As most everyone who reads this blog knows by now, I’m pretty into video games. I spend a lot of time talking about them and my need to spend money on them. One of the first games I played on any system, though, was Bionic Commando.

With its sweet theme music awesome, grappling hook mechanic, and your eventual face-off (literally and figuratively) with Hitler, you know that this game is a classic. That’s why when I heard rumbling of a PS3 port/polish of the original game last year, I got really excited.

A few months went by and there was no news. Eventually I read a rumor on Gamespot that the polish/redo of the original game was going so well they were actually going to make it into a whole new game. Not that long ago, screens and video started coming out of the new game. It looks alright but not really anything like the original (besides using the grappling hook/bionic arm concept).

I was afraid that they’d given up on the remake to do the whole new game. It turns out that my fears were unfounded as IGN now has a preview trailer for it up and it’s apparently called Bionic Commando Rearmed. Supposedly Rearmed will be coming out sometime in March and it looks awesome. I’ve watched it at least 4 times today and I don’t stop wanting to make sweet, sweet love to it. So glorious!

Activision does want money from Harmonix to let me use the PS3 GH3 guitar with Rock Band.  Activision, you suck.

Anyone want to buy a copy of GH3?  I think I’ll be trying to sell this and get Rock Band instead since they are apparently not complete jackasses about how you use their controller.

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of games that I get to play with fake plastic instruments.  I’ve been a Guitar Hero fan since the first one came out over a year and a half ago.  In fact, we’ve got some pictures of the controller on the design for this very site.  As you may also know, I bought a PS3 last winter and am a big fan of the machine.

So when I found out that both GHIII and Rock Band were coming out for it this year I was pretty excited.  The fact that I’d get twice the music fun and a couple new ways to play (and DRUMS!) I was really excited.  So, after getting hooked on the demo for GHIII in late October, I bought the game at launch–I even went out at midnight and picked it up (since my girlfriend was sitting around playing Viva Pinata I didn’t have much else to do).

Unfortunately, when Rock Band came out, I didn’t pick it up.  Mostly since I still had one fake guitar game that I hadn’t gotten around to beating but also because I had heard that the PS3 GHIII guitar  wasn’t going to work with it.  That turned out to be true and I was glad that I hadn’t spent $170 on a game that I was missing a peripheral for.

Then, last week I heard some good news.  Harmonix was going to release a patch to enable the GHIII guitar to work with Rock Band.  This was definitely good news.  Now, I could go out and buy the bundle when I was done with GHIII and get some new music game excitement.

Sadly the scheduled release date for the patch came and went and it was never released.  I (among many others) started to wonder what had happened to this great new functionality.  Well, it turns out that the culprit is Activision, the company that owns the rights to the Guitar Hero name and bought plastic guitar manufacturer RedOctane.  Apparently, Activision (which will soon be the worlds largest video game publisher thanks to an upcoming merger with Vivendi Games to become Activision Blizzard) is afraid that their colored plastic guitar cash cow may go away and are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening … including being complete jackasses by threatening Sony to not actually release the Rock Band patch that enables compatibility.  Supposedly they’ve threatened platform support on upcoming Activision titles (like Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, etc.).

Let me just be the level headed one here, Activision, and say that you guys are complete morons.  I know you’d like to be the only plastic guitar game in town and it was a good run but you can’t hold onto a monopoly forever.  Denying that and trying to lock people into your bullshit isn’t going to make it any better.  In fact, I’m now less likely to buy your future games with peripherals since I know that they’ll only ever work with your game.  When I’m going to waste a bunch of money on a novelty peripheral, I’d like to know that if I wanted to, I could use it on almost any game.  The fact that you seem to think a $50 device that I paid for should be useless unless I keep giving you money makes me think that you are jackasses.

And while right now this is only a PS3 issue, I’ve heard rumblings from a 1UP podcast that Activision is actually looking to break Rock Band compatibility from the GHIII controller on the Xbox 360 as well.  So yeah, no matter what system you’re on, Activision would like to screw you over.

Hope you guys like the fact that I’m not going to buy your crappy music game again (I’ve got an idea for a boss battle … it’s me giving you the middle finger).   With your crappy downloadable content system (3 packs, really?), inability to get quick-play co-op in the game, the continued lack of a rhythm/bass career track included, and your complete misunderstanding of why Guitar Hero was fun … see Boss Battles you have managed to quickly run a great franchise into mediocrity.  It takes real talent to do that AND make EA look like the good guys and yet somehow Activision, you’ve managed to do it.  Bravo. ::slow clap::

Ok, so I just feel a need to get it out that I broke down and purchased GH3 this weekend.  I wasn’t really planning on buying it immediately but it just kind of happened.  I’ll give some of my feelings on the game in a bit but first a brief history.

I picked up the original Guitar Hero in April of last year for my PS2.  I played the crap out of it and liked it enough that we even added the controller to the redesign of the site.  I got GH2 as a gift around Christmas and while I enjoyed it, it seemed to lose some of the magic of the original game.

I played it off and on for about a month but then in February I bought my HDTV and ended up getting a PS3.  I’ve detailed the issues I had getting that workin and even with my post saying that GH controller was mostly working with the PS3 I’ve since reversed my stance due to inescapable lag that had made playing any of the more difficult songs nearly impossible.

(more…)

So, I’d heard some rumbling on the internet over the past month or so that the issues with the Guitar Hero controller not working with GH1&2 on the PS3 had been mostly resolved. So yesterday on my way home from a particularly stressful day at work (this week has been pretty crazy), I stopped by RadioShack and bought a Playstation to USB adapter.

When I got home I opened the PS-USB adapter packaging (thankfully not an injury-inducing blister pack) and connected the new adapter to my GH controller + extension cord and then plugged the USB end into the PS3’s USB ports. When I plugged it in, it immediately started ‘working.’ By that I mean it does the same thing that always happens if you’re in a Playstation system menu and you have a GH controller plugged in, it thinks you’re holding the ‘down’ button in.

I promptly unplugged the GH controller and tried to press buttons on either of the two PS3 controllers I have or the PS3 remote. None of those buttons seemed to do anything though. I ended up holding down the PS button to bring up the controller menu and then just pressed ‘O’ to quit.

Back in the main menu I could navigate with the controller again and started up GHII from the menu. I then quickly plugged in the GH controller. I was amazed when the game detected button presses from it! When I got to the menu though I quickly noticed that it got confused by strumming up vs. down. It used to be that strumming down moved you down and up moved you up but now up moves you down and down moves you up.

I then played a couple songs on it and realized that the whammy bar was also not working. Unfortunately it didn’t detect its use at all. Still, the whammy bar isn’t that essential to playing the game and without it you can get about 98% [non-scientific number] of the enjoyment out of it without it.

So if anyone was holding off spending $600 on a PS3 simply because it wouldn’t play the PS2 version of  Guitar Hero you can now spend freely. Guitar Hero is actually operational on the PS3. You can finally get rid of that PS2 dead weight that has been holding you down.

Next up, I’ll be hooking up some PS2 controllers to see how gameplay works with those. Exciting!

Announced today, this new PS3 game (that will demo sometime towards the end of the year) called LittleBigPlanet looks like tons of fun.

Visually, the games graphics look pretty phenomenal but that’s not the only thing here. The co-op gameplay shown in the video makes it looks like something that could help people develop good and cute little puzzle/platforming squads. It would be so sweet if you can develop a little clan that is really good at moving through these little fantasy worlds..

Even cooler is the fact that it’s supposed to be a ’sandbox game’ in that users will be able to make their own levels and upload them to the site and other people will be able to play and enjoy these levels.

A person would be able to download an unlimited number of user created maps and play them single player or cooperatively online. It’s like swarm based co-op Lemmings with user maps. Plus, the little guys are cute!

Sorry to have another post about consumer electronics but besides the occasional task at work and the playing of video games (should I pay $4.99 to play Qbert in 720p?) much of my life is spent abusing the collection of power and time-sucking gadgets I now possess.

As I mentioned earlier, one of these is the newly acquired PS3. While I’m pretty happy with the purchase (although I wish my Amazon.com gift certificates would come so I could order an extra controller and Resistance: Fall of Man), one thing I thought I’d be able to take advantage of was the sweet SACD capability of the PS3.

So this weekend, I was at Best Buy and was looking for a cheap Blu-ray movie I could buy (I didn’t find one–although I will probably just buy Casino Royale when it comes out in 2 weeks) I decided to browse the CD’s.

I’ve been trying to catch up on older CD’s and movies that I haven’t seen or heard so when I noticed as I was browsing that there were a number of Kinks CD’s that were remastered in SACD/CD hybrid format I decided I’d pick one up to try out the SACD capability of the PS3 and hopefully continue my education on some of the musical acts that have helped define current rock (Fall Out Boy had to come from somewhere, right?).

Anyway, so I get home and put it in the machine and as usually happens I see a CD listed under the music menu on the Cross Media Bar (XMB). This time however, there’s also one labeled as a Super Audio CD. I pick that one (which is inexplicably 20+ seconds longer than the regular CD tracks) and click play. It then proceeds to tell me that SACD’s can’t be output via the optical out cable that I’m currently getting sound on the PS3 from.

Apparently SACD’s are all encrypted and since optical audio is unencrypted, they don’t want people just ripping the bitstreams. So, the only option that is presented is to output the audio via the analog red/white stereo plugs or via the HDMI port. Since I don’t have a tuner that accepts HDMI, I can’t really listen to this. I guess I should have really looked into the whole SACD thing a little bit more before I dropped $12 on a disc.

I did try to hook it up via the analog out on my PS3 but my cheap PC surround system I have is not of high enough quality that playing the SACD via analog sounds any better than the regular CD via optical.

Eventually though (perhaps when one is actually released), an HDMI 1.3 enabled tuner will go on the list of things that I need to buy when all that cash from the WRN IPO starts rolling in (although it’s really more likely that we’d just get acquired by someone looking to bolster their nerd-related offerings).

So just a day or two ago, I finally got around to getting my PS3 that I’ve been talking about for a while. The need for HD signal is really what drove the decision. I couldn’t settle for my crummy PS2 driving my new TV.

Unfortunately, while I picked up the PS3 earlier the HDMI cable did not come until today. Until that point I was connecting using the S-Video cable from my PS2 (480i = balls). Now though, we have upgraded to the 1080p/720p/480p set for games and movies.

I still don’t have a Blu-ray movie yet (I’ve requested some from BB Online but they have not come) and I still don’t actually own any disc-based PS3 games. I tried to rent Call of Duty 3 but the Blockbuster store I went to accidentally gave me the PS2 version so I’ve got to go exchange it sometime.

I have been abusing the ability to download demos to the machine though. I’ve got the Resistance: Fall of Man, Motorstorm, Full Auto 2 downloaded already and am in the process of downloading the Ridge Racer 7 demo. I’ve also purchased flOw, Blast Factor, and the free Gran Turismo HD games that are available in the store.

(more…)