Philip

Recent I’ve been getting stuck into The Eye of Judgment (EoJ) now that the Set 2 expansion cards have made it out, expanding the 100 odd cards from Set 1 to over 200 cards. If you don’t know, EoJ is played by putting cards down on a 3×3 grid which are read by the PlayStation Eye to summon creatures and cast spells. Winning the game means either summoning 5 creatures down, or depleting the opponent’s library of cards (max 30) which is quite rare but possible.

Where EoJ shines is that a very high level of strategy is required since you are constantly fighting on several fronts which include:

1) Mana - you only get 2 points per turn, the more powerful the creature the more it costs to summon, turn or activate. Top level creatures can take up to 9 mana points to do anything!

2) Direction - sure, your creature can be powerful as anything, but once it’s pointing the wrong direction thanks to an attack or spell, it’s going to cost a lot of mana to turn around again. Also, if you get attacked on your blindside, it’s an extra +1 HP of damage.

3) Hand - you can only have 7 cards in your hand, and get one extra each turn. However, using spells can rapidly deplete your hand of creature cards to summon, or you have only creatures that need high mana to summon (5+).

4) Health - each creature gets anywhere from 1 to 9 HP. Usually, most attacks can take at least 1 to 2 HP off.

5) Field - each of the 9 fields has an element, such as Earth, Wood, Fire, Water and Biolith with a flip side. Summoned creatures get a +2 HP on their element, and -2 on their opposite element, or even can be destroyed if the element is flipped. Careful planning needs to be handled to avoid summoning a creature that is wiped out as the opponent flips elements on you.

6) Specials - depending on the creature and what field they’re on, you can get special effects like forcing the opponent to discard cards, invisibility, decoy, mana steal and so on. Some range from annoying to downright evil, especially if they start stealing your mana or forcing you to discard cards.

7) Finally - your opponent. Let’s just say they’re out to make sure they win.

Lately I’ve been unable to play ranked games since the new Set 2 included some very powerful Zealot cards, but I’ve been playing some unranked games with the local Japanese and Italians online, still not many English players in +8 GMT…

The new game Guitar Rising by GameTank apparently takes the Guitar Hero phenomenon to the next level by using real guitars instead of those guitar shaped controllers. By using a USB microphone you play the guitar to play the music (who’d have thought of it!) to pass levels, check it out here from Gizmodo.

I recently picked up a HDFury which finally lets me use my PS3 via the HDMI port to my Dell 2405 monitor in 1920×1200 resolution via VGA, no thanks to the HDMI mafia. As a result I’m a tad more productive than the component leads that left me in 720p with some blurry output, so I’ve had a chance to get Fedora installed and download the latest Linux kernel. The good news is that the new kernels by Geoff Levand support WPA now, so I’m able to use the PS3 wirelessly with Fedora rather than having it tethered via Ethernet which was being a bit annoying.

After getting the new kernel on things speed up noticeably (even Geoff’s precompiled kernel is faster than the stock Fedora PPC one) and using the Cell SDK 3 to recompile MPlayer gives some modest results, letting me run AVI/MKV fine at SD and software scale up to 720p and still keep up. I’ll have to dig into the libswscale to see about writing some SPE optimised scalers and YUV->RGB converters at some point in time. I guess the next step is getting the BlueTooth SixAxis and Logitech MediaBoard Pro up and running properly which means I can get closer to using the PS3 as a dual-boot gaming machine and GNU/Linux based media center over wireless.

If you thought the start was bad, wait for just after 3 mins then 5 mins.

Apparently Beautiful Katamari may be going Wii only claiming it can’t be ported to the PS3. It’s getting tough to hold off getting a Wii if good games like NiGHTS and Katamari are coming out only on that platform…

Read about it here.

In what looks like a low key release Sony has launched the slightly revised PlayStation 3 in South Korea on 16/06/2007. Ruliweb was there taking photos of the launch including the first person in Korea to get a PS3. I’m curious to see how the PS3 fares in South Korea, if they got StarCraft 2 as an exclusive they’d be running out the door, but I’m more interested to see how Sony goes with their VOD services they’ve been talking about since South Korea has heavy investments in multimedia enterprises.

See the photos from Ruliweb here.

I recently downloaded the new 1.8 firmware for the PS3 to check out the new touted upscaling features for games and DVDs. Unfortunately for some reason, they decided upscaling for copyright DVDs requires HDMI however copyright free DVDs can be scaled up over component. (I can see an immediate rush of people either getting HDMI or simply reburning copyright to copyright free DVDs). Let’s think about this - why would anyone copy an upscaled DVD over analog connections in the first place when you can simply copy the source material then upscale it however you like later on? It makes little sense, similar to copying a HD movie over a raw uncompressed HDCP cracked connection if you can get a perfect copy of the original source instead.

That aside, so far it’s looking promising so I imagine GameOS and GNU/Linux could make the PS3 the preferred media platform. With upscaling for your media and the ability to integrate new upscaling techniques and postprocessing techniques as required gives it a much better position in the home theatre if it’s able to throw massive amounts of processing to clean up your source material as you see fit.

Gaming wise I showed Nick and Jim Okami upscaled then not upscaled. There is a large difference between standard NTSC and the dramatically better rendering of the graphics at HD, most of the aliasing disappears (with a few exceptions on textures and edges of objects), so it bodes well for further enhancements. Nick was sceptical at first, but I presume his threat of tearing his own eyes out after seeing it not upscaled means he can appreciate the difference now. Naysayers and competing fanboys immediately bashed the update for not upscaling PS3 games (ie, those locked at 720p) but looks like that’d happen no matter what anyhow.

Check out some pictures the ever vigilant Koreans have done at PlayPS3 of Final Fantasy XII and Shadow of the Colossus. Looking good so far!

Nick asked me what I thought of the PlayStation 3 since I’ve had a chance to play around with it for a while.

1) It’s hot

Just running GNU/Linux makes the PS3 fairly warm but quiet. I haven’t really bothered playing games on it yet, but I’d imagine they would do the following.

2) It’s even hotter playing Blu-Ray

That’s kind of interesting, I would have thought Blu-Ray wouldn’t have been straining the PS3 but it appears to do so. Kicks the PS3 into a higher fan speed mode and veritably blasts warm to hot air out the back. I got a free copy of Casino Royale for being one of the first 20,000 subscribers to the PlayStation network (bit of a worry, either there’s not many PS3’s sold or not many people are interested in online gaming and downloads?) and it plays OK, quality is head and shoulders over DVD for fine details however you get quite a bit of film grain now.

3) GNU/Linux is still immature

Linux on the PS3 is still rough around the edges, however thanks to Terra Soft Solutions and Yellow Dog Linux you have a relatively pain free (albeit long) installation. BlueTooth still requires patches and kernel recompiling to get the SixAxis working, WiFi support was just released sans WPA[2] support, sound support on different distributions is spotty, so there’s quite a long list of things to do.

4) No access to the RSX graphics in Linux

Sony for whatever reason has restricted access to the NVIDIA RSX which means exciting stuff like YUV -> RGB for video is off the table, forcing the PPE or SPE’s to do the hard grunt work. Hopefully they’ll open some of the 2D functionality up as well as perhaps a simplified OpenGL driver at some point.

5) H.264 and MPEG-4 @ SD is OK

This works OK, even though the PS3 takes a hit with no YUV -> RGB conversion and no optimised code to process video data. MPEG-4 works pretty well out of the box, scaling to 720p it starts to suffer slightly. H.264 at SD is fine, however it’s too much at the moment to scale to 720p. 1080i and 1080p are off the cards for now, but give it time I guess.

6) 0, 10 or 50 GB for OtherOS

Sony really needs to let a person choose between 10 GB and 40 GB for the OtherOS. Since the PS3 Game OS takes up 10 GB on its own, you really want to split it min 20 GB to Game OS otherwise you can’t really download much at all.

7) The PlayStation Store is great (?) for independent developers

If Sony plays the cards right, the online store for the PS3 will let independent developers get in on the ground floor to develop games without having to fork over their first born game to get published. Some sort of solution similar to XNA would be nice to let those budding game developers get on with it, and then have it available in the store.

8) Not much content on the PlayStation Store at the moment.

There’s not much on there right now. If they start releasing PS1 and PS2 games tuned for the PS3 this will see a revival of the old school games like CastleVania SOTN like on XBox 360. Maybe at the end of the year.

9) Not many games, either.

That I’m interested in, that is. Your milage may vary, but there’s nothing screaming to me to buy it. Again, it takes about a year to ramp up development for this, so we’ll see how the end of this year to early next year is.

10) Card reader

Not sure why Sony included this, I only used it to install the OtherOS booter since I didn’t have a USB stick handy. I’d say it’s easier to leave it out and then just offer a cheap $50 adaptor to do the job like the Memory Card reader if you really need it. I guess it’s part of Sony’s strategy, but I don’t see it being as useful as being able to just plug your camera in and reading it direct off that instead like iPhoto.

11) Software should be optional/XMB should be configurable

Again, you should have choices between photo and video handling programs. Maybe not Blu-Ray or DVD playing, but certainly your own videos/photos you should be able to install or purchase a 3rd party program that you like to handle it. Competition like this is a good thing. XMB is a tad… inflexible.

12) HDCP on HDMI

Personally, I don’t see why HDCP is enabled all the time. It should be on for content that needs it, but off for Linux and games. That would let me plug in a simple HDMI to DVI adaptor in and get 1080p pain free instead of using Component. Since Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have been cracked nicely, it seems to serve little point besides infuriating customers when stuff doesn’t work.

13) Region free games, region locked PS1/PS2, DVD and Blu-Ray

One step forward, but still saddled with region locked discs even though the ACCC was meant to have sorted this out. With these restrictions, modchips start to look mighty tempting to remove the locking and HDCP.

14) PS1/2 emulation incomplete

Sony should have held off on the EE+GS chip removal and made the emulation work a lot better. As it stands, there’s the NTSC PS3 that has the EE+GS, and the PAL PS3 that just has the GS. If they had worked on it further and didn’t jump the gun, they could have removed all of it (including the GS) once the emulation was up the scratch. Maybe for the 0.65 nm Cell PS3 revision?

Well, that’s a few thoughts. They come across more as gripes I guess, but it’s mostly as the system is still rough around the edges. Though, it’s certainly a lot more usable than the XBox 360 since you can get Linux going trivially and there’s a lot more interesting things you can do to make it your HTPC equivalent. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the next year or two for the PS3.

Sony apparently made an European TV spot out of some short films they made for the PlayStation 3 “This is Living” push. It’s pretty close to incomprehensible, but enjoy anyhow:

I think the only ads that made less sense were the Zune ones.

SPOnG confirms that a new NiGHTS game is close for release on the Wii, if anyone remembers NiGHTS into Dreams and Christmas NiGHTS on the Sega Saturn, it was good fun (albeit a tad short, especially Christmas NiGHTS) with a lot of replayability. Not sure about the whole walking around thing however, most of time I’d be NiGHTS heading through hoops and being in the air. Almost makes me want to get a Wii now.

Read about it here.