Visit my Mini-City
Everytime someone visits the city it gets a new inhabitant and grows! Pretty neato. It’s kinda like a mini SimCity but with no user control.
Update: Looks like I need industry now.
Archive for Geek Love
The Next Gen is completely Wireless
I know we are only a year into the current next-gen, a term I loathe to begin with, but I was reading an interesting article over at the Washington Post regarding Verizon’s new open wireless standard.
Verizon Wireless’s new policy also opens the network to a host of other devices, such as video game consoles, digital cameras and home appliances equipped with special chips, a system similar to the WiMax network proposed by Sprint and the WiFi-enabled service touted by T-Mobile.
What’s cool about this is, in theory, Sony or Microsoft could integrate Verizon’s chipset into their console and build a constant always on connection. Think of it like Xbox Live, but available anytime, anywhere with no cables or setup. Out of the box you’d have millions of console gamers connecting to the same network to play games, download demos, and interact with each other. Not only that, by guaranteeing that everyone is on a network, it opens that network up to be a standard feature for developers like a hard drive or a certain type of display.
Hopefully we’ll see more Cell phone companies do this as it really opens up a lot of potential on not only gaming, but tons of other fronts.
PSP + PS3 + Remote Play = Teh Awes0meness
So last night I finally fired up my PSP and downloaded the latest firmware release. I was quite a few releases old, so with the new update I was able to access the Remote Play functionality for connecting the PSP to the PS3. What is remote play? Remote play allows you to use your PSP as a virtual XMB of yours PS3. That mean, you can see and access almost anything that is on your PS3 via your PSP. The coolest aspect of this is the ability to connect via the internet, so technically you can connect to your PS3 from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.
After a few glitchy starts, I got the system up and running and it was absolutely slick. I was able to stream 1080p movies in realtime over the internet to my PSP. At one point I was literally browsing pictures that were stored on my Windows Vista Computer. Let me run that by you again. My PSP was connected via the Internet to my PS3, which was connected via my local network to my Windows Vista PC and streaming digital pictures back. God I love gross misuse of technology.
Unfortuantely you aren’t able to run any games via this method, it basically is like a remote desktop connection to your PS3. But the fact that you can stream videos and such, or listen to music is pretty awesome. And with the upcoming PS3 DVR, the ability to stream shows anywhere, anytime is huge. You are even able to adjust quality settings based on network performance, even on the default quality the videos look fairly crisp and sound great.
Finally I downloaded Syphon Filter for the PSOne via the Playstation Store and checked it out on the PS3. The title definitley shows it’s age, but it was still a blast. The really great thing is the ability to copy the game to the PSP then and play it on the go. Take note Nintendo, Sony has the pricing done right. $5.99 for a PSOne era game, something Nintendo charges $12 or more for), with the ability to copy and play it on your portable device. That’s value right there.
