to one-up anybody at all, other than we wanted to push multiplayer content. With multiplayer we saw an opportunity to up the game to 60 players with not a whole lot of pain on our end. The challenge for us is not technical at this point. It’s design. We’ve got to make sure that when you’re in a 60-player game it doesn’t feel like unmitigated chaos.

So we’ve been spending a lot of time analyzing and trying out different techniques to make sure you know what you’re doing, even though you’re in this massive battle, and it’s working. And it’s fun.

For the rest:

Ted Price Pt 3: Justifying 60-Player ‘Resistance,’ Competing With ‘Killzone 2′

GameIndustry.biz got to talk to SCEA’s vice president of product marketing, Scott Steinberg, and they talked about stuff like the fact that Sony didn’t have a keynote or make a big announcement at GDC ‘08. They also talked about this:

In terms of titles you are looking at in 2008, what do you have to counteract the just-announced Gears of War 2? One of the downsides of having a breadth of titles is that you might not be able to point to any one title like a Halo 3 or a GTA that are going to sell consoles. Is there a single strong PS3 title in your mind that you can point to like that?

Well, I think it is really easy to point to one when you’ve only got one. And so by default, that sort of solves itself.

I don’t want to say that we have an embarrassment of riches, but we have the ability to go in a bunch of different directions depending upon the choice and the taste of the gamer. So we’re not just forcing one genre upon our population, our installed base.

Nice!

One of the great things about the PS2 was its breadth of titles, and I fully expect the PS3 to be the same. While I love a good FPS as much as the next guy (unless it’s Gary), I also want to play some other great game genres too. I think that’s what differentiates PlayStation gamers from Xbox gamers more than anything else. Xbox gamers seem to be more racing and gunning oriented, while PlayStation gamers like that stuff and other stuff too. Correct me if I’m wrong.

GDC: Leverage Will Be Key to Sony’s Victory

Thanks to Jose and Sporty for this. Toshiba has officially ended its support for HD DVD. Production of almost all HD DVD hardware (except possibly HD DVD drives for laptops) will cease by March 2008.

TOKYO–Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I became the proud new owner of a KDS-60A3000 HDTV. It’s only a bit bigger than my previous HDTV, but the image quality and sharpness has taken a monumental leap forward. As well, with the new stand it looks quite svelte compared to my old setup. Here’s a pic:

Sorry about the picture quality, I should have taken the picture during the day.

The net is abuzz with rumours about the 80GB version of the PS3 being phased out in favour of a new 120GB to 160GB PS3. Rumours suggest that this new model will lose all PS2 backwards compatibility but will gain a DUALSHOCK 3 controller.

Lots of people are arguing in the forums about whether or not the discontinuation of the 80GB PS3 in the Best Buy database has any significance. For some reason, some people just don’t believe that this has any significance. I think it does, especially given the fact that Sony has submitted a new PS3 to the FCC for approval. I think that the 80GB is on its way out out OUT!

I don’t care that that the 80GB PS3 is going away, I just care about its replacement’s capabilities. I really like the 4 USB ports on my PS3 (for playing Rock Band), the memory stick support (for copying stuff), and the PS2 BC (which unlike some people, I use a lot).

So I hope that the new uber-PS3 still retains all that stuff that really makes it an uber-PS3 instead of just a 40GB PS3 with a bigger HDD. I already have all that stuff, I know, but if my PS3 dies three years from now, I hope that Sony’s still making a model that I’ll be able to enjoy.

Thoughts?

Mole: 80GB PS3 dead, 120-160GB with Dual Shock 3 incoming

Recently we were given the opportunity to ask Naughty Dog, the creators of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, some interview questions. Here are the results.

Questions 3 and 4 answered by Pal Engstad, Lead Rendering Programmer. The others were answered by Evan Wells, the Co President of Naughty Dog

Q1: What kind of Home integration are you planning for Uncharted?

A1: Rather than each individual treasure, the Medals in Uncharted are more likely going to turn into Home trophies. We modelled the detail into the treasures just to increase the satisfaction in finding them. We also went to great lengths to make sure that they were authentic items that were from the right time period and location. We will have to come up with new 3D models to represent the trophies when the time comes.

Q2: What kind of tools (software packages) did your programmers and artists use to create the game?

A2: A lot of our tools were designed and created at Naughty Dog including a level editor, a shader and material editor, an asset management system and a scripting language that can be compiled and uploaded to the PS3 on the fly. With all of the development tools that we use, the most important feature is iteration time. We want to cut down the time it takes for our artists, designers and programmers to see their work show up in the game. This means that they will get the maximum opportunity to experiment which is the only way to make a great game.

Q3: Do you find a global queue of jobs to be doled out upon request to be a good approach to paritioning work to the SPE’s, or is it better to assign each SPE it’s own task in the game?

A3: Naughty Dog uses a Job Manager developed jointly by Naughty Dog’s ICE team and SCEE’s ATG group. This means that we can send any type of job to any SPE, and all of the scheduling of jobs is done through a priority system. This works well, since the overhead is minimal and we achieve good load-balancing between SPEs, something that would be hard to do by allocating a whole SPU to a single task.

Q4: With streaming technologies and the included HDD in every PS3, how important is actual memory? I ask because the PS3’s OS takes up so much more of the available 512MB than the 360’s OS does.

A4: Main memory is a cache, but remember that a larger cache enables us to keep more data in memory at the same time, enabling more detail in textures. Therefore, every MB saved improves the quality of our game. We’ve solved most of our memory problems by relying on the SPEs to perform compression, both at load-time and at run-time, using techniques developed by ICE, SCEA Tools&Tech and the SCEE ATG group. So yes, memory footprint is very important to us.

Someone e-mailed me earlier this month asking if the 80GB PS3 was being discontinued. He mentioned that his Best Buy didn’t have it on order anymore. Now it seems that no BestBuy will be selling the 80GB PS3 anymore.

When I first heard that Sony would be selling two models - the 20GB and 60GB PLAYSTATION 3’s, I was disappointed. Why confuse people? Why not just have one console and be done with it? But now I’m starting to see the light, and just when I start to see why a dual-SKU might be necessary, it looks like Sony might be moving to a single PS3 model in North America. (After all, they’ve already done so in other regions.)

So why do I think Sony should stick with a two-model approach? Here’s why:

• Lose Less Money
  The current 40GB model is the cheapest PS3 Sony has produced so far. If the rumours are true, Sony is basically selling this unit at cost, instead of at a loss. Sony needs to be able to start making some money or at least not losing money on these consoles. So Sony needs a popular offering that does not break the bank for them.
• Sony Needs a Highend Offering
  Microsoft is selling a high-end Elite solution, and Sony needs to counter that with an offering of their own. Not only that, but 40GB of space is lots for some people, but for others (especially those in other territories who will have a PVR built into the PS3 soon), it’s not enough. So we need an option with more disc space. I suggest that Sony upgrade the 80GB PS3 to 120GB.
• Sony Needs BC
  Sony needs a model with PS2 backwards compatibility. I use the BC in my PS3 quite often, and I think it’s great. I wish it was even better! (Some of my games don’t work.) Sony had previously made a commitment to BC, and I think that they should honour that commitment by keeping the higher priced SKU with BC.
• Stay Price Competitive
  The competition is priced much better than the PS3 right now, and the PS3 needs to stay competitive. Say what you will about value in the box, the fact is that the 40GB PS3 is $399, which is still a lot of money, though doable.
• You Decide!
  Are there any other reasons?

What do you think?

Other Soapbox Rants

Ha ha! This is a spoof of the original Tom Cruise video, so the video below makes more sense if you’ve seen the Cruise one.