Myshuno

To choose a gaming console

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:51:00 +0100

Edge gaming city by Gary Lucken

Warning! You’re about to read a very long post about me rambling about gaming consoles. Please be careful not to overly exhaust yourself while reading. Reader discretion is advised…
So if you’re following me on Twitter or Facebook (which is very likely), you might’ve noticed I’ve been talking about gaming consoles, mostly about the differences between PS3 and Xbox360. The reason is I’m looking for something to play some games on, since the Mac still isn’t the ideal gaming rig they want you to believe. Even though there’s nothing wrong with the hardware, most ‘hard core’ games still require me to switch over to Windows on boot camp, which is kinda annoying.

Now my history with gaming consoles is quite rocky, as you could’ve read from earlier posts on my blog. In short: I had a CD-I player, which was old and compared to other devices from Nintendo and Sony, just under par as gaming device, next I had an Xbox, which just felt like one huge mistake to buy since I could barely find any games which appealed to me, and Xbox360 was announced not long after I bought it and Microsoft just completely dumped the original Xbox after the 360 came out, and now I’ve got a Wii, which is pretty much collecting dust. Yes, the new Zelda is out, but I never had any history with any other Zelda game, so I don’t really care.

However, today the situation is a bit different. I’m older, games improved immensely since the days of CD-I, and there’s actually several ‘hard core’ games now I really think they’re great, but just not out on PC for several reasons. The question is, which platform to choose?

Now I’m not even going to start with Wii U. The Wii is probably the first and last Nintendo console I’ll ever own. I mean I had fun with it, but eventually the waggling around just gets old and gimmicky, it’s crap with third party support and online gaming, and this is probably not going to change in the future. As far is known with Wii U it just seems like it’s a Wii with slightly better graphics and a freak accident between a Wii controller and a Nintendo DS. So case closed on that one.

So it’s really between Xbox360 and Playstation 3. Throughout the years there’s been a lot of arguing about which one is better, mostly in flame wars by fanboys. So I’ve tried to research both platforms on things I really want in a console, but without relying too much on average gamer reviews. This is mostly because I’m not your average gamer: I don’t really like to spend my free time to relax after a long day of work by shooting down soldiers/zombies/aliens/monsters in the most bloody and awful way possible. In fact I don’t really get most people who do. Yet most games these days pretty much revolve on killing <InsertHorribleThingsHere>. But if you look at both console exclusives with that in mind, the 360 comes forward as your friendly killing simulator, while the PS3 gladly gives you nice alternatives in other aspects of gaming, sometimes even in very experimental and creative forms. Just think of games like Little Big Planet, Heavy Rain, Flower and Echochrome. I just can’t find stuff like that on the Xbox, since Americans apparently just prefer to shoot stuff or move in very silly ways in front of their TV set.

Mind you, the Xbox360 has got its own perks. It provides a better online gaming experience, multi platform games usually just look better on it, the console interface looks a bit friendlier and the avatars are a fun and quirky way to express yourself towards your friends. It’s also a lot more social. The 360 does a much better job in connecting friends with each other with things like cross-game voice chat, integrated profiles across the platform and connectivity with Facebook and Twitter. Plus, most people just have an Xbox360 over a PS3. You’re more likely to find your friends on Xbox instead of PS3. That said, I just don’t like to pay an additional charge for doing anything online. You never have to do this on any other platform, so why do it now? Yes, it might be more reliable compared to PSN, but in this case I prefer to be frugal: I’ve got enough other things I need to spend on a regular basis.

Then there’s the whole motion control thing, which seems to be all the rage now. So far it only seems popular with dancing games and gimmicky mini-games. The technology behind Kinect does seem to be superior over Playstation Move, but I don’t have the astronomical space needed to use Kinect properly, plus I don’t like to put a thing the size of an aircraft carrier on top of my TV in order to catch some red balls on a screen. And with Move it just looks like you’re waggling a glowing rave stick, which to me makes it hardly any more immersive to play games compared to mashing buttons on a controller.
So far, motion controlled gaming never really took off beyond being fun for a while as a gimmick. And my prediction is that it’ll stay a gimmick until gaming really becomes fully immersive, which won’t happen for a while… (Playstation 9 anyone?)

So in conclusion, my preference still goes towards Playstation 3. The 360 has a lot going for it (better online, more social, nice interface), but in the end the PS3 just got nicer games. Especially this year had been a pretty lousy one for 360 exclusive titles, with nearly all them as gimmicky Kinect titles, while PS3 still went strong with titles like Uncharted, Resistance and InFamous. Now I haven’t made my decision just yet, but I think I have an idea what I’m getting for Christmas this year… ;-)

My Amazon Wish List

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:00:05 +0200

My Amazon Wish List:

I made a wish list on Amazon. Just some books I’d like to own someday, mostly humorous or something techy. Feel free to have a look.

Mix tape

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:54:16 +0200

It’s been a while since I last posted something here, but let me explain before you’re going to hunt me down with pitchforks and torches. You see, I’m currently doing an internship which at the end (hopefully) will bring me a bachelor degree. And one of the things you’re not supposed to do there is writing wannabe memoirs for your personal blog, so there.

Anyway, to make it up to you guys I decided to share something special: a mix tape. Now you might say: ‘Well, what in the blazes is so special about a mix tape, good sir?’ Well first I’d note that you’re talking like you’re from a 1950’s British detective film, and second: I don’t really share my music. Mostly because I usually listen to it when I’m alone, and because I’m occasionally a selfish jerk, especially when it comes to this. So you should be very pleased right now while I’m doing this. You’re welcome.

So, what’s on the mix tape? Well it’s mostly electronic/acoustic alternative music from bands nobody has ever heard of. You have to be into this kind of stuff to like it, so if you’re into upbeat pop music, some R&B Hip Hop ‘thang’ or anything from Glee, don’t bother listening to this. Of course, I can’t just give you a tape here (older people: yes I do know what a tape cassette is, and a vinyl record, I’m not stupid. I used both myself) so I decided to make a playlist here, but make it a legal one by putting it on Spotify (sorry America, for once not available in your area! Take that with your Pandora and Hulu crap. Muha!). And if you really like it, you can also get it on the iTunes store on my Ping profile. And yes, I’m actually using Ping but just for this. I know it’s hopeless for anything else, thank you.

So here it is. I hope you’ll at least tolerate it for what it’s worth…

1.       Sufjan Stevens – Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version)
2.       Aska, Flea, Nick Zinner – There are many of us
3.       Peter Bjorn And John – Young Folks
4.       The Radio Dept. – Keen On Boys
5.       The Cinematic Orchestra – To Build A Home
6.       The Radio Dept. – Pulling Our Weight
7.       Sigur Ros – Hoppípolla
8.       Aphex Twin – Jynweythek Ylow
9.       Jose Gonzalez – Heartbeats
10.     The Cinematic Orchestra – Channel 1 Suite
11.     Graffiti6 – Stare Into The Sun
12.     Coparck – The World Of Tomorrow
13.     Angus & Julia Stone – Paper Aeroplane

Overheard

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:06:17 +0100

Librarian Woman: Do you know any typical 'guy books'?
Librarian Man: Guy books?
Librarian Woman: Yes, you know, books that guys usually read. I thought you'd know something.
Librarian Man: Oh I don't know, I don't read.
Librarian Woman: You don't read?
Librarian Man: No, I don't read anything at all actually.

Gaming rig (2)

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 23:12:06 +0100

So a while ago I was talking about what kind of ‘gaming rigs’ I used to have (in short: not much). I wasn’t really planning to get any new PC’s other than my laptop. That would just be confusing with trying to get all my documents and other work sorted and stuff. (Of course, we’ve got things like Dropbox now, but this was just after the .com crisis) I did want to have something that was dedicated to play games, without having to kick my brother from his PC.

So I decided to get myself an Xbox in 2005(-ish), not knowing that the Xbox 360 was just around the corner. And contrary to the Playstation 2, Microsoft basically abandoned the old Xbox right after the 360 was released.
The game line-up for the Xbox wasn’t very appealing to me as well. There was Halo, some WWII shooters, more shooters, and some more ported junk from other platforms. So nothing special really. Looking back it was pretty much not worth my money at all. The worst of all was the infernal noise coming from that thing. I couldn’t even use it as a DVD player without maxing out the volume of my TV. It’s basically a set of mini jet-turbines inside a black box, it was horrible. I can’t really remember why I bought it in the first place.

So later on I decided to give it another try with a Wii. I’ve had a lot more fun with it compared to my Xbox. I’ve played games like Super Mario Galaxy and Wii Sports for hours on an end. Though today it’s just collecting dust. There aren’t a lot of new games on the Wii that interest me right now, and it doesn’t help that Nintendo is basically the only developer making decent games for the console. I’m only using it when there’s a party with everybody bored to tears. I think that the Wii just works better as a ‘party’ device, but not really when you want to do something on your own.

So where do I play my games on? Well, there’s still my laptop of course. And I’ve been playing loads of iPhone games lately. But that’s something for another time.

Yes, that means there’s going to be a part 3 to this story as well! So stay tuned!

Tomorrow?

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:14:27 +0100

Random person: Hi
Me: Hey
Random person: Say, didn't you tell us that you were going to write a follow up article for 'Gaming rig'?
Me: Yes...
Random person: And didn't you say you were going to finish it 'tomorrow'?
Me: Yeess...
Random person: Well 'tomorrow' was about 2 days ago already!
Me: Your point being?
Random person: You're late!
Me: Well sometimes things just don't go as planned. I'm way too busy right now to write articles.
Random person: Right, but you do have time to write a ridiculous conversation where you're pretending to talk to some random person?
Me: Why yes, yes I do.
Random person: I don't get it
Me: Well, I guess that'll be one of life's great mysteries...
Random person: No it isn't!
Me: Shut up

Gaming rig (1)

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 21:24:00 +0100

I wouldn’t call myself much of a gamer. In fact, I rarely play them. But on the other hand I do love games, and in general they’ve always been an interest of mine.

So, what’s holding me back from actually playing a game? Well, mostly time shortage because of work, me being able to amuse myself just fine by browsing the internet and then there’s the fact that I really don’t have a decent ‘gaming rig’ (which is gamer lingo for ‘device that is able to play games’).

I was born and raised to be a PC gamer. Mostly because my parents never bothered to buy me a console or even a gameboy when I was little. We did, however, have our own PC. My father had to do work at home, so we needed to have one. Apparently, I already used it when I was about three years old. And remember: this was 1990, we didn’t even had Windows then, let alone a screen capable of showing more than two colours.

I played a game called Leisure Suit Larry once when I was about 4 or 5 years old. Now if you know this game, you might start to wonder what the hell was wrong with my parents. You see, Leisure Suit Larry was basically a game about a guy looking for a hookup to have sex. I was completely oblivious though about the goal of the game. I just saw a little pixel guy walking around in colourful, yet sometimes weird environments. Oh, and you couldn’t cross the street. I remembered that, cause you’ll get run over by a car…
I don’t think the game actually hurt or traumatized me in any way, mainly because I never got the point where something ‘bad’ actually happened. And I think I liked another game called California Games much better…

Anyway, I digress. Years passed by and new PC’s came and went. My brother got his own brand new PC once with one of the first Pentium 4 processors. Mostly because he had a slightly larger interest in games than me, so all I got was my mothers old Pentium III PC. Then again, he’s still using that thing at this very day, while I’m using a relatively new laptop with a Core 2 Duo in it. So I’m far beyond the point of jealousy at the moment. ;-)

My Pentium III has been gone for years now, and I have been working on laptops ever since. I needed a laptop for school. And I liked the fact that I can carry it around to wherever I like. It’s anything but a gaming rig though.

So, how do I play games now? Well, I’ll save that for a post tomorrow. Goodnight!

The agonising road to Macness - Hellooo?

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 22:30:00 +0200

I write an editorial on a website for wannabe Mac owners called MacDesperate. I copy-pasted the entire thing here just to give my own blog an update. I could’ve come with something original, I know, but screw you anyway…

Hi there! You still here? Me neither. Well I am now, but that’s not the point.

Anyway, we’ve had some developments during the last few months, mostly consisting of El Jobso doing several keynotes announcing new and exciting things like the iPhone 4, the iPad, the new Apple TV and last but not least OS X Lion.

As Apple fans and aspiring Apple users, we all know about this stuff. So I’m not going to bore you with endless analyses about things like what shade of grey they used on the back of the iPad, or how they seemingly added blurry effects in OS X Lion when you use Mission Control.

No, I’m going to bore you with an update about my agonizing road to Macness: an endless quest full of (mostly financial) obstacles and disappointments. Yes dear reader, it really is becoming an agonizing experience. Forget the constant war and suffering in the middle-east, the lack of human rights in countries like Myanmar, and the hunger and disease in Africa: this is much, much worse. (FYI, this is called sarcasm. Thought you ought to know)

Why? Well my goal to save money for my own Mac isn’t coming much closer. I’ve been here for nearly a year and the meter is still stuck on 23 Euros. So I must be doing something wrong (“ya think?”). In fact, I need to adjust my goal because the price doesn’t add up with the current line of iMacs. It’s gone up from € 1,241 to € 1,544, mainly because they’ve started using new Intel processors, and I’d like to upgrade mine from i3 to i5. So the sneaky bastards actually made the iMac more expensive than the earlier models. No wonder they didn’t announce this during a keynote.

So what am I going to do to raise some more money? Well, first thing: get an internship where they actually give you money while you work there. That might help…I think. Second: maybe get a job till I actually start with my internship, cause it might take a while before I’ve found something.
So that’s basically my plan for the near future. Let’s hope it actually works this time.

There is some good news to tell though. They finally bothered to open a (semi) real Apple store in my city! It’s still a reseller, because Apple doesn’t do retail in Holland for some reason, but it does look like the ones you see in the US…minus things like the genius bar, workshop area and a huge glass cube on the street, but it’s a start.

But there’s even better news. Remember my iPhone thingies post from last spring? Where I said that it wasn’t really worth to buy an iPhone because it’s got a crappy camera without flash, no multitasking, loads of crashing apps and a horribly expensive contract? Well I’m a huge hypocrite now cause I actually bought myself an iPhone 4! I somehow managed to lose my old phone, so I had to get a new one anyway, and this seemed like the best choice for me.
Now Apple did manage to fix nearly all the problems I mentioned above…more or less. Plus, I managed to get a 1-year contract instead of a 2-year one, which makes me slightly more comfortable, but I still have the feeling that I’m being an idiot for paying 30 Euros a month for not calling anyone.

An idiot with an iPhone 4 though… ;)

So what is the deal with Belgium? They seem to be in political...

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 17:51:00 +0200

So what is the deal with Belgium? They seem to be in political crisis for months now, and it doesn’t seem like the situation is going to improve very soon.
The Dutch speaking people from Flanders want more independence from the French speaking people in Wallonia, but that’s the last thing that ‘Wallonians’ want.

To understand how complicated the situation really is, you need to know how the country works. It’s really complicated, but I think that this video explains it very well.

What happens when you put a girls choir together with...

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:24:01 +0200

What happens when you put a girls choir together with alternative rock music? Well…this! Scala & Kolacny Brothers is a girls choir from Belgium who mostly cover music from bands like Radiohead, U2, Nirvana and even Rammstein. Sounds unlikely? Well I wasn’t convinced that they could pull it off either (without sounding really corny anyway). But surprisingly they really managed to convert those songs to a harmonious ‘choirly’ fashion, fit for a church mass. Well, apart from the occasional fuck here and there…

Hipstamatic is already becoming one of my favourite iPhone apps....

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:29:44 +0200

Hipstamatic is already becoming one of my favourite iPhone apps. It enables you to take pictures with a vintage analogue photograph effect, including the same flaws you could end up with back then. I took this picture yesterday while riding on the train. Though you’d get the impression that someone made it about 40 years ago…

The Wilderness Downtown

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:37:26 +0200

The Wilderness Downtown:

This site is actually an interactive music video made by Arcade fire. It requires Google Chrome to run, but it’s still real fun to see.

Personal blogs, still relevant?

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:08:00 +0200

Blogs. Who in their right mind is seriously maintaining their own personal blog these days? Everyone knows they’re basically ‘So 9 years ago’ and is there really anyone in this world interested in what kind of mundane things I do every day? No I didn’t think so either.

A few friends of mine tried to push me (yet again ) to relaunch my old myshuno.net website. It seemed like a nice idea cause it’s been offline for quite a while, but I didn’t really know what to do with it. My site used to be a blog, but in the current era of social sites like Facebook and Twitter, personal blogs are really becoming a bit redundant. Why go to someone’s website if you could follow him/her on Twitter and Facebook?

But the thing is, even though those social sites are great to share things, they’re still a bit limiting. On Twitter, you’re still bound to your 140 character limit. Unless you’re one of those people who like to tell entire stories with streams of Tweets, which is really annoying, so: stop it. And on Facebook it’s really hard to publicly share things with your friends, without being pushed away by a gazillion pointless messages from Farmville polluting everyone’s news streams…

So maybe there’s still a purpose for blogs in this world after all: Not as a separate website like some kind of island on the internet, but more like an extension to the existing social web we love to use right now.

So I wanted my new site to be more like a premium version of Twitter: Without any limits, and with features to share more than just text and links, like photos, quotes and video, but with an easy and accessible platform to support it. And no ads, I hate ads. So it’s got to be cheap or preferably free as well.
I know it’s quite a list of demands, and you might think that nobody would ever build something like that. But you’d be wrong.

Which brings me to where we are right now. During my quest to find the perfect system to support my site, I’ve stumbled upon Tumblr.
It seems like the exact fit to what I want for my site, so I’ve decided to move and relaunch my website on Tumblr. And here we are!

What I like about Tumblr is that you can just upload little blurbs of text, photos or whatever, instead of creating entire blog posts. Which, ironically, I’m doing right now, but that’s not the point.

Anywho, expect to see some more around here very soon. Probably not as elaborate as this post, but we’ll see…

"I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down..."

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:14:36 +0200

“I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.”

- Stephen Fry

"…Why are you on this program?"

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:13:28 +0200

“…Why are you on this program?”

- Jeremy Clarkson talking to James May

Communication problems

Mon, 10 May 2010 23:47:00 +0200

Basil: May I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically...?
Mrs. Richards: Don't be silly. I expect to be able to see the sea.
Basil: You can see the sea. It's over there between the land and the sky.
Mrs. Richards: I'd need a telescope to see that.
Basil: Well, then, may I suggest you move to a hotel nearer the sea? Or preferably in it.

"You dare to challenge the might of the Beeny?"

Mon, 10 May 2010 15:21:56 +0200

“You dare to challenge the might of the Beeny?”

- Sarah Beeny, property developer