» 2008 » September

Next time you want to buy a movie on the PSN, short for PlayStation Network, you might want to think again before you make the purchase. According to Sony, once you have purchased a movie, it can only be re-downloaded once and that’s with the assistance from SCEA’s consumer services. While I understand why Sony would want to implement such restriction on movies because of pirating/copy right issues. It is a major turn off for us consumers because we cannot keep what we rightfully purchased. Then what’s the point of purchasing online? Might as well buy the physical Blu-ray DVDs which you can watch anytime and don’t have to worry about re-purchasing them. I for one will continue to purchase physical Blu-ray DVDs for the foreseeable future.

And again it comes down to one question, even if there’s no DRM restriction on purchasing any content on PlayStation Network, do you rather have a stack of hard drive disks storing all your movies and contents or a stack of Blu-ray DVDs. I will go with the latter, at least for now and until someone invents affordable storage devices equal to or smaller than the size of a disc.

Source from: DaileyTech

First I heard Resistance 2 will support up to 60 players in a single online multiplayer game. I was really excited about it. Now after watching THIS trailer, the CEO said in this trailer from Gametrailers.com that it will also support 8 player co-op mode. Wow this game is just getting better and better. (Excuse me if you guys all knew about the co-op mode already though). I am really looking forward to this game which is set to be out on November 4th.

As a somewhat related note, Tomb Raider: Underworld will be released one day before Resistance 2. October and November are going to be two busy months for gaming because Little Big Planet will probably take up most of my video gaming time once it comes out.

This is my first time blogging about my latest design in Second Life. I’m a content creator specialized in homes, stores and even some military buildings like hangars and command centre with nuke. But I prefer designing and building houses instead. I have recently released my latest home design called Basic Blocks.

Why call it Basic Blocks? It actually comes from the design which consists 10 rectangular blocks. It has two floors, therefore 5 blocks per floor with the middle one connecting to the other four on each much like a “plus” sign. The middle also consists of an elevator for accessing both floors. In this design, I tried to apply a bit more interior designs inside instead of just a plain empty shell. The designs are mainly from mixing different ideas in some of the interior design books that I read all the time. You will also notice I”m a big fan of the 3 colors – black, white and grey, I can never stop using them in all my builds.

Hope you guys will like this design and feedbacks are always welcome! Even the negative ones as I strongly believe I need to listen to all in order to further improve my designing skills.

For more pictures please visit my listing @ slexchange.com where content creators like myself sell their products and/or services for Second Life.

Is Google making us and subsequently our kids less intelligent nowadays because its much easier to find information by searching online? This discussion popped up when I was driving back home today and I thought it was an interesting topic to write about.

I personally don’t think Google is making us, or me rather, dumber because information is all over the Internet. I think you still need a bit of motivation to search online. There are a lot of people who doesn’t even use Google or any other search engines to look for answers to their problems even though the information is right in front of them, they just need to search (I won’t go there) ! And sometimes it takes a bit of tweaking when searching because different combination of keywords may yield slightly different search results. And just because the information is there doesn’t mean its 100% accurate, and WiKi is a very good example and schools have stressed many times NOT to do research based on WiKi. That’s is also another reason why I don’t think search engines are making us dumber because when you are searching for an answer, unless you are absolutely sure that the answer you found right away is 100% accurate, you will pretty much have to go through at least a few more results to confirm how accurate the information really is.

In the end, yes you no longer have to open up a dictionary or go to the library to look for information. But that doesn’t mean you are or will be less intelligent by searching conveniently on the net. Its still up to the person to find the answers and its just a different mean of finding them by searching online. Therefore, I think its actually the opposite, in which Google is making us, or rather people that hunger for more knowledge smarter instead because its much more convenient to look for and find answers online than going to the local library every time. I’m sure everyone would rather “Google” something rather than driving out to the library in Winter when its minus 30 degrees!

What do you guys think?

Jessica Simpson was the second victim, what do you guys think? I think my Angelina Jolie one turned out better though. I’m still trying to experiment with masking, filters and just playing with different layers and textures. Hopefully my third attempt will turn out better than my first. One thing I like about this one is her white hair, inspired by Rogue from X-Men.

Next victim is Britney Spears. (Evil smile)

I stumbled upon this great CG by Vincent chai of Digital Animation Herts Uni UK. After watching it, I’m pretty sure to say that, the 4.5 minutes of my precious was NOT wasted.

It is a fight between a classic American fighter/bomber jet and a Japanese tank. The surprising part is they are actually transformable into robots (rather not call them Transformers). The animations are fluid with high definition graphics. I haven’t seen anything this good for a while. Vincent Chai is simply a great talented CG artist!

The movie clip here is standard definition, you want watch the high definition version on his site.

World War – 3D Animation @ University Of Hertfordshire 2008 from Digital Animation Herts Uni UK on Vimeo.

First impression the sci-fi third person shooter Fracture gives me is that it is very Mass Effect-ish. The first half of the demo allows you to get used to the controls, the environment and lets you test out the different weapons of the game.

The controls are pretty somewhat straight forward but slightly different. R1, R2, L1, L2 are all for weapons. Triangle button is for sprinting which shows a very nice blur effect to simulate running. As usual, the square is for reload and cross is jump. L3 is crouch and R3 is zoom. I was expecting some close range one hit kill like the knife in Call of Duty but there isn’t any, at least in the demo.

 

The environment looks amazing with detailed textures. As the first half of the demo, you get to try out the weapons. Two features that are pretty important in this game and are actually very innovative – raise and lower terrains with your weapon and two types of grenades. You will know where to raise or lower the terrains by looking for the corresponding symbol around the area you need to manipulate. Unfortunately there’s a limit to how high or how low you can manipulate. The effects of terrain manipulation are impressive, even more so if you use grenades to do the job! Aside from moving from place to place, raising or lowering terrains also help you during battles. For example, if you lower an area, you have yourself a trench and if you raise an area, you will have yourself a shield for a while from all the gun fire.

 

The standard rifle that starts you off in the demo is pretty “standard” and doesn’t give a powerful impression. The Black Widow on the other hand, can enable you to shoot up to 6 grenades that you can detonate all at once. Then there is the pulse sniper rifle which is pretty common (Unreal Tournament comes to mind).

 

There aren’t too many sci fi third person shooters in the next gen consoles yet, well at least not for PlayStation 3 unlike XBox 360 which has Gears of War 1 (2 coming out soon) and Mass Effect to name a few. I’m not sure if its worth buying, more of rental to me. I rather wait for Dead Space even though it doesn’t have online mode. But then again, if you have a PS3, do give the demo a try, maybe you might just like it! Just not quite my cup of tea.

 

Score: 7/10
Release date: Oct 7 2008

Incoming search terms:

• Fracture Videogame Images

PlayStation 3 doesn’t have anything good these past two weeks that suited me except Silent Hill: Homecoming will be out at the end of September. After that, there are at least four games that everyone should watch out for since they are pretty hyped up! Hopefully these games will live up to their hype specially Little Big Planet.

Here are the dates for the four games I recommend to watch out for that are coming out in October:

 

Dead Space – 10/14/2008
Far Cry 2 – 10/21/2008
Big Little Planet – 10/21/2008
Fall Out 3 – 10/28/2008

Dead Space, an horror + sci fi combo third person shooter. Sort of like Resident Evil + the movie Event Horizon and with a lot more gore. Basically, in this game, forget about headshots from Counter Strike or Call of Duty. In order to make the bloody monsters stay down is by shooting their limps or their weak spots. Obviously each monster will be dealt with differently. Another new feature that has not been introduced in any of the other third person shooters is fighting in zero gravity where your movement is slower and sound is suppressed. Top becomes the bottom, left can be right under this environment. I am looking forward to hunting those monsters down jumping all over the place in zero gravity.

I also think Dead Space will be a good addition to the horror section for the PS3 until Resident Evil 5 comes out. Unfortunately there is no online component to this game, which is not good in my book. Would be nice if at least co-op play was implemented like Mercenary 2 because playing with others, specially your friends, is much more fun and enjoyable than by yourself…well sometimes.

 

October 21st will be a busy day as Far Cry 2 and Big Little Planet come out on the same day based on EBGames.com. I guess I will test out Big Little Planet first because its really a new type of game where as Far Cry 2, while impressive in both game play and graphics, is still a FPS to me so therefore it can wait. Big Little Planet really looks like a true party game that PlayStation 3 lacks since day 1 where you can play with up to four people on one console and instead of having a split screen, all four will be on the same screen, which is a huge plus. Wii will still dominate the party game section for a while or maybe for as long as the console lives since I think that’s what it really is for. But I’m still glad PS3 is coming out with an exclusive party game.

And finally we have Fall Out 3, another promising game to complete the month of October. So far it looks like Oblivion with improved graphics. Don’t get me wrong, its not necessary a bad thing. I will need to see more game play previews before I can say more for Fallout 3. But so far it really looks promising.