* Posts by Iain

357 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007

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Crazy Japanese earthquake game makes shaky debut

Iain

Great news!

Zettai Zetsumei Toshi was a really interesting game. Although, I admit that it pushed the PS2 so hard that framerates occasionally went single-digit, so hopefully they can do a bit better this time. The second game in the series had similar problems trying to do floods, so I'm cautious about that, however.

Channel 4 in Heathrow Playmobil reconstruction shocker

Iain
Coat

Oh yes, definitely a rip-off...

Sure. Look, they even used the same "Airport security scanner" set you did. Bound to be a rip-off, and not that _everyone_ would do the same when they saw Playmobil had released that set shortly before T5 went titsup.

Virgin Media calls foul on web speed testers

Iain
Stop

@fnordianslip

Do you mean these "undisclosed" download limits?

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

With the current 20Mb/s service, after 3Gb of peak use you're throttled back to 5Mb/s. Which is hardly "dialup speed", given that it's a shedload faster than most "up to 8Mb/s" ADSL services are to start with.

Do be more careful with your lying in future.

Blu-ray add-on coming to the Xbox 360?

Iain

Price is everything

This could be a very good thing, just as long as they get the price right. Having replaced a 360 HD-DVD drive with a standalone player already, because the cost came down to a level where it was affordable to do so, I'm used the way running films over Microsoft's console isn't ideal. But standalone Blu-ray players are coming down all the time. If they're going to do this, they need to do it both quickly and cheaply, before I just get a proper player instead. Or Sony drop the price of a PS3, for that matter.

PS3 too expensive, claims analyst

Iain

@AC, re: ACs

Until Reg ACs demonstrate more than one opinion (i.e. that everything Sony ever created is like amber from the Gods, but Bill Gates shat in their bed) there really doesn't seem to be any point in granting more than one person's worth in value.

Which is a whole person's worth more than /. ACs deserve. Most of them are bots.

Iain

Two replies:

Steve Rowsell: "Yet another $ony fanboy displays his fear"

Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm just assuming that all ACs are Mark in disguise. It would make sense.

Allan Rutland: "And the thought of almost buying three consoles to one of another brand, kind of massively skews the situation in favour of the 360."

For some, the Arcade doesn't make much sense; online use is a lot easier with the hard drive and headset. But, using the Sainsbury's offer, it's possible to buy both a Wii AND a Premium 360 for around the price of a PS3. Which really doesn't make it look very good value. Or, if you buy from Amazon, you could spend that Wii money on a standalone Blu-ray player and have all those HD movies that supposedly make the PS3 such a bargain.

Iain

@Mark

Have you played any Wii games? They work better. You can't point with a SixAxis, because it's just the wrong shape. Personally, I don't like using them on the Wii that much either, but there you go.

The PS3 would seriously benefit from a price cut, but I doubt Sony can afford to very much at the moment, without further damaging Blu-ray players. Their current solution of returning features to the machine while keeping the price constant seems to be the only option.

Halo 3 update confirmed

Iain

@AC

I agree. The 360 is now doing so badly it's only just outselling the PS3, which is pretty much the definition of fail.

Nintendo to limit DSi games with DVD-style region locks

Iain

What? Is this a joke?

"the PSP managed to survive this so long as it was so notoriously difficult and user unfriendly to run game copies."

Ha. Hahahahahahaha. No, really. This has got to be sarcastic. I've never met a PSP that wasn't softmodded. Not because I'm a dirty pirate, but because it was the only way to play PS1 games on them at first.

Judge traps RealDVD in legal limbo

Iain

@Eddie Edwards, re: "effective"

The DMCA has already been upheld against ROT13 in the case of ebooks, hasn't it? So something as complex (though broken) as CSS has got to count.

Otherwise, it becomes a non-law. Broken protection is 'ineffective', and 'effective' protection means you don't have a hack to distribute in the first place.

Iain
Stop

Really, Real?

"Rest assured, we will continue to work diligently to provide you with software that allows you to make a legal copy of your DVDs for your own use,"

And yet the Judge appears to agree that breaking open the DRM on DVDs (which, no matter what they do afterwards will have to happen) constitutes circumventing copy protection measures. Because it quite clearly is.

Real have a legitimate product here, even if they're historically scumbags for the nightmare that was RealPlayer. But US law explicitly states that this class of product is illegal, just in case there might be profit for Hollywood without it.

Sainsbury's launch console price war

Iain

re: Mark

Well, obviously I disagree on which console offers the best value, or I wouldn't have already bought the other two at full price. But I do think HMV's current offer off £299.99 for the 80Gb model plus a free copy of GTA4 is rather better than your suggestion of £250 for the 40Gb, because even without the game I'd need to pay for both the hard drive and the DualShock3 on top. Oh well, I'll probably grab a US one next year then, as planned.

Iain

PS3s?

I don't suppose they've done anything about the PS3 price, have they? I'm not spending £300 on one, but it's the only current-gen console I don't already have.

Virgin rejects $1m space sex offer

Iain
Thumb Down

Doesn't this have an 8-passenger capacity?

I thought so, anyway. $200k * 8 means the only way Virgin Galactic would have any interest in this $1M offer would be if they're struggling to fill capacity. Which sounds rather unlikely.

Slimline Xbox 360 due in December?

Iain

RROD discussion (again)

Tony - My recently revived 360 originally had 1st generation parts in it, so the only question for the PS3 fans is why it lasted the 2 years it did, to be honest. I was merely mentioning it with relation to the question about them being so noisy.

Anonymous Coward - I've been posting under my own name since roughly when El Reg allowed comments, and have had plenty of nice things to say about the best Blu-ray player around and the home of LBP (which is utterly charming) and wipEout HD (still the best futuristic racer ever). You're AC. Motes in eyes, and all that.

Iain

Re: noise and such.

Curiously, my aged 360 came back from a RRODing on Monday, with a fresh motherboard and DVD drive, to be FAR quieter than it used to be. Seriously, it's now decidedly less noisy than my PS2, and only a little more than my mate's PS3. Whether this means it'll go another 2 and a bit years without dying again is another question.

'I can see dinosaurs from my back porch'

Iain
Thumb Down

"teach both" is mealy-mouthed creationist whining

Giving creationists time to plead their case in science classes as special dispensation for their baseless claims without any evidence to back them up whatsoever is not critical thinking. You might as well give equal time to Intelligent Falling.

Retailers predict price-led Xbox 360 sales surge

Iain
Go

@Charles Tsang

Amazon have a 720p (and that's all you get out of 95% of games) projector for under £400. You know it makes sense. Or at least more sense than replacing a perfectly good CRT with an LCD that costs twice that, and still has a screen size half what the projector would do.

Slimline Xbox 360 to be named the Pure?

Iain
Stop

Wait 18 months.

According to other sources, the next step after Jasper's die shrink of the GPU is that in early 2010 we'll get the CPU and GPU combined into a single-chip solution. At which point the rest of the board can shrink, and that's when you'll get your smaller Xbox Box.

That, or this is just the replacement for the Arcade. The fact that they're talking about faceplates suggests it might not be a different size to the current models after all.

BenQ W500 projector

Iain

LCD vs DLP

Does anyone know how this compares to the Optoma HD700X? That one is under £400 at Amazon, but it's DLP and I'm nervous about seeing wheel artifacts.

MS confirms European Xbox 360 price cuts

Iain

@AC, re: price.

Yes, there are things you can't do on an Arcade. Some of them are even worth doing (playing Burnout Paradise online), though others mystify me as to why you should care (Football Manager and FFXI, the only two games that flat-out need a hard drive, are both better on the PC). But since one of the big points to this announcement is that the PREMIUM, 60Gb model is now less than a Wii, it's rather by-the-by.

Iain
Paris Hilton

Maybe I'm missing something...

"PlayStation 3 fans are likely to be pretty peeved at news of the Xbox 360 price cut, because Sony said earlier this year that there’ll be no UK PS3 price cut this year."

Surely PlayStation 3 fans already own a machine, and so what the price of one is later in the year changes to is fairly irrelevant to them?

Microsoft slashes US Xbox 360 to sub-Wii price

Iain

@"Team ICO"

"Produce one game every 5 years" is what I want to say to that. It's not much of an argument to sway you one way or the other, no matter how pretty (in stills; the framerate is painful) Shadow Of The Colossus was.

Iain
Stop

@Adam, re owning both.

Different people like different games. My Wii gets played about a quarter as much as my 360. Flat statements that one is 'more fun to play' than the other are far too subjective.

How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls

Iain
Thumb Down

Do what you want, OFCOM.

I'm sure you will anyway. But I really don't need my phone that much - I'll just stop buying PAYG credit every couple of months and do without.

Immersion shakes out $20m for MS legal win

Iain

Maybe...

...but then we also know that all you've got to do to be regarded as a "rampant Sony-hater" by Mark is to claim an MS product didn't urinate in your breakfast cereal.

Sony coughs to third-gen PSP power problem

Iain

@Dave Webb

Microsoft and/or Nintendo have been secretly employing Mark and countless others to make the Internet at large believe only obsessive nutters would buy Sony products.

At least, that's my conspiracy theory based on the evidence we regularly see here.

Philips unveils 38mm-thick HD TV

Iain

I don't get it.

Since it's got to sit on top of a TV stand that contains my centre speaker, cable box and DVD recorder, my current LCD is already thinner than I really need it to be. Do people wall-mount that frequently, then?

Ofcom considers termination charges

Iain

@Fred

"I pay about $100/month" - really? I pay about £3 to £5 for my mobile top-up a month, because I so rarely make outgoing calls on it; it's merely an emergency device. That's all I want it to be.

A PS3 price reduction? You must be kidding!

Iain

@Alex, Timi

Of the first 10 people I know who bought PS3s, every single one was at least primarily to use as a Blu-ray player. Two of those have yet to have a game disc even put in them to this day, because they have no interest in videogames.

I can buy a standalone for £160 from Amazon now, but until 6 months ago the PS3 remained the best player at any price, and remains the best without spending more money on a high-end Panasonic.

Iain

@Mark (sorry, AC - good idea)

Umm, your list of 20 games consists of no less than 14 that are on other, cheaper platforms. 15, if you don't count NG:Sigma, which is just an enhanced version of the XBox game. So that's why people who already own 360s complain there isn't much to entice them over.

Anatomy of a malware scam

Iain

Yes, I've cleaned this one out as well.

My Dad managed to catch this on his PC (had the bad luck to receive a scam "you've received an e-card" mail on his birthday, natch). I only spotted it as a problem because the thing foolishly used Vista-themed fake windows on an XP box. Dear Lord, it's a nightmare to get rid of, as all of those slight variants out there appear to have differently-named executables with different hashes in different obfuscated directory names and registry keys; nothing automated I could find would do the trick.

It also hides all your desktop icons and replaces them with an ActiveX page to reinstall the damn thing again, before locking out the relevant page of the Display Properties tab. Which was an eye-opener.

iTunes, and Sting, banned from China

Iain

Oi!

Look, I'll accept that Sting is a complete twonk, but there's a new(ish- it's a remix) Underworld track on there. So I'll be buying it.

Game sharer gets £16K fine

Iain

@adnim, re: WEP

Until my DS and Internet Radio support WPA, I just have to hope that any aspiring pirate helps himself to next door's unsecured network instead. I know WEP is broken, but the alternative is turning the whole thing off.

US PS3 sales fell 45% in July

Iain

@clearly

The minimal advantage the PS3 has over the 360 sales at the moment matches the proportion of people buying them purely as Blu-ray players. As a measure of the more successful GAMES machine it's too small to care about. They're both doing about the same, which is pretty terrible in comparison to the Wii.

UK to get 60GB Xbox 360 on Friday

Iain

@Mark Manderson

If Asda have the Elite (the 120GB version) for the same price as a Premium, then yes - the only reason to get a Premium is that you really, really want a white one. But that's a special offer price, rather than a new RRP.

Re: HDMI ports, though, all the 360s on shelves now should have them, irrespective of whether it's an Arcade, Premium or Elite. The only difference is that the Elite comes with a cable in the box instead of you having to spend a tenner on one.

Blu-ray to rule by 2011

Iain

@Rob Beard

I wouldn't bother with the HD-DVD drive. It's a perfectly fine format; I've got three shelves of the things myself, along with two players (the XBox one and the standalone I subsequently bought because the 360's fan noise is annoying). But that boat has sailed; the last of the bargains are starting to dry up now and many of the best titles are becoming difficult to find.

On the other hand, I was watching Batman Begins last night. Shot on 35mm with no digital intermediate, so just like 'old films' that some people claim not to see the point of HD for, but it both looked and sounded absolutely stunning. The HD formats look a lot more like film than DVD did; I've grown so tired of the look of the latter format, with its mosquito noise and macroblocking artifacts that I find myself preferring even Laserdisc some of the time.

iPhone 3G not compatible with existing accessories

Iain
Thumb Down

Grr...

If my mains charger (which only works over the 12V pins) wasn't Apple-branded, I wouldn't mind so much.

Sony profits down, but PS3 sales up

Iain

@the last AC

The PS3 will only remain among the cheapest Blu-ray players while Sony continue to subsidise all those billions in development costs with software sales. As you yourself suggested, Sony can't sell it at a loss for long.

But it's plainly obvious that the PS3 is not what you'd design as the most efficient method of playing Blu-ray films. As the format matures, system-on-chip designs will start to undercut that dramatically - a PS2 is over 4 times what you can pick up a standalone DVD player for. Samsung, Panasonic and indeed Sony themselves have players that can be had for less already. That they're last year's spec isn't going to be an issue now the Blu-ray consortium finally have a standard they're hapy with.

Sony sets PS3 sales objective

Iain

Hahahahaha

"The Wii is rapidly losing face, as more and more people discover it's nothing short of a fad." says the AC.

Meanwhile, in this week's All Formats chart, MGS4 sits at number 10, the highest-placed of the 10 titles in the whole top 40 that is for a non-Nintendo format. On hardware, Nintendo continue to devastate the opposition as well. The 'fad' isn't showing signs of dropping off just yet.

US PS3 sales surge

Iain
Stop

PS3 upsell?

"Those PS2 customers will be PS3 customers in 5 or so years" says an AC.

Not something you should take for granted. Every 360 owner I know had a PS2. Not every one plans to buy a PS3 as well. Since most of them are old enough to have owned a Megadrive but then went for a PS1 instead of a Saturn, the methodology looks particularly suspect.

Brits won't get PS3 movie, TV downloads until 2009

Iain

@Steve

Sony are just one member of the Blu-ray consortium. As such, they didn't have final say whether to introduce the region coding and BD+ features that Disney and Fox demanded as part of the spec before they would go with the format rather than HD-DVD.

Personally, I'm just buying a US PS3.

Sony PS3 movie downloads are go

Iain

Yawn

As patiently explained to the Sony fanboys last week, the 360 has had a "pay per title with no subscription, no not even Gold Live" movie service for over a year. Netflix support is a minor addition to it, whereby 360 users can use the existing free supplement to the main Netflix service for streaming movies via their telly instead of on a PC.

Sony to sell 80GB PS3 at 40GB price

Iain

keep your PS2

As with the others, I won't be getting rid of my PS2, so backward compatibility is a waste for me.

Netflix will stream movies on Xbox 360

Iain

@AC, re: FF13

That doesn't quite match what they said in the Microsoft keynote. There, it was that America and Europe get the 360 release "day one", i.e. the same time they get the PS3 release.

Development is on the "Crystal Tools" engine, whose initial platform was actually the PC, and that's where they're doing the development. It's a fully agnostic multi-platform engine, so now they've ported Crystal to the 360 hardware claims that they've been working for 3 years on the PS3 version are somewhat disingenuous.

Re: this new PSN system, it's a very different thing to the Netflix option, and a lot closer to the current 360 Video Marketplace. That also works with the free Live account and requires you pay per film instead of a flat subscription fee. That they've got more studios than the Microsoft service is good news, although I won't be using it as I still prefer to purchase my films on shiny discs.

Iain

@Mark

Yes, Mark. We all agree that the most important thing is which console can play a game in Japan, rather than the region where we all live. You fool.

Iain

US only?

I guess we won't be getting this in the UK any time soon.

Sony pooh-poohs PS3 price cut

Iain

Really, Mark?

My sources at Microsoft say the 360 is outselling the PS3, and that Ballmer is pretty well off, too.

Being sensible for a moment, I fail to see why Sony would announce any price cut in advance anyway. Nobody ever does. The price will come down when it comes down. I'll buy one when I can justify the expenditure.

Microsoft confirms 60GB Xbox 360

Iain

@Greg

The point is that 20Gb 2.5" SATA drives aren't competitively priced in comparison to the 60Gb ones any more, so Microsoft are switching. Having the same size drive as the PS3 is probably a useful tech-spec bonus for people who make their console investment based on such things, and it also may be tied into the Netflix announcement, which generates something to put on all that space.

Pioneer Kuro PDP-LX5090 plasma HD TV

Iain

Because, Graham Lockley...

Oddly enough, there are good things to watch as well. No, you don't particularly want to try watching Big Brother (a show in SD) on a screen that large while sitting really close to it. Or at all; it's rubbish.

The Blu-ray of 2001: A Space Odyssey looks absolutely fantastic on it, for example. Tartan's (God rest their soul) release of The Seventh Seal is jaw-dropping; noticeably better than on a £1500 Sony LCD, yes.

You're allowed to have different priorities, but a review that just says "This TV costs lots of money, and what's the point in that?" wouldn't be terribly informative.

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