The problem with modern consoles

Do you remember a time when you used to be able to put a game into your console and just play it? Remember the PS2/Dreamcat/Gamecube and every console before them? Well those times are gone. Now every time I want to play the latest game I have to update the fucking system. This is a pain in the arse and wholly unnecessary.

So when the Xbox 360 came out I was really hyped for it. I got the console and at first everything was great. Then I got to the updating. Back then I had really poor internet connection so downloading an update could sometimes take over 2 hours. When I got a PS3 I suffered the same problem. It was so slow that I used to go over to my friends house and play on his Xbox until mine had finished updating.

Well here we are in 2014 and the problem just seems to be getting worse. So tonight I decided to try and hook up my PS Vita using remote play to my PS3 so I could play vita games on the big TV. This meant that first of all I had to update my Vita software. Then I had to update my PS3 software. Then My PS3 demanded that it was connected to the internet via ethernet. Why? I don’t know.

After that I still couldn’t get the two to connect. The reason for this being that my PS3 had logged out of PSN. Why do I need to be logged into the PSN just to link the consoles?

But this got me thinking about bigger things happening with consoles recently. As far as I’m concerned a games console should be just that. A console to play games on. So why is it that every console nowadays has to have features like Netflix? I’ve already got half a dozen other devices in my house that can do this.

Also I know I’m ranting here, but why does every console have to have some sort of gimmick nowadays? What’s wrong with a basic controller? Why do I need 6 axis control, touch screens, touch pads, kinect, motion control etc?

All I want is a console where I put a game in and play the game. Is that really asking too much?

EDIT: Well now I feel like a idiot. Turns out remote play works the opposite way around to what I imagined.

Possible PC build

One of the things I enjoy doing is specing up and building new PCs. Unfortunately due to a lack of funds on my part I rarely get to do the later. However when I get the necessary money I intend on building a PC that I’ve specked up. This will probably be around November time. The main use I’ll have for the PC will be video playback and acting as a small home server. Anyway for those of you looking to build a small budget PC I thought I’d share what I’m looking at.

CPU

First of all the CPU. The CPU I was looking at using in the build was an AMD Athlon 5350 2.05GHz AM1 Quad Core. This is a 64bit processor with APU abilities allowing it to output 4k resolution. From what I can gather it is able to run lite games and stream video. The main reason I was looking at this CPU is to do with these abilities coupled with the fact that it only costs £41 and only needs 25W power to run. 

Motherboard

The mobo I was looking at was a ASRock AM1B-ITX. This mobo has HDMI and VGA output that I require incorporates the integrated graphics. It allows up to 16GB of DDR3 Ram and is ITX form factor. This means that I can keep the size to a minimum. The only real downside of this board is there is only 2 Sata ports. However at a cost of £22 it seems ideal.

RAM

For what I’m needing a 4GB ram chip seems plenty and the Kingston ValueRam of 4GB with 1600MHz speed is perfect for the price of £30.

HDD/SSD

The hard drive that I’m intending to run will be the most expensive part of the build. I already have a spare 64GB SSD that will be ideal for the OS but the HDD will have to be purchased. As I said before I want the build to act as a home server of sorts but I want to keep the power usage down. Therefore I’m opting for a WD Green Desktop 4TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5″ HDD. This costs £111 but if you want to keep your costs down I suggest using a much cheaper 2TB HDD.

Case

You may be thinking that I’ve missed the PSU but I haven’t. The case I’m looking at is a Powercool Q5 Black ITX Case. This case is tiny but has enough drive space to allow me to fit my drives. It also comes with a built in 180W PSU that is 80+ rated. It also only costs £40.

Final cost

When all this comes together the final cost of the build is £246. If you opted for a smaller HDD you could probably bring this down to less than £200. That’s pretty sweet for a PC with those specs and such a small size.

Quick update from me.

OK so I haven’t posted in a long time now so I thought I’d best make a quick update to let people know what’s going on.

First of all I’m alive. Now that’s out of the way I’ll give a quick list of excuses on why I haven’t posted. First of all I was busy with exams at university (I’m a part time student), second I’ve been busy with other things. These include making a game (a shitty RPG, I’ll release it free here when it’s complete), making a podcast, making youtube videos and planning a trip to Japan as well as managing work. That’s the excuses out of the way.

Talking about my trip to Japan, this will be my second time visiting the country. Unlike the last time I visited I plan on going to places outside of Tokyo. I can do this thanks to the Japanese Rail Pass. For those that don’t know the JPRP is a ticket that allows you to board most trains in the country for free. I say free but the pass actually costs about £158 for a week. However this is a big saving if you’re planning on traveling around on the bullet train like I intend to. I’ll update on the things I get up to when I get back.

I’m also planning on making a post in the future about the Sega Saturn. I don’t know how long this will be though.

While I’ve been away from the blog I’ve also managed to 1cc Touhou 7, 8 and 10 giving me 4 1ccs in total.
Here’s the vids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6VqzkmFKSM&list=PLWfYCweH68xtydNNMlkkv0SkuGd3mDAU-

I’ve also been keeping up to date with teh currently airing anime. Whilst I haven’t been able to pick up as many shows as I’d have liked to, my top picks are:
Rail Wars
Aldnoah.Zero
Akame ga Kill
Sabagebu!
Hanamonogatari
Tokyo Ghoul

Check them out if you want.

Anyway I plan to be more active from now on so expect more posts in the future.

MCM May 2014

I took a trip down south to London town to go to the MCM (Movies, Comics, Memorabilia) convention there. It’s not the first time I’ve been. In fact I’ve been to the last 3 in a row now. This was however one of, if not the, worst organised comic cons that I’ve ever been to. I’ll talk quickly about the main things that went wrong.

Queues

We all expect long lines when we go to a comic con especially to one as large as MCM. What I don’t expect is to purchase a weekend priority pass ticket only to find that when I turn up on the Saturday with my wristband on that I have to queue with people who’ve no tickets. It’s not really a priority pass at that point is it.

The initial queue could have been forgiven. However the new system implemented cannot. For those of you who have never been to MCM London the system is usually as follows:

See that big entrance there? You can normally enter and exit through those doors. It’s that simple. You go in and out smoothly no queues no problems.

This wasn’t the case this year. This year you had to exit through those doors and then re-enter the queue of people waiting around the outside of the building if you wanted to get back in. You could only get in around the side of the building. Let me show you the length of the building.

It’s pretty big and seems even bigger when you’re walking the full length of it all day.

Want to go out for a smoke? Have a queue.

Want to go to a shop to buy a drink or food so you can avoid con prices? Have a queue.

Want to view the cosplays in the sun? Have a queue.

To make matters worse at one point a thunder storm rolled in. It only lasted 15 minutes and wouldn’t have been a problem except for the fact that security didn’t let people in through the front doors and instead made them queue in a thunder storm outside. This destroyed 2 of my friends’ cosplays.

There was really no need for this system and whoever thought it was a good idea should be sacked.

Lack of details and directions

Another issue that I had was the complete lack of maps showing people where things are. I know that maps were available online prior to the event but these were quite low res and hard to read. It would have been much easier if a few were put up on the walls in the halls to help people get there bearings at such a large event. The same could be said about the time of events and such.

Fake goods

Once again there were unscrupulous dealers trading fake goods at the con. The same dealers that have been complained about in the past for selling fake goods. This just confirmed a suspicion of mine that MCM really don’t care if the dealers there are selling cheap fake items. Fake goods are a pet hate of mine.

Complete lack of security inside of the convention

Inside the convention itself I didn’t see a single security personnel. While this didn’t affect me personally couldn’t help but feel sorry for the dealers. I saw someone walk up to a stall grab about £60 worth of goods and just run off with them. I appreciate that security can’t be everywhere but a few wondering around may have helped curb the thieves.

Overzealous security outside the convention

Outside of the con the security was the complete opposite. They seemed to be everywhere. That would be fine but they were stopping people who had bought swords, blunt replicas in cardboard packaging, and removing there wrist bands so that they couldn’t re-enter the con hall. Luckily this didn’t affect me or my friends but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for people who had bought full weekend passes only to have them removed for buying something.

Good things

Despite all of my bitching, overall I enjoyed the con. There was allot of Touhou cosplayers there and I managed to get a group photo of most of them.

There was also a dealer selling Touhou remixes for £9 a pop which I thought was a really good deal. To make things even better one dealer was selling Touhou doujins for £5 for 2. This was due to him going out of business, which is a sad affair really, but this allowed me to pick up some up cheap.

Goodsmile also made an appearance selling figures. I picked up the yukata version of Madoka for £80.

The con was also used as an excuse for me to do some general sightseeing in London and I managed to visit the K-On! Café which was cool.

So overall the con was good but it has allot of areas that it needs to improve if it wants to stay the top con in the UK.

 

My 1cc of Touhou EoSD

After a long time playing I finally managed to 1cc Touhou 06 Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil.

Here’s the replay.

A guide to figure collecting

As someone who owns quite a few figures I feel like I can pass on some of my experiences over the last few years on to others who may be just starting out or curious about the hobby.

So to begin where to buy figures from. Before I actually start telling you where to buy from I’ll start out by saying DO NOT BUY FROM eBay! eBay is full of fakes from China. You may go on and find a figure for £10 on auction that is worth £60 but chances are that when it arrives it will be a fake. I made this mistake myself when I first started buying figures when I purchased a BRS “Figma” for £15. Now you may think I don’t care if it’s fake as long as it looks good. Think again. Fake figures have bad designs and terrible defects. The fake figure I own spontaneously falls to paces and looks really shoddy in comparison to the real one.

Here’s the fake

Not only does the colour of the hair and eye flames look faded but you might also note that the joints seem too long. Not too mention the fact that every time I pick it up it falls in 2 pieces.

Here’s the legit one

Notice the extra attention to detail and the fact that I can actually pose it without it falling to fucking pieces.

OK rant over about fakes. Another site that I’d generally avoid is PlayAsia. Whilst all the products are legit they charge far too much for both the figures and the shipping. Generally a figure from PlayAsia will cost you £20-£40 more than from elsewhere.

So where do I buy from? From my experience the best place online is amiami.com The site is in English and the prices are reasonable with decent shipping costs to the UK. You can also preorder figures and not pay for them until they are ready to ship. There’s also 1999.co.jp/eng/ Which everyone tells me is good and cheap but I have no experience buying from them myself.

The only problem buying online is the customs charges. Here in the UK they charge you 20% VAT and a £8 handling fee. That’s right they charge you £8 for them seizing your parcel. If a Figure costs 10,000 yen you’re looking at roughly £20 worth of tax charges (robbing bastards). Of course parcels don’t always get seized but in my experience 90% of the time they do. Now you can avoid this by going through a 3rd party proxy which basically involves sending your parcel to some company in Japan who’ll then send it on to you as a gift. I’m pretty sure that this is illegal and I’m no lawyer so do it at your own risk (I’ve never heard of anyone being done for this).

Now if you want to avoid buying online you can either buy from a shop like Tokyo Toys in London (Pricy) or one of the weird obscure shops in London or Manchesters China towns (these shops are hard to find but cheap). Alternatively you can attend a convention like MCM, LAC or any other anime con. These cons have lots of dealers selling lots of figures, but beware. There are a few unscrupulous dealers who sell fakes. (see http://www.mcmexpogroup.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=235&t=10574) The worst part is that, at MCM at least, the staff don’t want to know and won’t take action against a dealer selling fake figs (I’ll save my rant about MCM staff for another time). So if you’re buying from a con try to ensure that the figure is genuine. This can be difficult but don’t be afraid to ask to look at the figure and if it’s second hand ask for the dealer to get it out of the box. It’s also worth pointing out that figures at cons can be more expensive than buying online and paying both shipping and custom charges so always do your maths.

I hope this will help people and you can of course always go onto the buyfag thread on 4chans /a/ and read the guide there if you want to know more.

Flandre Scarlet Figure

Just thought I’d share my new figure.

Dubs VS Subs

I’ll give you 3 reasons why I don’t like dubs as a whole in both anime and live action.

1.) During the original production of a movie/series the director is heavily involved in how the character sounds and tailors the voice to what they desire from that character. This doesn’t happen in dubs. A new director is brought in and changes things.

2.) I watch (most) stuff as it airs in Japan and get accustomed to the characters voices.

3.) Dubs often translate things differently from the Japanese translation for no good reason, and I’m saying this as someone who can speak basic Japanese.

4.) I know I said 3 but here’s point number 4. Allot of dubs (and I’m mainly talking about Funimation here) have the exact same voice for multiple characters who are completely different in personality. There’s no change in tone and it skews the personality of the character.

Does the above mean that I don’t ever watch dubs? No. I wouldn’t be able to put forth an argument against dubs if I hadn’t seen/heard them. Dubs are good when you’re drunk and you can’t read subtitles anymore. What annoys me is people who watch dubs assuming that I’m some sort of elitist for watching things how I prefer to watch them.

If you want to watch dubs go ahead, you can eat shit all day as well for all I care, just don’t start preaching to me about how your shit tastes better than my steak.

Sega Dreamcast. Why it was the best and why it failed.

OK so I’m going to talk about the Dreamcast here, Segas last ever proper console release.

Now the Dreamcast was an impressive piece of kit for the time. Not only were the graphics superior to all other consoles, with the PS2 and Gamecube not yet released, but it also had internet connection. The Dreamcast was the first console to support online gaming from the box and developed a rich community in games like Phantasy Star Online. There was also an internet browser included that allowed the Dreamcast to be used like a PC. Sega also thought ahead and made a space in the consoles Mobo for a VGA output to be added allowing 480p gaming. You could also buy microphones, keyboards and other peripherals as extra add ons. There was also a TV combo pack that effectively turned the console into a PC.

As well as all this hardware there were the VMUs which acted as a display screen in the pad as well as a memory card. You could also download software from game titles and use VMUs as a portable console.

The Dreamcast also had some outstanding games released for the system. Chu Chu Rocket, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue and Resident Evil Code Veronica (the best Resi game ever made) as well as lots of other releases.

So why did the Dreamcast fail?

The Dreamcast was released in 1999 (or 1998 for the Japanese market). A time when people were growing bored of Alt Rock and Rap started its steady decline. A time when for some unknown reason people thought that all the computers in the world would crash and airplanes would drop from the sky due to Y2K. It was also 4 years after the Sega Saturn was released (something I’ll touch on later).

Now when the Dreamcast was released in the west things all looked promising for Sega. They sold more consoles in the first 2 weeks in North America than ever recorded before, over 500,000. There was also over 100,000 machines sold in Europe. Unfortunately the Japanese release wasn’t as successful due to a lack of titles and the Sega Saturn still performing well.

Now it’s worth pointing out that the Dreamcast used GD-R discs not CD-R. A GD-R disc held 800mb of data as opposed to the 700mb on a standard CD. GD-Rs are also unreadable on PCs, or so Sega hoped. However it wasn’t long before people discovered a way of ripping GDs and uploading a CDI image on the net to share with people. Now once you have a CDI image you can simply burn the file to a standard CD pop it into the Dreamcast and it will work like the original game. This meant that piracy on the console was rampant. Not to mention the fact that the PS2 was released a year later using DVDs and acting as a DVD player.

Now Sega pumped some serious money into this machine and not just on the console development. As an example just look at Shenmue. When Shenmue was released it was the most expensive game ever made. If every person who bought a Dreamcast purchased the game then the title would still have made a loss.

Throwing all of this money into a machine when a company is facing financial difficulties was a bad idea. This wasn’t helped by how much piracy was affecting the sales of titles and 3rd party developers began loosing interest. This caused the Dreamcast to go out of production only a year and a half after its release and is ultimately why it failed.

Why the lack of funds though?

I’m not finished yet. The Dreamcast in my opinion would have been a huge success for the company in the long run if they had been able to keep up production. As I said above production halted due to a lack of money and this was down to Segas previous bad decisions.

Lets go all the way back to the Mega Drive, or Genesis as it’s known in America. The Mega Drive was a big success for the company but when Sega decided to release the Mega CD they started loosing money. This was their own fault due to them not shortly afterwards releasing the 32x, which effectively allowed the Mega Drive to act as a 32bit system. Sales for the 32x were poor though due to a lack of game development and the impending release of the Saturn. The Saturn was released just 6 months after the 32x and pissed off a lot of Sega fans. The Saturn also struggled due to the release of the superior PS1. Now you may say that there was little Sega could do about the PS1 but it’s worth pointing out that the PS1 was originally being developed by Sega until they decided to bin the idea in favour of there inferior consoles. This ultimately led to the company loosing market share for years. Less market share means less profits and less money to ensure the future of the company and ultimately destroyed them.

How to use a PS3 controller on PC without motion joy

My PC pad broke today so I decided that I’d try to use my PS3 one instead. After doing a bit of googling I came across a program called motion joy. Not only did this program look horrendous but it also didn’t work on my PC. Then I came across something called LibUSB which works perfectly. Here’s a quick guide on how to use it.

First thing you want to do is plug your PS3 controller into your PC via the USB cable. At this point windows will then install some drivers that don’t work.

Then download LibUSB from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb-win32/files/

Extract the program wherever you like and go into the bin folder and run inf-wizard.exe.

Select the PS3 game pad from the device list and make a note of the vendor identification and the product identification numbers.

Once installed go to control panel, devices and printers, and right click the PS3 pad.

Click properties and go to the hardware tab. Click properties again and select the driver tab.

Then select uninstall drivers. This will remove the drivers that windows automatically installs that don’t work.

Unplug your controller and replug it in.

Then go to the amd64 folder (if you have a 64bit system) or the x86 (If you have a 32bit system) in LibUSB and run the install-filter-win.exe

Select to install a filter and select your device using the vid (vendor identification) and pid (product identification) to identify your device.

Congratulations your device is now ready to use.

If you want to use your pad in PCSX2 then in the controller plugin settings select DualShock 3 native mode. Then run a game or homebrew and hold the PS button until the red light at number 1 on the pad remains constant. You can then map all the buttons as normal.