A savePoint at storpi.com

Originally published on Playstation Underground Gamer Advisory Panel (GAP) 2007-03-19 13:26:

All this past week I’ve been pretty excited for all our friends over in the EU and elsewhere who are just about to get their PS3’s. Seems strange, doesn’t it, considering I already have a PS3 myself, but its hard not to get excited when a console you support is about to have one of the best launches ever. Can you imagine what our November would have been like if Resistance, Oblivion, Motorstorm, Virtua Fighter 5, Tekken 5:DR, and more had all been available at launch in the States? I know that I’d still be trying to pay off my holiday shopping expenses today.

But on top of this excitement, IGN has given me another thing to look forward to: the release of firmware update v1.6! If you’ve read my other blogs then you already know how excited I am about Folding@Home which will be part of 1.6. In addition, we’ll also be getting background downloading (with some yet-to-be-announced limitations), Remote Play for 20GB model owners (that’s me!), and an improved web browser.

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Originally published on Playstation Underground Gamer Advisory Panel (GAP) 2007-03-16 11:18:

Yesterday, when I heard that Folding@Home was going to be available for the Playstation 3 by the end of the month, I was extremely excited. The reports on how exactly the PS3 will benefit the Folding@Home Project aren’t exactly clear, and many of them are based entirely on speculation or PR rhetoric. Regardless of how fast a single PS3 will be able to run these calculations, the fact of the matter is that the more users they can get to run Folding, the more processing power there will be. The project has been going on for over half a decade and there are only 200,000+ active users. Just half of the number of PS3’s online would double that number. I think that’s a conservative estimate, since it’s much easier to get a PS3 on Folding@Home than a PC. Not every PC has Folding on it, but since it’ll be part of a firmware update, every PS3 will soon have Folding@Home, and running the app is just a couple of button presses away. With that in mind, hitting that 50% mark of all PS3 online users should be simple.

It seems though that many people do not share my enthusiasm. Quite frankly, I am shocked at some of the things I’ve seen on other forums and messages boards where I had gone to spread the good news about F@H. A lot of people simply don’t see the benefits and would rather not spend the little-bit-more on electricity to leave the PS3 running occasionally. Listen, if you’re worrying about electricity costs, you shouldn’t have bought a PS3. Seriously. Would you rather save the few extra dollars today on power, or the possibly hundreds of thousands of dollar in the future when you don’t have to worry about diseases that Folding@Home may have helped cure?

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Originally published on Playstation Underground Gamer Advisory Panel (GAP) 2007-03-15 13:20:

Since when has PS3 new been related to anything important? Since today, when Sony and Stanford University announced that Folding@Home would be available on the Playstation 3 by the end of March, via a firmware update which will add F@H to the list of Network-related options on the XMB.

For those of you who don’t know, Folding@Home is a protein folding simulator that uses hundreds of thousand of idle CPU’s sitting in people’s internet connected homes to perform calculations that would take even a single super computer decades to complete. The results of these simulation are used to further our understanding of how proteins work in the hopes that someday, we will be able to cure diseases caused by protein “mis foldings,” such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and even cancer!

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Originally published on Playstation Underground Gamer Advisory Panel (GAP):

I was playing Resistance online the other day. I don’t have anyone on my Friend’s List yet (*sniff*) so I just joined a ranked game, and a couple of moments later I was off to play some Meltdown. It was a 32 player game, so big teams. That was cool, but when the match started, everyone just sort of ran off on their own. Now, I admit, I haven’t played too much Resistance online so it seemed kind of strange given that this was “TEAM Objective.” Pretty soon, my team got in a pinch where suddenly the opposition had all of nodes, yet everyone I was with was still trying to attack individually. We just got picked off one by one. It was a mess.

It reminded me of an article I once read somewhere about how the PS3’s online experience is crippled by the lack of a headset coming standard with each console. While I scoff at the idea that Sony’s online service is completely lacking, the Resistance experience did feel a bit shallow without the ability to coordinate with my teammates.

So I was thinking that we could start some sort of “PS3 Headset Initiative” to get everyone on the Playstation Network a headset. (more…)

Do you remember why we were all excited about the Wii last year? Besides the Virtual Console, I can remember the promise of a deluge of fun, new games, played in a way we had never played before. Swinging the controller around seemed like such an innovative new approach to controls, and we all dreamed of playing Wii in big groups gathered around it, everyone with smiles on their faces.

Yet, here I am, four months into the console’s life cycle, and the only Wii game I really want to play is still Zelda: Twilight Princess. In fact, that’s the only game I can see myself truly wanting for Wii until the first week of April. That’s five months without a single game I want coming out for the system that has so much promise. I think if I actually had bought a Wii back in November, I’d be pretty disappointed by now.

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~flOw~ is serenity,
like wandering the city aquarium
in the morning
before all the guests have arrived.

It’s

Great Presentation:
-The pause screen is basically a higher depth, where there are no predators or prey. You can still swim around too. To go back to where you were, just hit “start” or eat the red circle. To go back to the main menu, just eat the blue circle and you’ll swim back up.
-When another player joins, you’ll swim up to the pause screen to join him/her. Hit “start” again to go back to where you were, with your new friend in tow. To leave the game, all the other player has to do is put down the controller. Your organism will then simply leave its friend behind when you change depths. There’s nothing to take you out of the experience.

But

It’s Not Really a “Game”

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