Playstation Plus

I’ve got a few good things to say about Sony’s Playstation plus, however a lot of bad things. Granted it’s still in it’s infant stages, but it’s so lacking at the moment, especially when you compare it with the Xbox Live service.

When firmware 3.60 was release, with the online storage option, I finally took the plunge and dropped £40 on a Playstation Plus subscription. I’m in a fortunate position where I have 2 PS3′s, (one in the front room, and one in the bedroom), and the idea of being able to save to the “cloud”, then pick up again in another room really appealed to me. I also like the idea of the automatic download feature, that basically downloading the updates to the games while the machine is switched off. This would fix one of the things I find most annoying about the PS3 over the Xbox, size of the updates, for some reason updating a game on the Xbox takes literally seconds, where the PS3 takes minutes….sometime even hours (Currently updating GT5 as we speak)

Now maybe I should have read up on this first, or at least spent some time in the forums reading peoples impressions first before dropping the £40, but was what I was hoping for.

• The ability to save directly to the cloud, and pickup on another PS3 (just like the Steam Cloud)
• The ability for the PS3 to download my updates while I slept (this way I never had to see again the “There is an update, do you want to download it” screen)

What I actually got….

The ability to manually backup my save games to the cloud (the same functionality we used to have with a USB stick……). Unfortunately non of my games recognise the cloud storage, so it means I have to manually download my save game, then remember to re-upload it once I’ve finished playing. This has already caught me out a number of times….I fired up a game of the other PS3, only to have to quit to the XMB to copy the save game local….or even fire up the other PS3 to copy the game to the cloud :s

On the subject of copying, Sony really don’t make it easy. Probably like most people, the first thing I did was to copy all my save games on to the cloud storage, this I had to do once save at a time !…..there is a “group saves by game” function, but you still have to go into the grouped folder and manually copy each one across….took me an evening to back everything up.

Next the storage size…..150Mb ?….in this day and age…..when each one of my later Fallout 3 saves were over 5Mb each….obviously I didn’t have room to fit them all on, come on Sony, if the likes of Dropbox can offer us 2GB for free, 150Mb is a joke.

So, once I’d back up all my saves, I thought…ok time for the automatic download setting. Once I’d finally found the setting, I selected my 2 hour windows of “when to download” and left it too it. I then went to the 2nd Ps3 to set up the automatic download on that, in the hope to select a different 2 hour windows, but was politely told that I already have automatic download setup on my account, and I do have it on this or the other 1, but not at the same time …….really ?

Now if my understanding is currect, the automatic download feature is useless if you use the cloud storage, as it uses your local save game files as it’s base of “what to download”, if there are no saves on the PS3 (which on mine there aren’t as they’re all in the cloud), then it doesn’t download anything !….*clap, clap, well done Sony*

Ok, so finally the content, and what you really get for your £40 a year. Now I agree, you do get benefit when you have a plus subscription, but are they worth it.

Below is the list of what I downloaded from the Playstation plus “benefits”

Sonic the Hedgehog (not HD’d up, just added trophies), looked and sounded horrible

Astro Tripper, Pix’n Love and Enigmo (all mini games, played once, and deleted)

inFamous 2 Dynamic theme (does look pretty cool, I have to say)

All apart from the theme have now been deleted, this was from the below list of possible downloads for the month of March

2 March to 5 April 2011
All titles are for PlayStation 3 unless stated otherwise.

Games
Sonic the Hedgehog – one month exclusive for PlayStation Plus members
Astro Tripper
Pix’n Love Rush (minis) – two weeks early for PlayStation Plus members
Enigmo (minis) – two weeks early for PlayStation Plus members

Full Game Trial
Prince of Persia

Special Offers
PlayTV Live Chat – 25% off until 6 July 2011
Fat Princess – 50% off
Fat Princess (PSP) – 50% off
StarDrone (PS3) – 50% discount on day of launch
Premier Manager – 50% off

Dynamic themes and Premium Avatars
EyePet Avatars
inFamous 2 theme
Sega Mega Drive Classics theme
MotorStorm Apocalypse Urban Avatar
MotorStorm Apocalypse Burning Avatar
MotorStorm Apocalypse Rookie XMB theme

Maybe I’m just disappointed as I was expecting more, I was hoping for Steam Cloud type storage, I was hoping to never see a “Update is available” screen again, but currently this isn’t the case.

Maybe now they have the Cloud storage backbone in place, developers will release updates to their games to allow saving directly to this. I do however think that if they get their butts into gear and get this working properly before the NGP (Sony’s Next Generation Portable aka PSP2) comes out, then saving a game on the PS3, then continuing on the NGP ticks all my boxes. I know that Microsoft attempted to do this Windows to Windows Mobile to Xbox….but it’s not really happened yet.

Personally if anybody is planning on dropping on the PS+ subscription, I don’t think it’s worth it yet, give it a couple of months and see if developers start to implement the “direct to cloud” saves.

Tags: Astro, bedroom, cloud, Download, Dynamic, feature, firmware, fortunate position, functionality, game, games, Impressions, infant, infant stages, machine, option, pickup, Pix, Playstation, plunge, Princess, PS3, reading, reason, screen, Size, sony, steam, steam cloud, storage option, time, xbox, xbox live, xmb

Happy Mac Day !

Well after much consideration, I finally took to plunge and bought a 27″ iMac.

I’ve been running Mac OSX on my PC now for a good few months, and I’ve also got a MacBook Pro. A couple of things were holding me back, first of all gaming ability. As you are probably more than aware, I game….alot ! and the majority of games come out on the PC. Now I know you can run Parallels desktop, and similar wine based software to allow you to run up Windows games on the mac, but there seems to be only a handful of games that run 100%.

Currently I have the option to boot up my Windows 7 drive in my PC and all is good. I was aware of bootcamp too, however until last week I’d not put this to use.

As mentioned, last week, I was going on a VB.net training course and had to put Windows on my Mac, in case I needed to run through anything on a evening….installed windows XP, installed the Bootcamp drivers, and everything ran very smooth

Another announcement 2 weeks ago which helped sway my decision was the announcement of Steam coming to the Mac in April, and they would also be bringing with them the Valve games. They’ve also said that if you already own any of the Steam games, eg Half Life, Portal, Team Fortress, there is no need to repurchase them !

So the decision was made at the weekend and I bought and iMac 27″. I decided to go with the Quad Core i5 version as I don’t plan on replacing this for a couple of years. When I say I bought 1, I actually mean that I ordered 2, and C wanted one too, as our current machines are around 2 1/2 years old.

I decided as we will have 2 iMacs and 2 MacBook Pros, it was only sensible to get a Time Capsule too. We do currently use our 2Tb Acer Aspire EasyStore for the majority of our storage, but through it would be advantageous to have the Time Capsule for the “what if” factor.

As you can guess by the title of this post, today everything has turned up !

Below are the images of the unboxing of both the iMacs and the the Time Capsule apparently turns up tomorrow.

The huge brown boxes

Unboxed from said brown boxes

Unboxed

The Keyboard

Keyboard and Mouse

Again, the keyboard and mouse

This is how slim the magic mouse is

and this size of the keyboard

Size of the screen, compared to my 15.4″ MacBook Pro

The spec from the box

Finally in place

C with the original PC in place

Both in position

and finally to give you an idea of the screen resolution, below is a google search ! Look at all the white !

Finally, how is it ?

Let me tell you, it’s huge, it’s fast, it’s deadly quiet, and it’s Apple !…..so yup it works really well. The mouse and keyboard are taking a little getting used to, apart from that, I’m loving it !

Tags: 27", acer, alot, announcement, Apple, aspire, based software, bootcamp, capsule, consideration, core, couple, decision, desktop, easystore, everything, game, half life, handful, i5, imac, imacs, images, keyboard, mac, Mac OSX, macbook, macbook pro, majority, mouse, Parallel, parallels, PC. Now, place, plunge, pro, quad, screen, Size, steam, storage, team fortress, time, time capsule, Unboxed, unboxing, valve, week, windows, windows games, windows xp, wine

Logitech G25 and Playseat A1GP

Official Logictech stuff below.

Tags: a1gp, clutch, clutch pedal, controller buttons, drunken night, g25, games menu, gearbox, hog, last friday, logitech, logitech g25 steering wheel, menu systems, pedals, playseat, plunge, PS3, racing games, screw, shifter, solid as a rock, wheel