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So I was playing my favorite Call of Duty 4 on my Playstation 3 and getting pwned, all of a sudden I lost the background sound and I could only hear gun shots. It wasn’t long until it was completely silent, or near silent. I quit the game after the match was over and I couldn’t, it just froze with the black screen, the screen you normally see when you quit the game and back to the main screen. I call this the black screen of death or BSOD for the PlayStation 3.

I’ve encountered freezes before but this time it was different. The console remained in the black screen so the first thing that came to mind was to turn off the console from the back after trying to turn it off from the touch-sensitive power switch at the front. I turned it back on hoping to get back in the game but I wasn’t able to. The game would not load, as in I didn’t see the game icon in the main screen. So then I tried loading one of my Blu-ray movie discs, same thing.

With less than 2 years of game time, my PS3’s disc drive is already busted. That’s pretty disappointing. I’m going to call support tomorrow and hopefully get it fixed. I don’t care if I have to ship my console to them.

Sigh.

When I saw it on Gametrailers, I couldn’t believe it, the video game version of The Grudge is coming out, well at least in Japan, for the Nintendo Wii. I can tell you I am a Japanese horror movie fanatic, I have all 3 games from the Fatal Frame series for the PlayStation 2, the forth installment is again for the Wii only, why?

Anyway, the trailer is pretty good in my opinion, the spookiness and the fact that you are exploring with just the flashlight makes the game even scarier. And in the end, the classic ghost-woman who makes creepy noise while crawling slowly towards you, just like from the movies! I’m pretty much used to all the horror movies, I don’t jump that easily but this one, although didn’t make me jump, I shaked a bit.

But why won’t it make it to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is really beyond me. That’s my grudge.

Before reading this from cnet news. I really thought it would either be digital download or Blu-ray, never once I thought they could co-exist. But now I think its possible because we are not dealing with two similar formats here like the HD war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Blu-ray is a physical storage medium while digital download is well, digital where data is stored in say, a hard drive.

There will always be people that prefer to buying the actual DVDs instead of downloading even when broadband Internet access becomes widely popular and fast. One reason being is that a lot of people, including me, are not comfortable downloading everything off from the Internet. Another reason will be the hard drive space you need to purchase in an on-going basis. And in the very near future, almost everything will be in HD format, we will be dealing with large files (think of a Blu-ray disc which holds either 25/50 GB). There are two questions you have to ask yourself before going the digital path.

- Are you willing to wait for a while in order to download such large files?
- Are you willing to constantly buy hard drives to store your data?

Of course, these two questions are irrelevant if broadband Internet access becomes extremely fast and that the price of hard drive space is like buying candies. But still, would you rather have a collection of DVDs on your shelf or a collection of hard drives instead?

I think in the end, the two WILL co-exist where people will use both depending on the situation. For movies, most likely people will continue to buy physical DVDs and download things that take up less storage space such as games and trailers (which is a common thing already on xBox Live and PSN).

Looks like there won’t be a war, at least not so soon.