Robot Claw

Well, Capcom have made it official – Monster Hunter 3rd releases for PSP later this year. Here’s the trailer:

From the trailer we can see the game contains most (all?) of the monsters from the Wii game (Monster Hunter Tri), in addition to quite a few new ones, such as the bear and the thing in the last shot. All the weapons are back (gunlance, twin blades) and they seem to have added the switch axe from the Wii game.

The cat helpers return, and now it seems we can have two of them? I recently read they are not in the Wii version, so I wonder what took their place?

It also seems no water missions, although perhaps they just are not ready to show it yet.

At any rate, you can bet once this comes stateside I will be all over it. You may recall the last MH PSP game was my choice as game of the year for 2009.

The Wii game releases here in a little over a month. Rest assured it’ll be spinning in my Wii seconds later 🙂

Look to the right there, under the ‘of interest’ heading ->

See that new link… the gamebooks one.

Click it 🙂

Today’s the day: 38 long years old.

When we were young birthdays were special – something to look forward to. Now, not so much.

I wonder how many will wish me a happy birthday today?

I recently obtained and read through the first three of the Doctor Who Find Your Fate adventures. My thoughts follow.

The first in the series, Search For The Doctor, was released in 1986 and authored by David Martin, who was the scriptwriter of the 1979 Tom Baker episode (of the actual show) The Armageddon Factor. Kudos to the publishers for trying to get someone with Doctor Who ‘street cred’ involved but… well they could have found better. Martin’s tale (involving the sixth Doctor) just doesn’t feel very much like something from the Doctor Who universe. Yes it involves Omega and Drax (Martin’s own creation, using an absurb car-Tardis) but the characterization is all wrong, the story just boring and the book makes very poor use of the choose-your-own adventure format.

The book has a grand total of 33 entries across 100+ pages. Very few actual choices occur, and even if you make the ‘wrong’ choice you are usually sent back to the previous entry and told to make the other choice. Some entries simply end with a direction to go to a new entry, which is sometimes the very next one sequentially (so why even split them?)! Choices are often left to dice rolls for no reason, and some are even more strange, such as one time the game simply tells you not to continue the story until you decode an anagram (but the anagram doesn’t contain the number to turn to…)

All in all, quite a bad read.

If Search For The Doctor is bad, then the second release – Crisis In Space – is just appalling. The author seems to have no experience with Doctor Who at all, and writes a story involving you (the ‘hero’), the sixth Doctor, Peri and Turlough. Nothing about the characterization is believable or entertaining, not the least being the fact everyone near-continuously puns. As an example:

The Doctor: “You two are too much for me to handle.”
Turlough: “I’d rather go for Handel. Smashing composer.”
The Doctor: “Pull yourself together!”
Peri: “Why, is he coming apart?”

Then we have the doctor shooting down armies of robots with laser weapons, and amidst this Turlough just cracks jokes like a madman while Peri see-saws between imbecile and juvenile.

A shockingly awful book.

It is perhaps at this point I should quote myself. Referring to these three books, I said to KLS the other day: “There wasn’t a single second when I was reading any of them that I felt entertained in any way.”

After the first two I suppose I should have expected The Garden Of Evil to be a dud, but here David Martin manages to produce a work even worse than the first book in the series. The galaxy is starving (a point ignored shortly after the book begins) and Gallifrey has become a  cosmic refugee camp. The Time Lords have allowed thousands of alien species to squat on their planet, and martial law is enforced by a race of snake-men working on behalf of the Time Lords.

See what I mean about these books having nothing at all to do with Doctor Who?

All sorts of garbage and nonsense follow, and the structure of the book and use of the format is even worse than in previous volumes. This book was in fact so tiresome and boringly-difficult to read it took me a week or so to finish and it’s only 37 entries!

There are 3 other books in the series, and I can only imagine they must be absolutely terrible based on what I have already read. In fact I’d wager a guess they’re so awful they are simply not worth reading at all, and certainly not worth buying.

I’ll be sure to post a review once I obtain them 😉

Yesterday, at around 7pm EST, millions of Playstation 3 consoles worldwide just started acting strangely. They wouldn’t connect to the internet, they wouldn’t play games requiring trophies, or games requiring an internet connection, or any games purchased online and downloaded to the system. Certain Blu-Ray films stopped working, the date on the system was screwed up, certain types of data (dynamic themes) were corrupted and trophies had disappeared from trophy lists.

In short: There was something very rotten in the state of Sony PS3.

Very quickly the collective mind of the internet was able to deduce the culprit: the internal clock (hardware, not software) had ticked over to the nonexistent date of February 29, 2010. This in turn confused the software (which correctly realized no such day existed) which sent the entire system haywire. The internet of course exploded with the news, and it was quite astounding to log on to investigate an error code we experienced here in our own living room and read about people as far away as Greece, India and Singapore having the same issue.

Every internal clock in the affected PS3 systems (estimated to be over 25 million worldwide) is set to GMT, so they all failed at once irrelevant of the local time zone.

Sony failed utterly in crisis management. It was over 11 hours before they released any sort of statement about the problem, and until then had only confirmed it via twitter! Their statement confirmed an internal clock issue, but made no explanation of why it took them more than 10 hours to confirm what many had already deduced. They gave no indication of how it would be fixed, but advised owners of affected systems to simply leave it off for 24 hours.

Sony hopes when the internal clock ticks over to March 1 everything will be alright. That will be about 7pm tonight (so in a little under 2 hours). Based on past, similar events this may or may not work. And even if it does a software patch may be required to fix the time anyway (the PS3 will be a day behind the real world). If it doesn’t work it is likely the internal clock will need resetting, and lord knows how Sony plans that. Will they advise users to disconnect their PS3 from the wall for 30 days to let the internal backup battery (that powers the clock) to run dry?

To be honest I have found this event humorous. Sony’s apalling slow and ineffective reaction has not surprised me, and has only confirmed my suspicion that inside Sony HQ they literally had no idea what to do (so let’s do nothing!). The response of the thousands upon thousands of owners that have gone online to discuss this has ranged from bemusement (like me) to vitriol-filled rants about the evil that is Sony. People are screaming for compensation and apologies just because they lose access to their Playstation 3 for a single day.

In fact such is the strength of the response to this event – dubbed ‘apolcalyps3’ – that responses to the response have already started to crop up. They are many and varied, but all poke fun at the more extreme outbursts of anger from PS3 owners.

And in my opinion, there are none better than the response from Adolf Hitler himself:

(Fair warning: NSFW video, contains foul text)

(But watch it, especially you Dad – you’ll love it!)