If the last game is any indication, this is going to be magic.

I’m a man of the side scrolling days.

So when I purchased a Wii a few years back, my major deciding factor was that it was a new take on video games. Instead of a controller, you waggled sticks at your television in the futile attempt to make a playmobile character swing a golf club. Hours of entertainment to watch – but as many of you fellow Wii players out there know, the Wii is a lot of fun, but it certainly does not put you in the “hard-core gamer” category of video game player.

Wii is the short bus of video game consoles.

About 8 months ago, after a night playing with my Roku, I found an awesome internet tv show called CO-OP on the Revision 3 channel. There was a particular episode where they dissected the video game Assassin’s Creed II. I was completely transfixed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As someone who thought all next-gen video games were first person kill-em-ups, where you run around shooting people in the head, to see a quiet open world game was something of a relevation. The visuals of Italy in the 1500′s, walking through cities, and the gorgeous way the world was rendered – I was floored. Finally a game that let you explore! It was shortly after that I started looking into video game consoles and figuring out which one to buy. Make that, the best one to buy.

PS3 or XBox 360, XBox 360 or PS3.

My decision came down to 3 criteria – cost, value, and game selection. As a new gamer, games were more of an abstract concept and since Assassin’s Creed II was available on both the PS3 and the XBox 360 (and that was the game I really wanted to play) – it was of little help. Next was cost and value and there the PS3 really shone over the XBox 360. The PS3 had:

• Bluray Player
• Built in WiFi
• 120GB Hard Drive built in
• Free online service to play online games

The XBox had (at that time)

• DVD player
• 120GB Hard Drive
• No WiFi
• $50 per year cost to play online games
• high hardware failure rate (Red Ring of Death)

So, with little I knew I went with PS3. Great system. Played Assassins Creed II – loved it. Got a Little Big Planet – Loved it. The games go on and on. It was a great purchase. I use it to play movies and tv shows and Netflix instant watch. The PS3 slim even paired with my television so I can control it with my TV remote. It is the best bluray player that can play video games money can buy. (did you see what I did there?)

The only problem was online play. I don’t know anyone, besides my friend Matt, who has a PS3. And even then, we never exchanged contact information so I never added his PSN id to my PS3. The PS3 became much more of a solitary playing experience for me. I, in turn, stayed away from the online experience as much as possible, only playing games with strong single player campaigns. This solitary playing experience really didn’t make me feel connected to anything. I felt like everytime I fired up the PS3, I was entering my little bubble.

Horsies!

Then Red Dead Redemption came out and I immediately said “I NEED to play this game!” For anyone who knows me, you will know I have a serious love of the west and always wanted to be a cowboy. Aside from country music, sign me up. So after seeing screen shots I bought my copy and got ready for my girlfriend to leave for a month while she performed in the Edinburgh Comedy Festival to really dig in.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At this same time, all my friends started being like, “lets play Red Dead online together!” Cool, I thought as I entered the online world, only to find that video game worlds, unlike america from the 1960′s on, are segregated. XBox and Playstation people do not play in the same worlds online. So all my friends? They were in XBox world, while I was in the wild west of Playstation world, where I knew no-one except people who would snipper me wile I peacefully rode around picking flowers.

Literally.

Then the new XBox 360 “Slim” came out and essentially leveled the playing field. Although still not as good a deal as the PS3 Slim, to my mind, it did add WiFi and a considderable 250GB hard drive. Most importantly, it made the original XBoxes price drop. At $120 for an Arcade (Base) XBox 360, I thought “Lets see what all this rage is?”

Turns out, the rage is well placed. The XBox 360 world is, without a doubt, much easier one to navigate. Within 1 week I had reconnected with college friends, old roommates, current friends, old Tracks Up The Tree buddies. It seemed like everyone I ever knew was on XBox Live and that is a HUGE selling point being a newbie gammer. Playing with people you now, is like inviting people to your house for dinner - the last thing you want is strangers wandering around your house… or worse yet TEENAGERS!

The problem is, unless you know this getting into buying your first serious console, you wouldn’t know it was important. If you’ve never played multiplayer, then you don’t know how multiplayer works or if you’d like it? I didn’t know until I had put 6 months of playtime into my PS3, which again – I LOVE. But I love it for very different reasons. As far as a media center is concerned PS3 is better than 360. It handles the same multimedia file types as the 360, but handles them correctly (aspect ratio, multiple audio, handbraked files) and appears to actually have a better upscaler for low resolution video, but I still have to test this more.

But for pure, unadulterated video game playing – I now prefer the 360. Their easy to use navigation system, their friends lists, and their online play make it just a better gaming console to play games on.

So the Newbie Verdict

Which one to go with right? I think it depends on the person. If I had bought the XBox instead of the PS3, I probably would have bought the PS3 for InFamous, Uncharted 2, Little Big Planet, and upcoming Portal 2 (with Steam integration). You know I already bought a PS3 and went with an XBox so that’s no help.

Honestly it comes down to this. Do you watch a lot of movies and think Bluray is the future, but aren’t sure about how much time you will sink in this whole video game thing? Maybe you think you might play a few games per year, but may have weeks of inactivity while you get things done? I mean – who’s got the time right?! Then I would totally say, get a PS3. It’s an unbeatable media center that plays absolutely stunning video games. The lack of yearly fee to PSN (Microsoft charges $50 [soon to be $60] per year for access to their network) means you can always enter the online world whenever you want if you want without forking over money when you’re not.

If you think you’re REALLY going to get into video games, especially multiplayer, but already have a bluray player or think bluray is junk. I’d say XBox 360 is a better bet for you. It’s an awesome game machine that you can play multimedia files, Netflix, and LastFM on. As far as the whole gaming experience? The 360′s got it.

Lastly, Don’t let the prices fool you. That $200 XBox you’re looking at is actually a more expensive system over time than the PS3. Although you’re paying less up front, Microsoft will get you with their nickel and dime fees and add-ons, which Sony does not do. Once you buy the PS3 and a second controller, you are done ($350). The 360 needs multiple pieces to actually become a usable system. Although my 360 Arcade was $120, XBox Live Gold was $50, hard drive was $120, with another controller for your friends ($50) comes to $340. Pretty much the same price as a Playstation 3 with no fees for the first year alone. And if I want to upgrade my PS3′s hard drive to 500GB? Just slip in a $50 2.5″ hard drive and go. The Xbox you have to buy a special branded hard drive from Microsoft that is 250% more expensive than any hard drive I have ever seen.

Final Words

As you can see, It’s a difficult decision. Honestly I would go over to a friends house and play their gaming system and see if you like it. The only problem is, as I found out, 9 times out of 10, that’s going to be an XBox 360.

Come over to my house, I got both.

(And if you want to friend me on either PSN or LIVE my user on both is “FuntimeBen”. Really, what else would it be?)

If you’re a comedy nerd, such as myself, you may be pumped to find out that the upcomming portal 2 game on PS3, XBox 360, and PC features the vocal stylings of Stephen Merchant as Wheatley, your robotic tour guide. You might remember Merchant from his writing on the office and the hilarious Ricky Gervais Podcast.

Portal 2 is the follow up to the hugely popular and brain bending Portal from Valve Software. I’ve played it as part of Half-Life 2 Orange Box and thought it was awesome there, but apparently the PC and Mac versions are superior, although Portal 2 was announced with Valve’s steam engine on PS3, which will allow the upcoming title to be updated the same way the Mac and PC versions are. Bonus!

I’m really excited about Portal 2 as I find Valve’s games to be super creative and engaging. If I wasn’t a gamer before, this would have pushed me over the edge.

I will say I’m not a fan of all achievements. While a healthy ‘carrot on a stick’ achievement in a single player or multiplayer campaign will make me continue playing a game and pushing me to improve and grow, I am less of a fan of the start up the game, play for a minute or two and unlock an arbitrary 5pt achievement which will forever dirty my gamerscore.

While I understand that gamerscore is completely arbitrary and that the people who really care about it are not the same people I know, I still find these persistent micro scores a little annoying. And as I found out recently, you can delete a game with a 0 achievement score, you can’t remove one with 5 points. So while I do dislike achievements which are exceedingly difficult to obtain, achievements which happen too soon don’t feel earned. Really achievements should be actual achievements and not wrapped up in my learning the controls or figuring out the backstory of a character.

Of course these micro achievements do their job quite well in that I am now determined to beat those games I have smaller scores on, which I might not have continued playing otherwise. All I’m saying is, it makes me feel like less of a gamer when I see that puny little score in Viva Piñata and I realize it’s position in my “games I need to play before I die” list.

One day little Piñata, one day.

Welcome to your 30′s.

Once you hit 30, shit changes. Hardcore. When I was in my 20′s I was like “This is how it’s always going to be, pass the deep-fried butter pats!” but now I’m eating hummus with carrots. CARROTS PEOPLE! I thought they were only used to stuff up animal’s rectal cavities or used to flavor gravy. I look at people like Paul Westerberg and am like, what am I doing wrong? He had is blood replaced like 5 times by the time he was my age and I bet his knees don’t click when he goes up the stairs!

So all of this is further evidence that while I feel like a idiot child, I am in fact becoming a geezer who will shortly understand the allure of Matlock and early bird specials.

I get it.

Aww man this new Resistance 3 trailer looks pretty intense. I really hope they add a bit more story to Resistance. After finishing Resistance 2 (PS3) I was fairly unimpressed with the piddle they called a story. Fun game, but by the end, I was bored of the missions because I had no stake in them.

It was a run and gun shooter pretending it had some underlying alien experimentation/militarism story. But when it came down to it, I had absolutely no attachment to the lead character… what was his name? No idea and that is the problem. I couldn’t care less. This trailer seems to hint a bit more character based story. Maybe even a co-op story playing mode. All of which I would totally welcome.

Insomniac need to take a page from Irrational games and give some ideology to the Resistance franchise other than killing running aliens. Fingers crossed.

(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay released January 1968
Recorded Nov 22 & December 8 1967

Today we break from our usual format, and take you behind a song that I hold dear to my heart.

To my mind anything other than the purchased audio accounts for DRM and I don’t want it. While I’m all for legal downloads, I’m not into being tracked, no matter how legal you make it. Lucky for you and me the account information is actually embedded at the last moment of the iTunes purchase and download process. Which means it isn’t hard embedded, it’s only some additional meta-data. I will have to mention, at this point, that this process only works on iTunes Plus (.m4a) files downloaded from the iTunes Music store. It will not work on older iTunes Protected files (.m4p) although protected files can be upgraded in the iTunes music store to iTunes Plus for a nominal fee.

To remove the meta-data, you need an program which doesn’t recognize the additional meta-information and a way to save the audio losslessly. The program that fits the bill is Rogue Amoeba’s amazingly versatile Fission ($32). It’s a lossless audio editor for the mac and it’s a seriously wonderful tool that I use on a daily basis for editing audio files and creating ringtones. To remove the meta-information, open the iTunes Plus file and re-save the audio.

That’s it. It losslessly saves a .m4a with no user information embedded and best of all, it doesn’t recode or transcode the audio (as with some other burn a CD and reimport methods). It is exactly the same quality coming out as it went in.

A few things you might notice about this process is that the file size will drop after saving. Not entirely sure why. Perhaps removing all that extra meta-data cleans house a bit. You will also notice that the bit-rate for the file will go from 256kbps to something else. This is normal and because Apple, in an attempt not to scare it’s users with different  variable bit-rates from the encoding process, makes every file share the 256kbps regardless of it’s true bitrate. Lastly, Fission adds 0:00.032 of audio to the track? While odd, this shouldn’t actually effect the sound, as it’s 0.03% of a second, so unless you have crazy dog ears, you wont hear it.

Best of all, now you have an audio file that has none of your private data attached, which in my books is truly DRM free.

Show Notes

• Link of the Day: Regretsy
• lala.com
• My twitter
• My most favorite headphones Sennheiser PX 200

TUTT 57: Home of the Unfocusse…

Another show? 2 weeks after the last one? That’s impossible. 5 years worth of podcasting and this is what it results in. This show.

• 5 Years of podcasting starting with the first show
• lala.com
• podcasts to listen to
  • RISK! with Kevin Allison – like a dirty this american life
  • Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code

• Whip it
• Podcast dont’s

TUTT 56