loonyblog.

It took them a little while, but those amazing genius hackers finally did it…they successfully found a way to easily downgrade a v2.0 PSP firmware to the homebrew-happy v1.5. As these days my PSP is mostly just a portable movie player (especially since I got my DS), I was all over this.

The downgrade was only a little scary, and took all of five minutes (if that). I followed this handy tutorial, and it was a very painless process, and within ten minutes, I was up and running, playing emulated games on my PSP.

And good lord there are some awesome emulators already out for this thing. The most significant is the port of ScummVM, which is simply spectacular. If there’s a better use for a PSP than as a portable way to play Sam & Max, I don’t want to hear about it.

Other great emulators have allowed me to fire up classics like Herzog Zwei and Shining Force (on Genesis, naturally), as well as Military Madness (TG-16) and the complete run of Fantasy Zone (SMS). All are running at full speed, much to my surprise, and the whole thing is just awesome.

The funny thing is that I was this close to running out and picking up Burnout: Legends. But you know what? To hell with that. I’d rather play Herzog Zwei or Space Harrier any day over that.

Graves & MacGuffin is a work-in-progress graphic novel by Simon Carless and Adam Reed. Simon’s a fine English lad I’ve known for some time now (blog here), who also happens to be the editor of Game Developer Magazine and Gamasutra. The comic takes place in the games industry, and stars one of those unsung heroes of the industry, an overworked QA tester. It shows a lot of promise, so hopefully they’ll finish it, because I like what I see. Check it out.

You know, I don’t use Gmail, but I gotta say, its very presence has been phenomenal. Thanks to Gmail’s obscene amount of storage, it’s become the norm for similar services to provide equally astronomical amounts of storage, lest they look inferior. The last convert to this was Apple’s .Mac, which although I’ve used since its inception, has always been a distant runner to pretty much everyone else out there. I’ve used it because I love its integration with iPhoto, and while I could just as easily do everything I do with .Mac with other (cheaper) services, I’m a lazy, lazy man, so I’ve stuck with it.

This week however, .Mac made a great step towards actually competing with the big boys. It’s still lagging, but two new things brought it up a bit. The first, and most significant, is a full gigabyte of storage space for the iDisk and e-mail. You can still allocate however much you want to either one, so I’ve got 974 megs assigned to my iDisk, and a measly 50 megs for e-mail (since I only use my .Mac e-mail for software registration, that’s far more than I need as is).

Having a full gig (more or less) on my iDisk is great, and makes it actually a viable option for backups, whereas before it was okay, but way too small to do much of anything with. Helping in its usefulness is a new version of Backup, Apple’s unfortunately named software backup program.

The new version of Backup is great…really, really great. Rather than have an acceptable interface, the program now feels like an iLife app. While it won’t wake a machine from sleep (as far as I know), if you miss a scheduled backup, it’ll nag you the next time you turn on your machine (a big one for me, since I have to shut my machine down every night). It has a nice, clean interface, and comes with several backup “plans” by default. You can even set it to backup the same files to an unlimited number of different locations, so if I wanted to put my purchased music on the HD portion of my iPod, my external hard drive, my iDisk, DVD-ROM and my WebDAV accessible Shackspace, I can. Kick ass.

But .Mac is still behind in several major ways, most notably Homepage, which is pathetically limited. Yeah, you can use your own software to make a far better web page than anything you’d be able to do with their ultra-limited frontend, but I want ease of use…if I want to code HTML by hand, I’ll do it on this domain. Actually, all I really want is the ability to add longer captions to my posted albums from iPhoto. They barely give you any space to work with, and it’s a problem every single time I post photos.

But the new features are good, and it’s nice to see Apple hasn’t forgotten about us .Mac users. These changes showed up right around the same time those of us who signed up for .Mac at the beginning have to decide whether or not to upgrade for another year. This is no coincidence, and long time readers of this blog may remember that it was just over two years ago that Apple released Backup 2, making the software usable for the first time (that initial release was total crap, unable to back up to firewire drives or DVD-ROMs). I’m up for renewal in a few weeks, and I’ll be on for at least another year. Hopefully it’s not another 12 months before we see the next round of improvements.

Somehow, somewhere, some evil person or persons unknown have conspired to put the only two shows I really care about this season on at exactly the same time. I mean really…why do Smallville and Alias have to both be on Thursdays at 8:00?

Okay, okay. The initial shock has passed, and now it’s time to plan a way to live with this insane situation. Here’s what I’m going to do. Alias, I will plan on watching live, in high def, as I did last season whenever possible. Smallville, I’ll let the TiVo grab, since I don’t get WB in HD anyway (thank you Time Warner Cable). On those nights when I miss an episode (and for the next month and a half that’s going to happen fairly regularly) I’ll turn to BitTorrent for help (hey, it worked the last time I had this problem).

It still sucks though, especially since t means I have to consciously track down each missed episode of Alias. Grrr.

While I was in between meetings in the Paris leg of my tour last week, the news broke about Nintendo’s…unusual Revolution controller. I pulled it up on my laptop, and several people crowded around the screen to get a look at this wild and out-there design. If you haven’t seen it yet, swing by IGN and read their hands-on report. The gist is this: it looks like a remote control and has an integrated gyroscope for 3D motion tracking.

Now I am the crusader against alternative interface design. I happen to truly love dual analog sticks and a d-pad, I think the Dual Shock 2 is the most versatile and perfect game interface device ever created, and I absolutely detest most unnecessary attempts to reinvent the wheel. While I’m a DS owner (a proud one, actually, although that’s an update for another night), the only games I play on it don’t utilize either the dual screens or the stylus (and for the record I think three out of four games using a stylus suck ass).

So the big surprise about the Revolution controller is that I don’t hate it. I actually think gyroscope technology (assuming Nintendo gets it to work) is pretty cool, and it’s not hard to imagine a game like Tie Fighter not benefiting from a tilt sensor (actually, knowing Nintendo, it’ll be more like Star Fox…sigh). That’s assuming Nintendo works the kinks out of the technology they invested in…we have a Gyration mouse at work, and while it works, it’s very floaty. It works great as a PowerPoint remote, but as a mouse it’s just not accurate enough. But that’s beside the point, and I’m sure Nintendo will work that out.

But that’s just the technology. I think gyroscope games may be pretty cool (well, the ones that don’t graft it on to existing games in the same way so many crappy DS games try and wedge stylus gameplay in), but the controller itself has some issues. I don’t care what 1UP says, that “Nunchaku” configuration seems silly to me. I realize Nintendo wants to make their controller easy enough for a complete idiot to use, but it really wouldn’t have killed them to integrate an analog stick. If nothing else, it would have made backwards compatibility a lot easier. IGN has a cool mockup of how a GameCube/Revolution controller shell might look, and I’m sure we’ll see a few of those.

Ultimately with this thing, it’ll come down to the games. They didn’t go with an EyeToy like peripheral as their main input device, it won’t have a Fisher Price-like button layout like the GameCube does, the d-pad looks like it might actually be comfortable to use (unlike the GameCube’s) and there’s no (*shudder*) touchscreen, so those are all good signs. I doubt I’ll get one, but I’ll at least give it a shot instead of dismissing it outright like I expected to.

Last night Heather and I hosted an absinthe party, featuring absinthe I imported from the Czech republic (after discovering it while in Prague). It was an alcohol (and thujone) filled evening, with lots of people (okay, just me) stumbling around like idiots. Naturally, it made for good photos, which were taken by our friend Dan. As is my way, I’ve posted them online, so check ‘em out:

For the European tour for a certain turn-based strategy game that’s shipping late next month, I went on a whirlwind European tour, visiting three countries in five days. I didn’t get to see much of the U.K, Germany or France, but I did manage to snap some pictures of various stuff, so check ‘em out:

Transcript of a conversation at Charles du Galle airport, Paris, France:

Airline Security Officer: Did you pack your bags yourself?

Me: Yes.

Airline Security Officer: Have your bags been with you at all times?

Me: Yes.

Airline Security Officer: Do you have any electronic devices in your bags?

Me: (After smiling and taking a deep breath) Yes: a PSP, a Game Boy [I doubted they would understand just “DS”], a laptop, a digital camera, a mobile phone and a Blackberry.

Airline Security Officer: Do you have an electric shaver?

Me: (Looking surprised). What? No, of course not.

Yes, it’s true, hell has truly frozen over, as I am now the owner of a Nintendo DS, easily the most unsexy piece of video game hardware I’ve owned since the Jaguar (I love my Jaguar…but ugh is it ever ugly). So what on Earth possessed me to pick up this clunky game machine whose very existence runs contrary to my entire philosophy about game design? A GBA game.

Rebelstar: Tactical Command, to be exact. A moderately rated X-COM clone for Game Boy Advance.

Here’s the thing. I love my PSP. I really do. But most of what I use it for is non-game related. I watch lots of movies and I read classic comics, and I’ve been playing a lot of Metal Gear Ac!d, Death, Jr. and Wipeout Pure, but those games are only so-so. If you ask me what I really want in a handheld game, it’s simple…I want turn based strategy games, and lots of them. That’s the whole reason I put up with the silliness that is Ac!d, but that gets really silly after a while (Snake is a highly skilled operative, but he can’t fight back unless he randomly draws an attack card from his deck?). So when I saw that a moderately rated X-COM clone was coming out for GBA, I was sure I’d pick it up.

This is where the DS comes in. I have a GBA SP that’s been collecting dust for a while now. I figured I’d dust it off to play Rebelstar, but then it occurred to me that Rebelstar was almost certainly going to be the last GBA game to draw my interest (accept it…Nintendo’s “third pillar” plan with the DS was total bull). So it dawned on me that I could just sell the SP and all my old GBA games (plus some more recent stuff that I’ve been meaning to sell back) and use that credit to pick up a DS, which is a system with a future. In the near term, I could play Rebelstar as well as Advance Wars: Dual Strike, for that 2X turn-based win. And that’s just what I did.

An astute observer might notice that I have two games to play on my DS, neither of which uses the touch screen (Advance Wars uses it, but you can also use the d-pad, which generally works better). This is not a coincidence. I’m no fan of stylus gaming. I appreciate Kirby: Canvas Curse, but it’s just not for me. Nintendogs I can’t even look at, and don’t even get me started on the butchering of classic games and gameplay to shoehorn in stylus support. I do however acknowledge that there are some games where stylus support will work quite well (I’m definitely looking forward to AoE II, and hopefully those rumors about Blizzard porting StarCraft turn out to be true), but generally speaking, I like playing with a d-pad and/or analog stick.

But anyway, I’m pleased with my purchase (“purchase” being a relative term…between all the credit I got for selling back games and that recent price drop, I didn’t pay a dime for it). I’m off on a three-country European tour tomorrow (to show off a turn-based game of all things…hah!), and this will come in handy on my very long flights, alongside all the UMD movies I’m bringing for my PSP.

If you’re wondering what’s up with the lack of updates, the answer’s simple…we are now fully in what can only be described as the worst two months of the year in the video game industry, where all games enter crunch mode and ship to be out in time for that all-important holiday season. Plus I’ve been traveling like a madman over the last six weeks. To top it all off, this year is extra-specially brutal for me, so if updates are sporadic over the next couple of weeks I apologize. I’ve been sitting on an unfinished story for over a week now…I promise I’ll get it up soon.