UnsignedStar

Apparently Sony are going to put songs by unsigned acts up for download in the SingStore. Of the couple of hundred tunes currently available, there are lots on there by famous acts that I haven't downloaded. The reason is because I don't know those songs, and the fun of SingStar is singing along to stuff you know. Surely Sony must realise that?

PS - If anyone who has any say in these things is reading, if you made "Danger, High Voltage" available I would buy it. Possibly even at triple the usual price.

Metal Gear Online Beta (PS3)

I don't know quite what I was expecting from this, to be honest. I've always wanted to like Metal Gear Solid games, but every tie I've tried them I've ended up giving up, due to a mixture of the controls and the cutscenes.

Maybe that's why I thought I might like the Metal Gear Online beta - because it'd have no cutscenes. But in the end I've left it thinking it wasn't a very good idea to try and make an online shooter out of a game series that's mostly about sneaking around.

In a reverse of the order that things annoyed me, I'm going to briefly go on about how rubbish the gameplay is, then I'll get on to everything else. The guns aren't satisfying at all to shoot, and the damage reaction is minimal to the point where I could rarely tell if I was damaging someone, or about to die myself. The controls are floaty and vague, and what seems like every element from the single player has been left in, leaving them overly complicated given the few actions that you'll actually want to do.

Why would anyone want to use tranquiliser guns in multiplayer when you still have to go over to your enemy and kill them? Similarly disguising yourself as a cardboard box, given your enemies aren't stupid AI. The "throw everything in and hope something sticks" mentality baffles me.

But before you get to play, you'll have to trudge through the interface and registration. Lucky you.

It's become quite clear to me that Konami don't really understand user interfaces. For example, Sony have allowed previous Metal Gear Solid games to continually break their requirements checklist in the West, and since Konami can't be arsed to do a proper job of localising, we "too damn tall" gamers have had to try and remember that back and select are the wrong way around in all of the menus. They've sorted that for this game, but there's still a raft of horrible interface niggles. For example, it has a whole raft of screens that expect you to press a button to continue, but don't tell you that, so you sit looking at it for a minute thinking that it's just taking its usual, horribly slow, pace to do something.

Aside from those basic niceties, the beta will regularly update, or fail to connect, or do something else it wasn't entirely expecting, and instead of dealing with it in a friendly manner (I don't know, perhaps a "retry" option, eh?), it will leave you with a "you've got to use the PS3's system software to quit the game and restart it again" screen.

And of course there's also the registration. For reasons that probably make perfect sense to someone in Konami Towers, your PSN id is not good enough for their baby. So as well as that I now have a Konami ID, a game ID - neither of which can be the same, for some reason, and one of them needs a 8 digit numerical password (I wonder how many phone numbers Konami have on record now) - as well as a character name. So 3 identifiers and two passwords, just for 1 beta.

The last step before you get to start shooting people is using the automatching system to find a game to play in. I liked that I selected "team deathmatch", and it decided to ditch the "team" part. Thanks, Metal Gear Online, clearly I was confused about what game mode I was interested in. You do know best.

So for some kind of rough summary, then. If you like this sort of thing - that being a very average 3rd person shooter with a bobbins interface and horribly bland washed-out graphics (and remarkably I do know at least one guy whose gaming preferences lie in exactly that direction) - you might well enjoy this.

Twisted Firestarter

This bit of news provoked two separate thoughts in very quick succession. One: Has there been a single good Spyro game since Insomniac stopped making them? Two: When are Sony going to release the PS1 Spyro back catalogue on Playstation Network?

I'd buy them all again in a flash. Imagine having a good platform game (that isn't Daxter) to play on the PSP!

Don't hate the Player

As you might be able to tell if you pay attention to the bits of my blog that I update over on the right there, I recently bought a PlayStation 3. Despite still only ticking one out of four of my buying requirements, the urge to play Ratchet & Clank had become too great. After all, there are only so many Mexican terrorists that you can shoot with a range of realistic weaponry before it all becomes a bit tiresome and repetative.

So, from my position as someone who's owned an Xbox 360 for the last two years, here are my thoughts on the PlayStation 3. Who knows, maybe indignant Gamefaqs arguers will balloon the number of hits I get and I'll be able to blow off this game developing lark and live off my AdSense revenue.

First off, some things that I really like about the PS3...

• The Xmb is quick to navigate, consistent, user friendly, and looks slick. It's a world apart from the mess of the Xbox dashboard & blade system.


• Touch sensitive buttons to eject the disc, and switch the power on & off. Such a minor thing, but I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.


• Remote play is a cool feature. I'm not sure I'll ever use it (aside from the one time I tried it out by sitting in my living room playing G-Police on my PSP while it was being piped through the internet and back by my PS3). But it is cool, and there's got to be something to use the PSP for, right?


• It's so quiet compared to the 360, a big plus in girlfriend-acceptance factor in the living room (especially given the size of the thing).


• I like having prices in proper money in the online store, so I don't have to do mental calculations to work out how much a pointless bit of DLC costs. And it's nice to not have to prebuy set amounts of cards or points, since it allows you to put exactly the amount you need to make a purchase into my wallet (well, as long as it's above £5, but I can live with that).

Now on to the things that I dislike about the PS3...

• Having to install demos and games once they've downloaded, before I can play them. It seems completely pointless, since the downloads are in the Gb range anyway they can't be compressed too heavily. And the installation can't be done in the background. How about having "automatically background install" as an option at some point, Sony?


• The Supplied USB cable for charging your controller is tiny. I can't believe anyone has their sofa that close to their entertainment system. Another annoyance is that when the system's in standby it doesn't leave the USB power on to charge a connected controller, so you can't leave it to charge overnight like you can with the 360's play and charge kit.


• Speaking of controllers, the Sixaxis is a horribly light and flimsy feeling thing, and as of yet I've not played anything that's been improved by the whole motion sensing thing. Thank goodness DualShock 3's restore much needed weight, even if Sony are dragging their feet about releasing them in Europe.


• Strange as it seems, I really miss the rich presence stuff that Xbox Live has. You can't see your friends list while you're playing a game, you can't see what games your friends have been playing, what they're doing in that game, or how far they've played through it. I guess Home is supposed to be adding some of these elements, but ... well that's an entirely different scathing blog post I think.

Good idea - Rainbow Six Vegas 2's experience system

Non-RPGs have often dabbled with adding in experience systems, and recently the idea seems to have really taken off in first person shooters. Halo 3 had fairly limited multiplayer progression, and then Call of Duty 4 had a fantastic online experience system. Now the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (and that's the last time I'm ever going to type the ridiculous football score name out in full) developers have implemented a logical progression from that.

In R6V2 you have a single character, who is shared across all three game types - campaign, multiplayer, and terrorist hunt - and every kill that you or your team makes earns you experience (though obviously you earn more for making the kills yourself). At certain experience levels you earn a new rank, and with those come new types of armour and camouflage.

R6V2 also adds the A.C.E.S system (I forget what it stands for), that rewards you for kills made in certain ways. So shooting enemies at long distance will improve your sniper level, and killing filthy terrorists with explosives increases your assault rating. Leveling up these categories gives you experience bonuses (towards your rank)and is also how you unlock weapons, themed to the category you improve.

Reasons why working in the games industry is still great

1) Sometimes you get really cool stuff given to you.

Bummer, man.

A thought that recently struck me, for no particular reason I can work out, is that I feel really sorry for any team given the task of producing a new Bomberman game.

First, the good. They're guaranteed to get some sales through IP recognition. I would be more likely to buy "Bomberman" than "Explodeguy", just because I would know roughly what I was getting. And I'm sure there are some people out there that have bought (and will continue to buy) every Bomberman game that's released. Even Act Zero.

But I think the bad far outweighs it. There is a weight of expectation that comes with Bomberman - there have been some excellent games in the series in the past, so a developer has a lot to live up to. I think a lot of it is down to the games having such a "simple formula" (for want of a better phrase, though the best titles in the series have a lot of extra features). If a developer doesn't add anything new to their title it will get panned as being too basic and conservative. If they do add things then they'd better hope they chose them wisely, because there are few things in a reviewer's mind worse than messing up the "simple formula" with unfocused new features.

It makes me wonder why, other than for the cash, anybody does it. Did the people who've produced poor Bomberman games really think they were bringing something worthwhile to the table, or did they just do it for the money?