Sidewaysgravity Blog

It seems like all that I write about is Playstation! I should probably spend a little more time reading books and working on my programming and less time playing the ps3 during my free time. With christmas break around the corner, thats not likely to happen.

Although I have been playing more than I should, this past week I have been hitting the books for finals and so I am just getting around to updating to 2.53 on the playstation. That being said I think it was just release yesterday, but I am not sure. A quick seach on google will tell you that the main update for this patch will be to bring full screen flash to the playstation. While this has received mixed reaction, I am looking forward to seeing what all I will have access to that I did not before. Sites like youtube may not have the highest quality video, so unless your watching TV on a 21″, your videos might not look so good on a 50″ with youtube. Nothing says HD quite like a pixelated video. What I am excited for is sites such as NBC, CBS, and others which provide a selection of there shows and some with HD quality. I will look foward to see how those sites will perform with this new update. All we need now is either a netflix player for the ps3, or for netflix to switch to flash instead of silverlight, or for ps3 to get silverlight support.

Although I didnt dig to deep, it looks like that is the main point to the 2.53 update. If you know something more about it feel free to share.

UPDATE: When trying to play a video from nbc.com I got the “You need to have flash 9 to play this, click here to download.” After spending some time trying to navigate around cbs.com I was finally able to get the the full episodes of Numb3rs, a show my wife and I like to watch. While I do not get any flash errors, the page just seems to load forever on first try. I refreshed the page and then it loaded properly. One click and we had a perfectly fit full screen video on our TV, so yes for cbs and a big no for nbc

Over one month has past since the initial (delayed) launch of littlebigplanet. I decided to take some time to look back and see how things are going.

The initial launch, including the delay in the game was a fairly bumpy ride. After running the software update that was available the first time I played the game was plagued with dropped connections and server timeouts which caused the whole game to lock up. The first couple days I looked forward to when they turned the servers off just so I could play without the game freezing on me. After a week or so it seemed that the servers became more stable an since then have been running well. All the while we haven’t heard much from media molecule.

Since the server connection issues have been mostly taken care of after the game launch it doesn’t seem like to much has changed. The problem is that there are still parts of the game that don’t function correctly and it’s over a month after launch. The one obvious problem, although it does not affect get play, is the fact that it always shows 0 0 0 for your play, create, an share stats. I have heard that these stats were part of the reason the servers had such a hard time in the first place so they turned them off. The other issue that I am aware of is the shared levels themselves. I’m am not sure if anyone else has this problem or not but depending on the day, I can only access a certain number of online levels, and it varies from day to day. Some days there will be 30+ pages of levels and other days only 7. There is a great news system built directly into the game so mediamolecule can easily give updates to all users but so far hasn’t produced much.

Overall given all the difficulties that this game has suffered since launch, it is still a fun game that I enjoy playing. It appears that they have it stable enough to enjoy and have fun, but they still have some smaller bugs to work out.

If you were one of the unlucky ones like myself to order your game at BestBuy, you probably were not able to get the game until Monday the 27th while most preorders from gamestop were able to get the game the Saturday before. With that said, once I got it home and plugged it in I was pressed for time and skipped the update and went straight into the game. It was fun and smooth sailing, getting to know the easy controls and learning to jump, dress, stick, and all sorts of other things. After playing around for a while I ran the update and then it would let me connect to the servers to use the online funtions. This is where the frustration came into play. Day one the servers I think had a heart attack and since levels, friends, trophies, scores, menu system are all integrated to the online functionality, then if the network fails, the game fails.

I was constantly watching a frozen screen waiting to get into a menu that I would eventually have to get out of due to delays. Playing a game online was nearly impossible since it took to long to load any level. I was successfully able to invite some friends into our game where they were froze half the time and vice versa when we went to their game. All in all the first day was a fail for the network and a success for the game. Later that night the servers appeared to be turned off again and did not appear to be back on untill 2pm tuesday.

I did have a chance to play around online a little tuesday as the servers were back up, and I must say the game is a lot of fun and the online section is great!! So far I did not have any issue with the online system today, but that might just be due to the fact that it was 2 in the afternoon when most people are not online. Tonight will be the real test to see how the network does under stress… hopefully well.

Today on my luch break I was surprised to read on Playstations official blog about a delay for the soon to be released LittleBigPlanet. Apparently a complaint was made about two specific phrases in one of the songs in the game. It contained two phrases taken from the Qur’an, which is a holy book for the Muslim faith. Although I will give Media Molecule credit for being sensative to their consumers and not wanting to be offensive, I do not fully agree with the need to delay the release date.

I have heard speculation that the song lyrics could just be a delay to give more time for a joint release of playstations Home along with LittleBigPlanet, but it is just pure speculation as to whether this is the case. To be honest, at this point I dont care about Home or its release.

LittleBigPlanet was set to hit the shelves on Monday, October 21st, just 3 days away, but has now been pushed back until the week of the 27th. I doubt their will be time or need to recall all the games and redistribute new ones. I think it is more likely that they will use the extra week to develope a patch for the game to be ready as soon as it hits the shelves.

If anyone gets the game and knows what they are looking for, I would be interested to know if it is something fixed in the patch or if they are recalling and redistributing the copies.

Click here to check out the Playstation Blog Article

Update. According to Media Molecules blog, they are going to replace the discs with a newer one and a patch has already been created and is ready to go. This still seems a little overkill for some song lyrics. You can check out their blog post here.

With only a week before LittleBigPlanet hits the shelves, the people at Media Molecule have upped the excitement not only with the limited beta, but also showing off some new costumes for sackboy, the mgs4 costume being my favorite. To learn more check out mediamolecule’s website.

Update: These costumes as posted on the playstation blog will be considered a premium and cost $1.99 each! Two thumbs down for that one Sony.

One of the great things about the ps3 is the ability to download demos and try out different games before you buy them. With the 80 gb hardrive, space is not an issue, so over 50 games can become a burden to sort through. I have wanted a sorting feature for a while but have not been able to do so until tonight. The feature I wanted had been available since I bought it, but I never knew.

To sort the games into folders use the following steps.

1. Select the Game that you want to sort.
2. Press Triangle button and Select Info from the menu
3. The Album Field should be highlight, select it to edit.
4. Enter a name for the Album (This will be the folder it will be stored in).
5. Once done press circle “O” to return to the game menu.
6. Repeat the process for all the games, sorting them into albums. (ex. Demos, Arcade, Racing,  Shooter)
7. Once you have edited all the albums, select triangle from the game menu and choose Sort By option.
8. Choose to sort by Album.

Finished. You should now have all of your games sorted into the albums that you set up. If you do not specify an album for a game, it will be put into an Unspecified folder.