Recently in PS3 Category

I read (on Gamespot, via Blue's News) that a visually impaired gamer is suing Sony because its video games aren't 'accessible' enough. He sites examples of games (World of Warcraft) that has plugins with accessiblility features; that's reason to praise the WoW community, but hardly a reason to sue others.

Video games for the blind - what a contradiction in terms that is! The very word video is from the Latin videre, to see, combined with the 'o' as in 'audio'. I don't wish to come across like a rabid Daily Mail-reading reactionary here, but if you can't see, and the game is highly visuals-oriented, then you are pretty much fucked. It's not for you. That's actually not the game publisher's fault, however much one might try to bend the letter of the law to say otherwise. It's noone's fault.

Making computer games for disabled audiences is a great idea, and (since it is a business we're talking about here) it makes really good business sense to do so - it costs tens of millions to make a triple-A video game now, with no guarantee of success. Spending a fraction of the budget on a really, really good audio-based game would almost certainly bring success, along with tremendous positive publicity, and quite possibly a great deal more satisfaction than making a slightly better gorefest or pornographic driving experience.

I can't understand how it feels to be blind, but I know that I don't much like the feeling of someone trying to make their misfortune everyone else's problem. I hope this man's ridiculous case is thrown out of court, and that he goes away and finds a better way than this to deal with his unhappiness.

I have a replacement PS3, my venerable launch-day PS3 expired. The extended warranty worked rather well, to be honest. I have a shiny new console, some new games, and some money left over. Can't complain about that.

However...

I had put a 320GB hard drive in the old PS3, and (naively) thought I would be able to slap it into the replacement model and go. Nuh-uh. Complete epic fail on boot. After waiting for something, anything to happen, I had to reformat and reinstall the OS image from a USB stick, then start the tedious reinstall process.

The last backup I had was from 21 January. Restoring it took about two minutes, which is easily explained: It only restored a fraction of my files. At least my game saves were there. None of my stored games were there, nor any of the updates, nor any of my Singstore purchases.

I can redownload the games. That's just a matter of time. Lots and lots of time. The Singstore stuff was harder, I had to call Sony and ask them pretty please if they would sort it out for me. Crap.

I think that it will take me a few days to get fully working again. Until then, every time I put a bloody disk in I get asked to wait for a hundreds-of-megabytes download. Then, when the update's downloaded and installed, more often than not I have to wait ages for the installation. What a royal pain in the arse.

Whilst ranting about installations: If a game as hench as Killzone 2 doesn't need to be installed to the hard drive, then neither should anything else. It's time PS3 developers stopped being lazy just because every PS3 has a hard drive. It sucks to have to upgrade the drive or ration your games due to lack of space on a 60GB disk.

And finally: What the hell is up with the installation time for Bioshock? It takes about 20 minutes, even on my superfast 320GB drive. Why? There's no excuse for that.