Games for 2010

Updated the list a bit. As usual some stuff slipped... I'm ignoring stuff like Halo/Call of Duty/Medal of Honor/Gears of War of course.

September
Trackmania Wii
Metroid: Other M
Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep
Valkyria Chronicles 2
Rune Factory 2

October
Vanquish
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
Dead Rising 2
Sonic Colors
Fable 3

November
Gran Turismo 5
Little Big Planet 2
DC Universe Online
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
God of War: Ghost of Sparta

Time for a look forward to what's coming out

Note: I updated this a bit.

E3 is now dust in the rearviewmirror (putting on Pearl Jam now as I type). So what's coming out this year?

June

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP)

Demon's Souls (PS3)

Transformers: War for Cybertron (PC, PS3, 360)

July

Crackdown 2 (360)

Dragon Quest IX (DS)

Starcraft 2 (PC)

Ace Combat: Joint Assault (PSP)

August

Mafia II (PC, PS3, 360)

Blue Dragon: Awakened Shadow (DS)

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days (PC, PS3, 360)

September

Dead Rising 2 (PC, PS3, 360)

Halo: Reach (360)

Playstation Move (PS3)

Test Drive Unlimited 2 (PC, PS3, 360)

Trackmania Wii (Wii)

Metroid Other M (Wii)

Kirbys Epic Yarn (Wii)

Civilization V (PC)

October

Fable III (PC, 360)

Brink (PC, PS3, 360)

Vanquish (PS3, 360)

November

Gran Turismo 5 (PS3)

Little Big Planet 2 (PS3)

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (PC, PS3, 360)

Crysis 2 (PC, PS3, 360)

Kinect (360)

2010

Zelda: Skyward Sword

Fallout 3: New Vegas

L.A. Noire

2011

Dead Space 2

Killzone 3

Uncharted 3

Forza 4

inFamous 2

PSP Go & PS3 Remote Play

It's not often that I get to do something fairly unique these days, but I seem quite alone in wanting to remote control my PS3 using my new PSP go and its built in Bluetooth functionality.

I'll share the lessons learned.

1. You will need an 'old' phone. Unless you're fortunate to have a smartphone that can create PROPER wifi networks complete with SSID and some kind of real security such as WPA, you're out of luck. The PSP go needs an Infrastructure access point for its 'normal' network connections, or Bluetooth DUN (as opposed to Bluetooth PAN, which was what all these new things only have).
2. You'll need an older phone that is probably a Sony Ericsson, or at least not a Nokia Series 60. My PSP go cannot maintain a connection with the Nokia, I think this is Sony's fault. Unsurprisingly it works really well with the S-E, even down to the ability to query the list of available APNs.
   
3. You'll need an account with Mobile Internet. WAP is no good. We need real Internets here.
4. I haven't had any luck using O2. There seems to be some kind of firewall or NAT issue which prevents the thing from connecting.
5. I have had success with T-Mobile, it's what I'm using now. I can't comment on 3, Orange or Vodafone.
   
6. Anything except 3G is way too painful. And turn off the animated background on the PS3, as that is just going to make it unusable.
7. Ensure your PS3 is set to allow remote play, and also that Internet remote play is enabled. UPnP will clear up all the port stuff if your router supports it, otherwise forward port 9293 to your PS3.
8. That should be all you need. Everything else is pretty straightforward and covered in the manuals

I think there is some room for improvement. The bluetooth modem stuff could certainly be fixed, or at least some guidance as to special strings or whatever. It's not really Sony's style to support stuff that doesn't take off though, so I doubt it ever will.

Gaming market fragmentation

Just think about this for a few minutes.

Handheld:

• DS cartridge games - DS / DS Lite / DSi / DSi XL / 3DS(?)
• DS downloadable games (requires wifi skills) - DSi / DSi XL / 3DS(?)
• PSP UMD games - PSP 1000, 2000, 3000
• PSP downloadable games (requires PC or wifi skills) - PSP 1000, 2000, 3000, Go
• iPod games - iPhone / iPod Touch
• Online iPod games - wifi / iPhone required
• Demanding iPod games - 3GS, newer iPod Touch required

Console:

• Wii - standard
  
• Wii - with motionplus
  
• Wii - with classic controller
  
• 360* with HDD
  
• 360* without HDD
  
• 360* Natal
• PS3* standard
• PS3* with Move

* Note, these systems need both SD and HD versions testing, and achievements/trophies, online considerations

That's 15 or 20 targets that Devs need to consider. Not including the scalable PC and Mac markets. I'm sure I've missed some as well. Surely the market cannot bear this for much longer?

Hackintosh / computers in general

I just this evening did the hackintosh thing on my Dell Inspiron 9400. It runs really, really well.

It makes me wonder if my laptop will ever actually become out of date. It will be three years old in January, a mere 7 months away, yet when I visited apple.com/uk/thestore this week there was little that made it seem out of date, certainly nothing under £1500.

Snow Leopard is meant to throw out all the PowerPC stuff and reduce the HDD footprint. Windows 7 is less bloated than Vista. Either way I can't see any requirement from the OS for more power.

What about games? PC games seem to be tied to the console power now, more than ever. So we just get console games but we can up the resolution and lock the framerate at 60fps if desired. So nothing much will change here - new consoles aren't even rumoured.

So, it's down to video encoding I think. That's the only thing I can think of where I could use the speed. I would still be interested for my desktop of course :)

Security by isolation

I've been playing around with VirtualBox again. My original plan was to set up some kind of virtualised "corporate home network", in order to get some experience of doing such a thing on Linux, but also maybe having something ready should Helicoid suddenly need to take off in a networked support applications fashion. Of course it was a little pointless, not just because we're using Google Apps, but also because my computer (recently

Recent news articles have highlighted a couple of interesting things for me. Firstly, neatx/nomachine etc. is very, very cool Much better than TightVNC for remote access. Secondly, there is some sense in compartmentalising your various kinds of web access.

Think about the web being more like three webs: Web 1, the general Wild West of forums and the like; totally open potentially user-contributed content: highest risk of trouble. Web 2, where you do some basic shopping stuff - a mixture of http and https and you want to know when you're doing both. Finally, Web 3, https only - for banking etc.

So the trick is to use a VM for each one. A bit heavyweight? Not really, considering web vs. local application usage is only going to get more common.

There are some tweaks you can do to make sure you do it properly. In your Web 1 system, put broken hosts entries in for your banks etc., so you can't accidentally visit them. In Web 2, turn on all the 'warn me when switching to https and back' type stuff, so you're not irritated day-to-day but you should know when you want to. In Web 3, put in a broken proxy for http traffic - this should be entirely https only.

I've only just implemented this, so I'll probably think of more stuff to do. One thing I've already done is pop a little thing in .bashrc to show my last logins etc. I could probably do my accounts spreadsheet in Web 3 as well.

Really now. How many game systems can the market bear?

PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS, DSi, PSP, PC, iPhone, Mac.

Just how much longer can this go on? I genuinely expected at least one of these to die off in the recession regardless of how "recession-proof" the gaming industry is.