hapless turns at Sony's

Probably you've already heard it: Sony needs a lot of red ink for writing the records of their gaming branch since the release of the PS3.

Sony has - up to PS3 - had a very strong pillar in Games, while other business areas are usully rather unexciting (No pioneers' work in most of them). Thus, the damages caused by this bad streak might cost Sony a lot of their overall stability.

But what went wrong?

To my mind, Sony went very very wrong in the concept phase. Taking a pride in the long-lasting PS2-sales, they threw their new machine on the market without caring about demographical or, on a peoples-scale, economical changes. Consumers want to spend less money on games, PS3 games get more expensive without offering extra benefits to the gamers. You still finish cheap-ass jump'n'runs in a few hours or lose interest before that happens, but pay 1.5 times the price. Or, as Terry pratchett has put economy : "It's very much like dairy farming. The goal is to get a maximum amount of milk with a minimum amount of moo, and I'm afraid all I get these days is moo". Sure, we must pay for entertainment. But if it hurts more than it pleases, it's a habit to kick.

PS2 was, in the end, budget gaming, which kept people buying. The prospect of testing games before buying (using a modchip) also tickled some of their fancies.
Right now, PS3 is still only interesting for enthusiasts, consumers will wait until it gets cheaper (and moddable!).

I consider myself a model gamer citizen : I love playing, I spend a lot of time on it, and I even play a lot of crap. PS2 was a great platform for that, cut out for gaming. It sold very well, because of all consoles it was, while being more pricey, still the best. It was, powerful enough, quite easily moddable and most of all affordable. Recently I prefer Crysis on my PC to what my PS3 has to offer...

While microsoft didn't achieve too much with XBOX on the gaming side, it offered great MediaCenter and Modding potential. Which is why I owned one. Most of the games really sucked, but XBMC had a strong appeal to keep it for a long time.

One more admonition goes to Sony for their policy towards the European consumers. Ever since the PSX, we have stood in queue behind all other markets, finally getting a modified and less interesting product. For more money. Dear Sony, a market consists of people (who might add up to numbers, but each and every one of them considers him/herself a person rather than a digit) who have emotions. Emotions play a very big role in a market, which is how stock trade works. If you treat us like the car's fifth wheel, there will be an according echo.

Have it your way, but if you want people to buy your stuff, it's give and take!

And yes, I can judge this. I am a gamer. I own a PS3. I am very happy about the console and very unhappy about the games available right now. It's like winning a Ferrari in a lottery and having no gas station around. The Sony Store is a good idea, but filled with junk, whoever wants to pay money for crappy B- or C-games they have to download when each and every harmful firmware upgrade (my brother's console was bricked by a regular update) might make you lose the game?

I sincerely hope the modding community will squeeze some pleasure out of the console pretty soon, otherwise it will be a final stop at ebay for mine...

spectacular

The recent local event "Spektakel" has been dearly anticipated, at least by me. As those things go, it started off with two bands i didn't know and "starred" Bounce, the Bon Jovi tribute band from around the corner.

In short : they rock bigtime and sound very much like the original. Whenever you can, you should check them out.

www.bonjovitribute.de

one step at a time

hey all,

What a year so far!

I'm happy to announce that gametra.de is well on the way of progress. In addition to Prototype, I have switched over to using 2 more very efficient JavaScript Libraries for the user interface : Scriptaculous and Lightbox v2. The great thing about that : they're all compatible - scriptaculous is based on prototype, lightbox on both of the others. Since Firebug is such a relief for Debug, we can get more serious about using JS than before. Remains to hope that the libs are sufficiently crossbrowser-compatible, because debugging IE will NOT be fun :(

Another project of mine, unbrick.de, will hopefully be online later this week. It has been stuck on my harddisk for something like 4 Months now, waiting for a few graphics, some minor IE-CSS-Debug (yuck!) and a filled database (how should i get this done?)...

Web Recommendations of the month :
• imeem.com - youtube for audio :D
• steinway.de - simple elegance

Back to work!

Hardware fever

after some time of pondering, I finally made my mind up to get some more current hardware. My config now is :

* intel core2duo e6300 + sonic tower + s-flex/800rpm/120mm
* asus p5k crossfire mainboard
* 2*1GB Team DDR2-6400 Memory
* Gigabyte X1650 Pro/256MB GDDR3/silent pipe II
* Gigabyte X1600 Pro/256MB GDDR2/silent pipe
* 250GB Samsung Spinpoint S-ATA 2
* 500GB Samsung Spinpoint S-ATA 2
* Win XP SP2

Sure this is not bleeding edge (rather budget level), but is a good treat for my needs.

The greatest benefit of all is changing to a 2 Harddisk setup: I do a lot of installing from image files, which can be time consuming when you have your images on the same physical disk as your install target. with 2 Sata2-drives, I managed to install a full 700Megs image in a few seconds. Physically separating soundlibs and temporarily generated audio is also a great advantage for recording, as I have read.

I haven't received my second VGA Adapter yet, I'm really interested in seing how crossfire works (Well, my setup is not optimised for games anyway, with the slower X1600 surely taking the wind from the X1650's sails) and i hope i can get my 3-screen-setup working with it.

what remains now is replacing the PSU, I'm ogling with a Be Quiet! one...

Cheers!

"Zielchen und Merriem"

after some time of not posting, here i go again.

"Zielchen und Merriem"
time flies, and all of a sudden my kids are so big that i can hardly imagine there ever was a time without them around. very recently, anna (3 1/4 yrs) has named her two fluffy toy cats "Zielchen und Merriem". Strange names, where'd she got those from? Julia (21 Months) has developed a trait of discussing a lot and never giving in. most of her arguments are "no" and "why". So much life to come home to every day, it's great!

I have now finished my first weeks at INKA, a HSBC subsidiary, develeoping WinForms in C#. A step, as I recall, I have first uttered the wish to take, back in 2004.

tomorrow i will post a blurb about software design patterns, since i have had a good / bad time with them.

Eye Of Judgment - big time!

A few years ago, I used to play Wizards of the coast's Trading Card Game "Duel Masters". It was something that really got me by the conkers, since I like card games, I am easily convinced to collect stuff (you should see my Elton John collection...), and I really like fantasy-monster-stuff. So, there was this new hobby, but lack of time I dismissed it after spending somewhere around 250USD on import cards.

Now WOTC and sony have finally combined their efforts to put up something really grand : The Eye Of Judgment for PS3. The cards are played on a gameplan that is watched by a USB Cam (PS Eye). The software identifies the card and brings it into play, be it a spell, creature or an action card. A nice 3d-representation of the cast entity is then shown on-screen and battles with its adversaries.

Your opponent can be either remote or locally present, It doesn't matter. Just, if you want to play ladder games, you gotta go online.

If you like TCGs, try finding some cool videos on youtube - there's many - and get yourself this freakin' hot game.

Or, if you already have it, why not challenge me? My PSN ID is fopsi. I am also in the german playstation league with this nickname.

Cheers!