And here I am again after the Sony Media Brief with all you need to know and probably a lot stuff you don’t care about, but still it’s important!

It started off with a short retrospective on how far the Sony Computer Entertainment has come with its PlayStation brand. 15 years of gaming with Sony, which established some games which have been very popular in Japan over here in the west. Although games like Final Fantasy have been touched in accordance to the past we have gotten any updates to what we are about to receive. In fact the whole show was very much shooter driven with the odd exception here and there.

Resistance 2 was the first game that has been shown as we see a gigantic monster roam the streets, while you are running up a tower trying to find a spot to attack the monster… alien… thing. In the end all it comes down to is that the alien grabs you, miles above the ground that is, and you’ll have to literally ‘feed’ it with your RPG. It then slams you through several buildings which is presented in bullet time… although fancy, not really ground breaking!

Little Big Planet has finally gotten some updates and as we are anticipating its October release, we are just as much thrilled to witness all the user generated content that will follow its lead. Jack Tretton and LBP COMPANY created a level that served as a presentation for Sonys accomplishments over the last year, now imagine a presentation you’d have in Powerpoint or Keynote presented as a level which you manipulate as you like, sounds like a fun meeting for me once the game’s out. Apart from that nothing new really has been shown for Little Big Planet. As said before though, we can’t wait for the game to be shipped.

Nintendo being the market leader, rightfully so, and Microsoft might do… well whatever they are doing, Sony is the only company having three very successful platforms at the same time, which of course are PlayStation 3, PSP and yes the PS2 is still very much alive with as announced over 130 games being released for the PS2 in 2008.

PSN is coming in now with a lot of features which it definitely needs. Real games, non of that 2nd tier stuff like Pixel Junk, but games like Ratchet & Clank Future Quest for Booty which will be available for $14.99 within the PSN store. Other games which will be within the same price line that are new but at least look like real games are for example Crash Commando which looks very much like a classic Contra game but with neat graphics, fat princess a very cutsey game that seems to be quite brutal at the same time, Rag Doll Kung Fu: Fists of Plastic which looks a bit like a Smash Bros clone, of course not exactly but as much as Onimusha Blade Warriors is a Smash Bros clone. Now the one game that really stood out of this range was Siren Blood Curse which looked quite stunning - what it plays like is of course a completely different story and still needs to be seen.

Gran Turismo TV has been introduced which will offer HD feeds of real Motorsport to watched on your PlayStation 3 from around the world.

Now one of the bigger announcements was how the PS3 PSN store turns into iTunes… or is it the other way around with iTunes now selling games for my iPhone? The PSN store will deliver HD movie purchases AND rentals directly to your PS3. Now if you’ve seen the Microsoft Media Brief this might sound familiar, BUT Microsoft does not have FOX, MGM, Warner Bros, Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures & Lionsgate under their broken laggy Vista $2,000 e-mail machines, or so a Microsoft executive described Vista himself. Who again has the same film companies under it’s license oh yes it’s Apple… so yes PSN… iTunes… all the same, I wish they would migrate somehow though. Oh it doesn’t end there, remember how you can rent or purchase a movie and pull it over to your iPhone or iPod touch? Exactly you can do that with your PSP as well now. The PSP may not be as versatile in regards to how you handle it, but the screen resolution makes more than up for that! Same as with iTunes you have progressive download, so you can start watching straight after you hit the download button (give 2 - 3 minutes of downloading to start). New titles will be added each week to keep the library which is huge already fresh and up to date. Oh and… been saying that a lot in this paragraph now, it goes live TONIGHT (July 15th 2008).

Here a list of what awaits us for the PSP:
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Madden 09
Loco Roco 2
NBA 09
Super Stardust Portable
Lego Batman
Patapon 2
Buzz Master Quiz
Valkyria Chronicles

The next thing that has been talked about is the cooperation with Google and how to migrate the Sony PS3 with YouTube in which users can upload their videos have it rated by the community and just live within the community which will come by the end of this month (JULY 2008). This is going to be called LIVE WITH PLAYSTATION.

Sony Online Entertainment has announced DC Universe Online, which up to this point looks very interesting but also very static and very very beta. The idea to be your own hero or villain and to cooperate with Superman or maybe even the Joker to conspire against Batman sounds amazing, but so far it only ’sounds’ amazing.

And one last thing… YES! GOD OF WAR III will be coming to the PlayStation 3!

Now I have been playing for a bit and stopped at the third Boss for now, as my girlfriend was tired and needed some sleep and I refuse to play the game without full blasting sound! Now this is obviously not a review as I haven’t either finished the game, nor will I myself ever want to write a review again (as I honestly suck at it). I really do love this game but instead of picking out all the good parts, which you can find really by just typing Metal Gear Solid 4 into Google, I am just going to list what pisses me off about the game. Now keep in mind though that I am still very fond of this game and it is by far the best PS3 game I have played yet (and no I do NOT play FPS games, hate them and suck at them).

Now the most annoying part first, the one thing I think everybody can agree on with me, or so I’d think at least - the installation. I know it’s normal for every PS3 game to have to install first and I made my piece with that, as that decreases loading times quite significantly. Devil May Cry 4 had a big cut I believe from 7 seconds on the 360 down to 2 seconds on the PS3 so yes installing the games is without a doubt a good thing. Now for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots though, you install the game after each Act… yes that’s right, not just when you boot the game up for the first time, every single fucking time, which is somehow really taking the piss.

The second thing that kind of gets to me is Loading Times, now I thought the (multiple) installations would be for that specific reason!? Yet you will just be running from one screen to the next and then be presented with an actual loading screen in which you will be asked to press start after it’s done loading to continue the game… Is that really necessary? I mean I am not saying prior MGS installations didn’t need to load, but at least it was handled a bit more subtle. The reason why this is getting to me I think is the fact that you actually see a loading screen which reads NOW LOADING, which as far as I am concerned is so NOT Metal Gear Solid at all.

The third and last of my complaints is how the game is set up. Metal Gear Solid, and I am only taking Metal Gear Solid / Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes; Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty / Substance & Metal Gear Solid 3:Snake Eater / Subsistence into account here as those are the only ones I have played, has always been a game of where you have been quite aware at all times where you are, this has gravely changed now. In the first installation of Metal Gear Solid, the only time you didn’t know where you were was after Sniper Wolf’s fight and even after that around 10 - 15 mins later you knew again. And you tracked throughout the whole game on foot. Same with MGS2 and 3, MGS4 suffers from ‘Let’s do what Capcom did with Resident Evil 4‘ syndrome. What I mean with that is how the game’s changed from a continous experience into this chopped up chapter / mission based gameplay, not to mention that like in RE4 you now have shop to purchase weapons, armor, etc. from. I am not saying this is a bad thing per se, just pointing out that I am not too fond of ideas such as those.

To sum it all up, all my complaints really have marginally so little impact on the actual gaming experience that this would hardly be reasons not to buy the game. As said before I love the game and I can’t remember having had such a great time on my PS3 so far and I will buy Metal Gear Solid 4: Sub-abstinence, or whatever they’re going to call it.

Thanks Konami, I am not 100% happy but you still managed to hit all my buttons! So when’s my Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia out!?

PS: I love the fact that the game’s Apple branded, being a huge Apple geek myself, with my iPhone and Macbook and soon to come Macbook Pro, I love all the iMac’s and Macbook Pro’s and the iPod 30GB. And unless I am wrong, the cellphones are Sony Ericssons aren’t they?

UPDATE June 16 2008:
I managed to finish the game yesterday (Sunday June the 15th 2008) around 3pm or so. And I still stand by all I said above what annoys me, but I also even more than before stand by me saying that the game is just genuinely awesome!

So what’s this all about you might ask!? It’s a blog, nothing fancy just a plain simple Wordpress blog that I visually and functionally edited to my liking. The idea, plain and simple, is to integrate everyone that’s working on Shinohan a bit more into the actual idea behind Shinohan.

Sean and me created Shinohan as an experiment to see what we could accomplish with some of the ideas him and me had. As we are both respectively working in fields that closely relate to the work each of us are doing on Shinohan it was just an experiment. The first thing we considered obviously is how much time and money we would able to invest for this project. Obviously this was more a time issue than a question of money, yet money is of course always a part of everything, if it wasn’t the Internet would be advertising free and quite frankly also pretty damn boring.

When we started nearly a year ago, we only wanted to try out some designs and parallel experiment with Youtube to integrate it into our Site. Now we never really got around to do the latter and just kept on concentrating on how to further re-create the site. After a certain amount of time I decided that I want to keep Shinohan the way it is, just a portal for people interested in video games for consoles and handhelds, as I have absolutely no interest in PC games, in fact I am a Mac user (yes I got an Apple Macbook and I love it!), so much for that. Over the course of the past year we actually managed to garner a certain amount of regular visitors now, which we sadly still done treat and serve properly. Our main issue is that we do not have the amount of content on the site we would like to have, which break down into two problems, the significantly bigger one would be time. Even if we would be getting the amount of content we would like to have, we still need to implement it, which is quite a time consuming endeavor in itself. We have three main writers, one designer, one editor and me (yes I don’t have a fixed purpose – I am like the ‘do whatever is necessary bitch’. Sarfaraz, one of our writers, who is also a translator at the same time, is in charge of our Famitsu WAVE DVD section which we started with the May issue, and we are very proud to say that our Famitsu Wave DVD translations are reaching a lot of people who are hopefully enjoying it. Now here’s the other problem, we would like to do so much more with the content we have, for example we would like to integrate the translations directly into the videos (e.g. subtitles), yet unfortunately none of us have the experience, nor the know how and, again, least of all the time to be able to even learn it.

We are working on all of those current issues and hope to get them all sorted out eventually. The good thing, contrary to what everyone seems to believe, is that we are not a company – meaning we don’t have any targets we have to reach under any given circumstances, we have all the freedom we want and are just driven by our own joy to keep the site growing. Of course we’d like to see Shinohan going to the top, but I am not as delusional to believe that this is going to happen over night. We don’t have millions of dollars backing us up in the background, everything that is happening on the site that requires payment comes directly out of our own pockets as we enjoy paying the money for something we like to believe in and work with. And just while I am at the point of clearing up certain things… I am NOT a girl, I don’t care where you live and what kind of a name you believe Sascha is, I am a guy! Alright, just wanted to get that off my chest, I am sick of applications addressing me as Mrs. Zaman, Mrs. for fucks sake!!! ← not just female but also married – I am NEITHER! I am not single, but I am sure not married! The way I am starting to drift off is proof enough that I’ve written way too much already, so I am going to cut it off right here and now!

I am sure I’ll be writing another post within the next couple of days, but I can’t promise that – the latest I will post though will be exactly seven days of my last entry. You should keep on checking back every now and so often though, as I am not the only one who is going to be blogging here.

So long!

Sascha