Months back, I fixed the problems I was having with my old fat PS2, turns out it was just a dead battery. But even so, I had started receiving disc read errors when playing certain games. Metal Gear Solid 2, in particular. Rather than spend close to $200 on a new PS2 I decided to put that $200 towards a PS3 model capable of playing PS2 games.

The only such PS3 released in Australia was the 60GB. It’s not the perfect solution, as unlike the NTSC 60GB and 20GB PS3s, it is part hardware, part software compatibility. That is to say, it has the PS2’s graphics processor, the “Graphics Synthesizer”, but the PS2 CPU, the “Emotion Engine” is emulated with software. This means compatibility is nowhere near 100%, however it is good enough for me as almost all my games work perfectly.

Unfortunately, because they aren’t made anymore, 60GB PS3s have become quite rare and sort after, making them hugely expensive. They often sell for more than their original RRP of $999. However, I was lucky because I managed to snatch one up for $900 including a set of official Sony component cables and Casino Royale on Blu-ray.

I managed to sell my 40GB PS3 for $582, which seems high for an 8 month old console, but I still had 16 months warranty left plus I included Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, which I had two copies of. The rest of the money I was able to make up by selling off old accessories and games, such as my Action Replay 2 v2 and Vib Ribbon.

The 60GB PS3 I bought was in excellent condition. It had the inevitable scuff marks from wiping dust off of it, but so did my 40GB. The Blu-ray drive is in perfect working order and there is no signs of a failing HDD, though I will likely replace it in the future anyway.

Apart from being able to play PS2 games, there are other advantages too, such as an extra 2 built in USB ports, flash card readers and SACD support. Of course, there are disadvantages. For starters, as of May it has been out of warranty, so if it fails it will cost me something in the region of $150 to fix it. Also, it has a 90nm Cell processor which equals higher power consumption and more heat.

Overall, I am extremely happy with it and to be honest, it was now or never to sell my 40GB PS3 as the new 80GB PS3 is now available in stores for the same price and it comes bundled with a DualShock 3. In terms of features, it is indentical to the 40GB it is replacing, it just has more storage space. There is talk however, that it uses even less power hinting that Sony may now be including 65nm RSX chips, joning the 65nm Cell introduced in the 40GB.

I’ve moved my blog over to WordPress.com because I don’t need the flexibility of a self hosted WordPress blog and now I don’t need to worry about upgrading WordPress at every point release.

The web hosting company we were with was Host Gator, and apart from a recent stuff up concerning a password reset, the experience has been very good. I would recommend them to anyone looking for cheap, reliable, shared hosting.

If I were a PS3 fanboy, the most depressing news to come from it is that Final Fantasy XIII is no longer a PS3 exclusive! What in the world were Sony thinking (smoking?) when they decided to not do everything they possibly could to retain exclusivity.

There is some clarifying to do however. FFXIII will still be exclusive to PS3 in Japan, but it will appear on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 in English speaking territories. The obvious reason for doing this, is that Xbox 360 has a greater audience in North America and it makes sense for Square… but not for Sony. This is one occasion when Sony should have done a Microsoft and pulled out the wallet to “make things right”. If Sony want to get the PS3 ahead of the Xbox 360 worldwide, they need to tie-up exclusives, especially with the price not looking to be lowered anytime soon.

Final Fantasy Versus XIII is still a PS3 exclusive, but never-the-less I fear it may be time to bring back my custom “Sony is run by idiots” logo.

There is more bad news (good news for Xbox 360) owners. There will be exclusive Resident Evil 5 DLC (downloadable content) for Xbox 360 and Games for Windows. Fallout 3 will also be receiving “substantial” DLC on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms, though this doesn’t really bother me because Fallout 3 is BANNED in Australia.

Microsoft also revealed there will be a significant overhaul of the Xbox 360 dashboard, with a lot of new features. The only good news for PS3 owners to come from this press conference is that Viva Pinata 2 is an Xbox 360 exclusive.

Back to non-fanboy mode. I think it’s fair that all gamers, no matter their platform of choice get to experience great games. If I didn’t think this, I would be the biggest hypocrite known to man as I’ve long been pushing for games to be available on Linux. But I categorically do not like it one bit, that Microsoft is presumably paying huge amounts of money to secure exclusive rights to DLC.

Sony’s press conference is tomorrow and I have a sneaking suspicion they are shaking in their boots. Boy has Sony dropped the ball.

It was a long and boring assignment on Managing Complex Projects, Managing Quality and Development Methodologies.

Over the past two weeks I had three practical exams on Windows Security, Linux Security and Enterprise Wireless Networks. By some miracle I was able to achieve full marks in all three despite going into them feeling less than confident.

If I had to pick one exam that contained the most BS, it would have to the wireless one. Each student was given an incredibly unreliable D-Link wireless bridge. I was one of the two lucky ones to actually get their bridge working on the day and it was seen to be working by two teachers, however when it came time to get my exam marked it had stopped working!

I lost one mark because of this and I was pretty pissed. But then, suddenly, without me touching anything the bridge started working again! Thankfully I got that extra mark, but I cannot believe I was going to penalised for the crappy equipment we were told to use.

Thankfully, I don’t have to put up with that shit anymore though.

Last week, I purchased a mint condition copy of Metal Gear Solid 1 for PSX. The non-Platinum original version. It cost me $56, but it was well worth it. I played through it again and confirmed that it’s lost none of its magic.

I also finally finished collecting all the Dog Tags in MGS2, including those on Extreme difficulty. Although, I’m ashamed to admit I had to use my Action Replay to give myself infinite rations for some parts. It was just too hard! I purchased MGS2: Sons of Liberty when it was first released back in 2002, but about a year later Konami released MGS2: Substance which contained additional content such as 500 standalone missions. It also has a whole new set of Dog Tags to collect. I already have Substance for the original Xbox, though I will likely end up purchasing it for PS2 as well.

MGS3: Snake Eater was released in Australia in 2005, but I never played it because my PS2 was broken (or so I thought). But now I have decided that I must play it before MGS4, even though chronologically it takes place before the original Metal Gear, I still want to experience the evolution of the gameplay. MGS3 also had a re-release (this time called Subsistence) which included the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake games based on the MSX2 versions.

TAFE permitting, I should be able to finish MGS3 before MGS4 is released and if not, it’s no big deal really. I have plenty of time.

This is absolute bullshit. Now I’m going to be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars on eBay for a copy. Maybe I could just import it from somewhere and bypass the robbery Australian gamers have always experienced.

However, something I used to do when installing the old 7.5 version was to untick Email scanner and Resident Shield. The E-mail scanner was pointless to have installed because I don’t use local email. The Resident Shield, which scans files when they manipulated in anyway, is important for some but for people who are extremely careful it just slows down your system.

In 8.0, the Resident Shield cannot be unticked during installation and while it can be disabled from within AVG there is no way to ignore its status, which means AVG is constantly reporting that there’s a problem.

This is very disappointing. Hopefully they add the option to ignore the status of each component in a future update.

The Hideout originally began in July 2001. It was hosted on SourceForge using a friend’s account and reached 5,000 posts after 9 months. I started the forum as a replacement for the official DarkBASIC forum, as the software it was using at the time, Phorum, was very poorly featured compared to the other message board scripts of the time, such as YaBB SE.

It was quite popular, with lots of regulars from the DarkBASIC forums posting, however in March 2002 it was “hacked” and everything was deleted. I had a backup, but it was 3 months old. Rather than restore it, I decided to start from scratch in April.

Really, from that point on, it was destined to fail. Sure, most people did come back but they did not post in the same numbers and in August 2002, the new DB forums arrived which were more or less on par with YaBB SE in terms of features.

After the regulars dried up, it turned into almost a pure General Discussion forum, with only a little bit of game development talk happening. Though that did offer some interesting times, with the likes of Joey5rince and ste posting a lot of weird and wonderful things.

And of course, who could forget the legendary debates on religion and gay rights.

I don’t really feel the need to harp on anymore about “the good old days”, except to say it has been fun having my own semi-popular forum and was a more than worthwhile experience.

Thanks to everyone who participated over the last 7 years.

Last Post: Re: Mass Effect to be released on PC -

Maybe not ‘mutating’ per se, but there is emphasis on a non good evil type morality system which is affected by your dialogue. This has impacts on the way the game plays. I also think that there are multiple endings based on the choices you made.

It is open ended, though. Pretty non-linear, because you can choose the planets you wish to go to, but the level design on planets can be linear, I believe.

- P@

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At first I thought it was my iPod Video that had thrown in the towel, as I’ve heard of the headphone jacks on them dying before. I tried the standard iPod earbuds and they worked fine. I then tried the headphones with my PC and the left channel was still quiet.

Now I knew the problem was with the headphones, but I was confused as to how it would have happened. I first jiggled the end of the wire heading into the headphones and nothing happened. I then moved the end of the wire nearest to the plug and the left channel began cutting in and out.

I found that if I rested the cable in a certain position the connection would be maintained, so I struggled on like this for a few days but last night even that trick stopped working… so I smashed the fuckers.

Maybe 15 months was too much to expect from $70 AU headphones. But I will never recommend the brand to anyone in the future.

After the first practice session on Friday morning, it seemed as if Ferrari and McLaren were once again set to dominate the rest of the field. However, over the course of the next two practice sessions and qualifying, things started to go pear shaped for Ferrari.

Raikkonen made it through the first stage comfortably, but a small way into the second stage he was struck with a fuel pump problem and attempted to limp back to the pits. Unfortunately, he stopped less than 100m shy of the entry line and was deemed to have stopped on track. He was therefore prohibited from taking any further part in qualifying. Raikkonen would end up in 16th after qualifying, but 15th for the start of the race after Timo Glock was handed two 5 grid position penalties.

Felipe Massa qualified in 4th position. There was some speculation that he was carrying more fuel than those in front of him, but we can’t be certain as I’ll detail later.

It was a great but rather uneventful qualifying session for McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen, who in 1st and 3rd respectively. Perhaps the biggest surprise in qualifying was the excellent pace of the BMW Sauber team. Robert Kubica qualified in 2nd place a tenth of a second slower than Hamilton. Had Kubica not run wide on the exit of turn 12 he would have been on pole. His team mate, Nick Heidfeld qualified in 5th position.

Personally, the race was hugely exciting while also being disappointing in some ways. The ban of launch and traction control meant the start was going to be interesting and it was. At the front end of the field, Massa attemped to pass Heikki Kovalainen at the first corner but as he came alongside he used too much throttle and spun the car hitting the wall relatively lightly, but easily enough to damage the front wing. Thankfully he did not take out Kovalainen.

Further down the pack there was more carnage with Giancarlo Fisichella (who nows drive for Force India) getting some air. Japanese driver Kazuki Nakajima lost his front wing somehow and was involved in an incident with Anthony Davidson, which in turn took out Mark Webber on the first lap. This was hugely disappointing because Webber had good speed earlier on in the weekend.

I’m not going to summarise the whole race, as it’ll be a huge task. But I will say that I was shocked at the huge number of cars that retired during the race. Out of 21 starters, only 7 cars were running at the end!

• Giancarlo Fisichella
• Sebastian Vettel
• Anthony Davidson
• Jenson Button
• Mark Webber
• Adrian Sutil
• Jarno Trulli
• David Coulthard
• Felipe Massa
• Nelson Piquet Jr
• Takuma Sato
• Timo Glock
• Robert Kubica
• Kimi Raikkonen
• Sebastien Bourdais

Every one of those drivers retired from the race. However, Raikkonen and Bourdais were classified as finishing because they made it within 10% of the race distance. Even so, it seemed as if Ferrari would finish the round scoring absolutely no points until Rubens Barrichello was later disqualified for exiting the pit lane under a red light, effectively pushing Raikkonen up into 8th which is worth 1 championship point.

Lewis Hamilton went on to win the race quite easily as he encountered no problems or misfortune. His team mate looked like he had 2nd place in the bag until a safety car meant he could not pit under ideal conditions and ended up finishing 5th. Nick Heidfeld finished 2nd for BMW and Nico Rosberg scored his first podium finishing in 3rd for Williams Toyota.

No doubt there will be a lot of debate in the near future surrounding the ban of drivers aids and whether or not it was the cause of most of the DNFs. Ultimately, even if it was, I think it’s better this way. Bear in mind, this was the first race under the new rules and it will take a few races for the drivers to get used actually racing without TC. No longer can you aim your car where you want it to go and floor the throttle, passing off the hard work to a software program.

One last thing. I always enjoy the coverage of the Australian GP more than any other round of the championship. Why? Well some of it has to do with the increased amount of coverage. We see 2\3 practice sessions, qualifying and the race. Not to mention all the support races. But mostly, because I don’t have to listen to James Allen. He is one of the ITV commentators. Channel 10 use their commentary for all foreign races, while doing the Australian round themselves. At least, that’s how it was last year and the year before and the year before that, etc. This year however, we had to endure his Hamilton deep throating for qualifying and the race. It was TERRIBLE.

I’m guessing Channel 10 felt the need to use them because Neil Crompton no longer works there, after moving to Channel 7 with the V8 Supercars. But still, Greg Rust, Jeremy Shaw and Cameron McConville would have been many times better.

Update – 21/03/08: It seems as if my silent prayers may have been answered. The other day, it was announced ITV has lost the rights to cover Formula 1 to the BBC! This is excellent news, if it means I no longer have to put up with James Allen. Please let this be the case!