E3 continues...

Having had Nintendo and Sony present their anticipated press conferences, it thought it apt to refresh my E3 coverage. They had big targets to meet after the Microsoft bombshell, and they were impressive, but was it enough...

We'll start with the Sony camp. One of the biggest unveilings (and the worst kept secret) was the PSP Go! Official details were released which was pretty much the same as the pre-release specs. Lighter, smaller, no UMD, now with Bluetooth, slide-out controls, and still no second analog stick. Also interesting was the online-style features. A partnership with eMusic for PSP-based music on the go, PS3 inter-operability, and a couple of other nice bits, apart from the obvious DLC-only gaming.
The PS3 has also been hit with a possible future revolution, with Tretton premiering not just an incredible volume of new games, but also a motion senitive controller, that is even capable of doing soft touches, such as knocking over dominoes. Impressive, and definitely a Wii-hunting move.

Now with Micorsoft and Sony going Wii-hunting, what would Nintendo's response be?
Pretty much nothing as it turns out! Their biggest announcement was a couple of DLC titles for the DS platform and the improved Wii Motion Plus. Yawn!

So that's it for the big three for this year. Let's hear it, who do you think won it? Who was most impressive? Who was an absloute dud?

UPDATE: I almost forgot. Nintendo released a heart-rate monitor for the Wii! Yes, i know it's pretty weird, but they were struggling...

E3 is here!

E3 2009 has started, and some of the big guns have already thrown in bombshells on the first day!

Biggest news of the day was, of course, Microsoft's big press conference. They were starting to look a touch like the lame duck of the console business, but they've just delivered a whopping great slap to the Wii! The next Xbox 360 add-on is based on the idea of your body controlling the game. Details are still a little on the sketchier side, but it seems that rather than having something like a Wiimote, the Xbox 360 add-on, codenamed Project Natal, uses a bar setup with camera, motion, sound, and even suggestions of 3D perceptions. If it works as well as they claim, it should be really impressive. But it still has no name, no price, no release date, no specs, no (or barely any) compatible games, and not really anything concrete at all. Crave even thinks that it won't be ready for E3 2010! My bet? When the Xbox 360 gets replaced, Natal will be ready and waiting.
Microsoft also announced a swag of new games for their soon-to-be-reborn console. Not too many gorundbreaking titles, but interesting nonetheless. Many sequels. Rock Band, Tony Hawk, Final Fantasy, Crackdown, Left4Dead, Splinter Cell, Forza Motorsport, and Halo (two of them) are all current franchises about to be given a boost. In fact, there was really only two new games, and one of those was a lightweight online-only game...

Yet more suprising Microsoft news :  Facebook and Twitter are coming to Xbox Live. Now i've always thought that Sony would throw in a port of either Facebook or MySpace (or new kid Twitter) into the PS3's PSN capabilities. But i've stopped waiting. And now Microsoft has jumped in and is (to be brutally frank) holding Nintendo and Sony by the balls. Only sign of light on the horizon is the Facebook Connect Standard which may yet make the jump to the PlayStation family. Wouldn't it be awesome to have Twitter on a PSP!

There are some other nice games from the likes of Ubisoft, but none seem earth-shatteringly new or particularly attention-grabbing, so i won't waste your time now.

Keep your ears (and/or eyes, unless you are somehow text-to-speeching my blog which is just weird) peeled as i try to keep you updated as Nintendo and Sony hit back tomorrow at 9:00 and 11:00 respectively (American time)...

Portable World : Part 1

Announcing a new (and hopefully recurring) segment to FerretTech : Portable World
I will (somewhat) regularly report on what's happening in Portable Gaming, Computing and Communications.

First up is today's topic: Portable Gaming.

Portable Gaming has positively exploded in a few short years. With the release of ever better and smaller GameBoys, then the DS, Apple's App Attack, and of course, Sony's heavenly PSP.

It is no secret that I think the PSP is the best by far, especially in its latest PSP-3000 guise. Nintendo has also been improving on their success with the new DSi (which has controversially dumped the old Gameboy cartridge slot!)

But there is one thing i want to focus on and that is the Apple products : The iPod touch and iPhone (which i can't be bothered typing out twenty times, so if you see iPhone, chances are i'm talking about both...)

Everyone has been talking about how it is the new king of portable gaming. But, as i see it, it's not even part of portable gaming. About as advanced as gaming gets on the iPhone is Air Traffic Control (legendary!), as opposed to the PSP's headliners like Resistance:Retribution (even more legendary!) and MGS Portable Ops etc etc.
Sure, an iPhone is a good enough all-rounder when it comes to portable gaming, communications, connectivity etc. But saying it is a good Gaming machine is absolute crap. A PSP is a gaming machine, a DSi is a gaming machine, but an iPhone is not!

And that brings my first Portable World post to an end.

Now that is out of the way, let me explain why a PSP will always be better than anything Nintendo can throw at the DS.
1. PSP's are powerful. 333MHz in a device that fits in your pocket! That's pretty impressive. Up until recently, most PSP games (which are technological masterpieces in their own way) have only usually used 222 MHz. I don't actually know the exact figure for a DS, but i know it is less.

2. PSP's can do anything. They play video, they play music, they show photos, they play games, they browse the internet, and given some eggs, and a whisk, i'm sure they could whip up a damn fine omelette, too!
Yes, there are better ways of watching videos, there are better ways of listening to music, there are (probably) better ways of looking at photos (someone once described the PSP as the modern-day 6x4 print), but there is nothing else that can do all of these, and definitely nothing that can do all of these as well as the PSP...

3. PSP's are supported. Apart from Sony's brilliant team sitting in a dungeon somewhere constantly making little tiny variations to improve the PSP, third parties everywhere are jumping on the PSP. From hacking and downgrading to themes and downloadable wallpapers, you can make a PSP do whatever you feel like with a little digging on the Net, which you can do straight from the PSP.

There are plenty of other reasons, but that would run the risk of RSI from the furious rage-typing so i'm gonna leave it at that...

PSP Game: SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Tactical Strike

SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Tactical Strike, or SOCOM TacStrike, is a PSP Game released a little while ago that was at the time and still is a bit of a genre-buster. It's closest description would be a Third-Person Shooter, and don't worry, that doesn't mean its a side-scroller. This game has you commanding a squad of four Special Forces commandos, and getting them from absolutely unco dumbasses into the best crack team the world's ever seen. One of the great things about this game over some of the other SOCOM series is you can choose your team from a whole list of real-life commando units, from the French GIGN, the German KSK-9, the Aussie and British SAS, the SEALs, the Dutch, and even the Spanish, and two others i can't remember. It actually has an effect too. The names change, the uniforms change and even some of the weapons. But one of the funniest things is that it also changes the teams language, so rather than hearing "Tango down" or whatever in English, you hear your KSK-9 yelling in German. it's hilarious (and luckily there are English Subtitles)...

Some mission can be a bit linear, but almost all of them provide plenty of different ways to achieve a goal, or get to a place, and there is also plenty of little sideline routes that can give you heaps of hidden goodies, like Intel (which gives you points), and more baddies to shoot through the back of the head.

Which brings us to the gameplay and controls which is pretty novel to most people and even to SOCOM diehards. The camera angle is the standard above-and-behind, but the crosshair/reticule rather than controlling your commandos movements only changes which direction the camera looks. Movement is very different to any other game, and it's actually a two-step process. First you 'engage' your movement dropper, then you press circle again to
tell your men to go there. And it's that second press that changes everything. It allows you to get over there at a run, really stealthily, with your guns blazing, or you can even tell one half of
your squad to give covering fire while the other two make a run for it. It is possible to control each of your men individually, but that can be a bit clumsy, so unless you are setting up an
ambush, you should keep your squad in either twos or as a four.

The x button is also very important. As your reticule slides over something, it will change what the x button does with a subtle subtitle, telling you about it. Attacking then can be a simple thing of looking at your enemy and pressing x. But if you want to get past about the fourth
level, or get scores even resembling high, then you're going to need to master all your other attacks (which like all the other aspects of the game, is very easy to get the hang of). The controls are effectively press for simple, hold for detail. This means that whenever you focus on an enemy, you have the option of taking him out from a mile away, or you can tell your sniper to take him out, or chuck a grenade at his feet, which takes a bit of mastery to aim well, or you can creep up behind him and knife the shit out of him etc etc.Doors are also great fun as you can watch as your guys creep up, inch it open and silently glide their way in, or you can go in with all guns blazing (literally), or even get them all to line up on eith er side of the door, as one of them
chucks in a flash or a HE, wait for the tongue of light/flame to erupt out the door and then run in. Classic.

So there can be a sense of disembodiment in the real heat of battle, but that only really occurs if you take the fun out of it by just saying fire at will. If you issue your own orders, it can be an
addictive experience. It can also happen that whenever you die, the camera stays there, watching your wounded/dead men lie on the gorund moaning and complaining, just to make you feel bad, and give you an irresistible urge to try again, and get some revenge. (Fortunately for the retards in you, even after your men have run out of health or had a critical hit, they will only be incapacitated for a little while in which time you can heal them and they'll get up and keep fighting. Tough. As. Nails.)

The single player campaign is pretty long, and then there are the quicker, more intense Instant Action missions, and there are twice as many of them as there are normal missions, so that will take you some time to get through, and there is also online multiplayer, with some innovative modes, which i haven't had a chance to try out.

Finally, there are the weapons and training. Before each mission, the team will be armed with a suggested kit-out. I always ignore that. I have my own choice of guns and secondaries. (Secondary weapons with a higher rate of fire than primaries. Hell yeah!), with a nice sprinkling of grenades, sniper rifles, medkits, and a rocket launcher (fun, fun). After each mission you will also receive a rating, and this will give you cash to buy more and better guns, and training points, which if you put them to the right things will turn your dumbass first-level team into a killing machine of Teutonic efficiency.

Overall, this is a truly great game, and anyone with a PSP should buy it now.

10/10

PS. My kit-out always includes SFCR-HWs,
F90's all round, barrel-mounted grenade
launchers, one PSG1 Sniper, One Rocket
Launcher, two HEs each, two Flashes, a
smoke, a bunch of medkits, and some extra
ammo for the sniper and his SMG. Lethal.

The Real Magic Disappearing Act

Magicians the world over should take a quick look at the gaming world. More specifically, they should take a look at what's not there ...... the magical disappearing PSP!

I could be the only one noticing this (it wouldn't be the first time), but i have to wonder what's going on. Just to clear things up, i'm not saying that all those true geniuses who put their hard-earned cash into one of these über-machines is going to spend the next 2 weeks wandering around the house thinking 'Where the f*** did i put that thing?!'. (<--Check that out for a punctuation string!) No, i'm saying that the shops and the retailers and probably Sony have completely forgotten about that shiny, little handheld. Among the PS3, Xbox 352 or whatever it is (yes, i'm a Sony man), the Nintendo DS (like that's a Spring Chicken!), or the Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii there's just no more space for the PSP. I opened a series of 4 different catalogues, Hardly Normal, Big V, L Mart, and Mick Smith Electronics. Each had a double page spread just for games and consoles, and yet 2 of them had no mention, one of them was advertising only a console, and the last had console, plus your choice of three games. My God! Three! That would be fine if on the same page there hadn't been 15 Singi'mnotreallymuchofaStar games, 12 Buzz! games, at least 10 other PS3 titles, probably 12 Xbox 127 games, 15 DS games, and 12-ish Wuuuuuuuuuuuuu games.

Yes, so the PSP is getting on and a replacement should be expected. (Rumours suggest a March 2009 replacement, but i don't think so), but the PSP 3000 facelift/butt-tuck has just been released and there's still plenty of people who are going to want UMD games. But even if you're going to say its too old. The Nintendo DS has been around for a full year longer than the PSP (February 2004 compared to March 2005) and there still trying to flog all those left-over flippy pieces of smoking turd to any idiot who walks into their store...

Shops may be rejecting it in favour of its high-powered big brother the PlayStation 3, but in case nobody had noticed, I don’t see any hugely capable, hugely successful, and incredibly popular Xbox 429 Portable variants…