“Pilotwings?”, you say. Yes. I loved earlier ‘Pilotwings’ titles (and ‘Pilotwings’-style titles such as the wonderful and seriously underrated ‘Sky Odyssey’ on PS2), and so far this seems to hit the spot, with pretty decent 3D effects. And after a couple of hours playtime, I’m happy to report that my eyes are still functioning, and there’s no ‘Scanners’ action going on. No migraine yet, although I’ve heard reports (on the internet – so they must be true, right?) that headaches appear after a few days use.  The other title in my possession.. ‘Pro Evolution Soccer 2011′. It’s not bad.. fuck knows what the ‘over the shoulder’ view is all about though! Ok, so it might benefit from moar 3D-ness, but PES is supposed to be played with the classic camera view – I’d have thought the developers would have known that – after all, I trust they do try to actually play the game during development.

In other 3D news, my TV – only 3 years old – has a disease. Since Christmas – and yes, yes.. I don’t need reminding that I haven’t posted here for months – it’s taken to having a strange flickering display when powered on in the morning. After 10 minutes or so (presumably once the guts of the set have warmed up), all is well – so it’s not quite terminal. At first I thought it might be the backlight, but based on the variations of the resultant screen mess, this is clearly something that’s more related to the core of the TV.. I’ll try to get a picture up, so you can see what I mean. What this does mean is that I’ve been able to justify the purchase of a new TV! Yay! Turns out Sony do their TV refreshes in the first half of the year. Normally they announce them at CES, then they come out April/May. So, with the benefit of a hefty staff discount I’ve plumped for a KDL-46HX923, which should be here at the end of May. It’s a 3D TV… I’ll reserve judgement on the 3D-ness of it all until I receive it. And actually, it’s slightly crap because when I pre-ordered it from our system, they took the fucking money straight away! Anyway, fingers are suitably crossed that my current spluttering set holds on until then.

And in final tech news, I’ve ordered an iPad 2 (32GB, Black, WiFi) online.. and that won’t turn up until nearly the end of April. What the fuck is with people announcing and ‘launching’ stuff then making it so you have to wait for ages for it to actually be available. It’s not as bad as the TiVo situation with Virgin Media.. I mean, it stretches the very definition of ‘launch’ when you hear VM employees saying it’s launched, it’s soft-launched, it’s launched to trialists, it’s launched to people who like gaspacho, it’s launched to people who had an old Series 1 TiVo. For fuck’s sake, VM.. I give you over £100 a month for TV/Broadband/Phone, and you’re dicking me around with pre-registrations that don’t happen before the full-blown launch, raffles (yes.. raffles!) for a ‘free’ TiVo unit for 12 months etc.

Just give me the fucking box!

So, that Kindle I bought.. it’s the bollocks. The screen is way way easier to read than my old Sony E-Reader (a PRS-505), and the Kindle store is a dream to use. Infact, everything about the Kindle ‘experience’ is designed to make the user feel in control. Case in point, on the train back from London the other day I was able to load up the Kindle for iPhone app, download the book I’m reading right now to my iPhone and carry on reading from exactly where I’d left off at home. And when I carried on reading on the Kindle at home, it knew how much I’d read on the iPhone and advanced to the right location. Anyway, I’d recommend it to anyone.. and with Christmas coming up, it’s probably a pretty decent gift.

In the ‘World O’ Games(tm)’, I’m currently playing ‘Assasins Creed : Brotherhood’. More on that when I next get time to update this blog.. but suffice to say, I’m really enjoying it. So much so that the copy of ‘NFS: Hot Pursuit’ I bought is still in the cellophane.

I also need to get back to ‘Fallout : New Vegas’, but I’m finding that titles based on that particular ‘horror show’ engine from Bethesda  are like older Windows releases – basically, don’t fucking think about playing it until the 3rd or 4th patch. They have a habit of letting purchasers find all their bugs. I can only imagine that the QA staff they employ spent their time snorting coke, or eating pork pies. Or eating pork pies covered in coke. Whatever they did, it wasn’t testing-related.

Baffling, huh? So I gave my old Sony eReader away to a friend.. and I’ve patiently waited for a cheap & flexible eReader that does what I want it to do. Hopefully the new Kindle won’t disappoint!

The worry is very real.. every time I power the accursed box on I end up crossing my fingers, sacrificing some kind of chicken (Microsoft Voodoo Chicken Professional 2010), and hoping that it’ll show me something on my 1920×1080 LCD panel, rather than a 4×1 LED panel that seems to have a propensity to show red more than green.

Oh.. yes.. sorry! LIMBO. It’s short (as you may have noticed by the mention of only 4 hours above), but I really enjoyed it. Some of the game mechanics are all over the place – the ‘first time into an area = unavoidable death unless you look on the interwebs first’ bit is painful, but after a while you begin to view everything in the environment as though it could stab you in the face. Or rip your face off. Or both. I guess this is what the designers wanted you to do though.. to look upon the experience with caution, and – in the absence of more specific form and colour – consider everything as a threat.

What else have I been playing? Joe Danger, I guess.. although not as much as I’d like to. The game is great fun, but one thing I look for when downloading a game from PSN or XBLA is for the title to be as immediate as possible. And every time I think I’d like to play a bit of Joe Danger (to fill that gap in time between other non-gamey duties), I always end up bailing on the idea due to what I can only say is my fear of a TRC-destroying black screen, that in no way hides ridiculously long load times. It’s not a big title.. so what is it loading? The entire text in the British Library? 1GB of ill-gotten gains from the internet? I don’t know.. and to be honest, I don’t want to know, but I would like the developers to fix it in a future patch.

I’m still waiting for my copy of Demon’s Souls to show up, but if I’ve learnt anything from listening to those at work who’ve played this game, it’s this.. that Demon’s Souls is unforgiving in the extreme. And that the character models are a bit ropey. Of course, I’m not saying that.. they are.

I’d never say that.

As you might expect, the nature of my employment means that I’m restricted in a million different ways as to what I can write on a personal site – I’m not even sure I could even say that ‘Game X’ by ‘Publisher Y’ is utter shite, simply because as an employee of Sony it might be considered bad form to slag off a publishing partner. I can probably say what I like though.

Finally, if you’re looking for any details related to my actual work.. well, suffice to say that I take my NDA’s extremely seriously. So you’ll get bugger all from me on that front.