Last week I finally got Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 for the PlayStation 2. Alas, my PS3 doesn’t have the backwards compatibility that the first models had, so I had to dust off the old PS2 for the game.
But what an awesome game it is.

Today a lot of games are entitled RPGs, Roleplaying games, but few really deserve it. Morrowind was a true roleplaying game, where you only controled your alter ego, and saw everything through his eyes alone.

But almost every so-called “Japano-RPG” (like the Final Fantasy franchise) lets you take full control over a whole party of characters. I don’t see much roleplaying in that. In the same vein, one could call StarCraft a roleplaying game, because you order a few heros around in it. Nothing could be further from the truth though.

So back to Persona 3: It’s the first true RPG I have played since ages, and the first truly astonishing one since Morrowind. While the combat system is fast but tactical and there are around 100 different monsters (Personae) you can summon to your aid, the game truly shines with its storytelling and atmosphere. It’s the little details that (at least to me) make this a true roleplaying game:
Not only do you not control your whole party during combat, but to equip them, and see their status, etc. you have to talk to them and ask them how they feel. If you want them to only concentrate on healing in battle, you tell them again through dialog. While other games have cascaded menus for such things, being able to talk to a party member and tell him/her what to do, makes the game so much more realistic.
Another detail is, why do I, as the player, always hear music in the game? Simple, because the main character has a Portable Music Player equipped which even shows up as an item.

Little details such as this, combined with an awesome and fresh combat system, make this game truly a Milestone in “Japano-RPGs”.

Johnny Chung Lee has made some very interesting experiments with the Wii Remote and Sensor Bar, and all the infrared tracking that those two do. While the second video I’m gonna show you is actually the lastest he posted on his Wii projects site (and shows off some cool Minority Report like interactions), it is another one that really made me go wow: Headtracking on the Wii and therefore maybe the first possibilty of real Virtual Reality displays.

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote

Tracking your fingers with the Wiimote

Also very impressive: a low-cost interactive whiteboard

I planned on installing Linux on my PS3 some weeks ago, but only in the christmas holidays did I find the time to do the task. And I intended to journal my experience and write a guide so other users can have the joy of Linux on the big screen too, and don’t have to work a whole night to get everything working.

Note: For this guide I will assume you have the latest PS3 firmware upgrade installed, which changed some wifi stuff so all the updateing at the end of the guide is nessecary.

You can install Linux on your regular PS3 harddrive, or you can opt to first upgrade the harddisk.

Things needed for the hdd upgrade:

• Phillips head screwdriver
• Flathead screwdriver (a fingernail or knife or other sharp object will do too)
• 2,5″ SATA harddrive with either 5400rpm or 7200rpm

• A PC with internet connection
• CD-Rs to burn the image files
• Storage media with a few hundred megabytes space, formated with FAT32 (a regular USB stick works best)
• USB keyboard and mouse (wireless ones with a receiver so they only need 1 USB port together work best for the PS3 versions with only 2 USB ports)

• Some time

Note: Before you change harddrives on the PS3 you should back up all data you want on the new disk to an USB stick or external drive. Backup can be done via the built-in backup utility to backup the contents of the whole disk. If you don’t have enough external storage space, you can back up individual game saves and data via the XMB in the game menu, under the entry Game Data Utility and/or Game Save Utility.
Also, of course, the PS3 should be powered down full via the switch on the back before you attempt to change the drive.

The first step is to remove the plastic cover from the hdd tray located on the left side of the system. Use a flathead screwdriver, your fingernails, or something else which is flat for this:

Next you have to remove the blue screw which holds the tray in the case:

After that flip up the metal handle on the caddy and move the it to the front of the PS3 with the handle to dislodge it. Then you can remove the caddy with the drive in it:

Use your Phillips screwdriver to remove the 4 screws holding the harddisk in the tray, and exchange the old one for the new one:

After that just put the 4 screws back in, slide the caddy into the PS3 and move it back with the handle to connect it, put the blue screw back in and finally put the plastic cover back on.
You’re now ready to boot with your new disk!
The system will ask you to format the drive, just use quickformat for this.

Now you are ready to begin with the Linux installation steps!

First things first: Download the XUbuntu PowerPC LiveCD iso file and burn the iso to a CD-R using your favourite burning program (if you don’t know how to burn iso images, refer to the Ubuntu Help forums).
In the PS3 menu navigate to the system settings and start the Format Utility, and choose “allot 10GB to the OtherOS”. After that insert the XUbuntu disk and choose “Install OtherOS” in the system settings menu. Confirm to restart the PS3 and you will be greeted by the kboot boot loader.

Protheus wrote an extremly detailed installation guide in the PSUbuntu forums so I’m gonna skip the whole procedure here. Just do what he does in the guide step-by-step (although you could and should skip the “compile your own kernel”) and you will be fine. The guide also details how to update your kernel so the wifi which broke with PS3 firmware 2.0 will work again in Linux.

But another problem arrived with the 2.10 firmware - Ubuntu wouldn’t boot anymore. So after you upgrade the kernel as described in Protheus’ post, follow the instructions in the next guide.
AliasXNeo wrote a detailed guide how to update your kernel once more so it works with the 2.10 firmware again, again, follow the guide step-by-step.

Once that is finished you will be able to boot into your newly installed Linux system on the PS3! Now you will have to configure your wifi or use a regular LAN cable so you have net access on the box. Firefox comes preinstalled with Ubuntu so once you have your network configured you can surf the web. You’ll probably want to play sound files and movies now, so just install VLC media player using the command sudo apt-get install vlc from the terminal.

So there you have it, a working Ubuntu Linux on your PS3. You can play movies, dvds, mp3s, surf the web with a real browser opposed to the PS3 one, and do everything that you can in Linux that doesn’t need more than 256MB RAM (so SNES emulators and the likes will run fine, but 3D apps probably won’t).

And to finish this guide, a screenshot from my working system (don’t mind the crappy quality of the movie in VLC, that’s normal when screencapping movies, windows media player shows just a black window on screencaps), click the image for a better quality one:

Further reading:

• PSUbuntu.com, home of the distribution
• PS3 board: Linux 101, general questions and answers about Linux
• PS3 board: Flash in Linux, because the normal flash plugin won’t work on the PPC64 architecture

While browsing one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language) I stumbled upon a sideproject of its author. The project are 3 minimalistic (in terms of design, not content!) websites which have only one goal: to find out The Funniest, The Cutest, and The Fairest pictures of all the internet.
A noble goal you might say, but what on these sites is different than all the other countless funny-picture-websites? Well first of all there are no comments, and not much design around the site. On all three sites you get a white page with a little introduction text and then 2 pictures at random, and you click the one you think the funniest, cutest, fairest. A system in the background registers all clicks and makes a ranking out of them.
And even if you are not particulary interested in the ranking of certain pictures, the sites still offer longtime fun and amazement in those boring hours. And while I really got good laughs out of The Funniest the pictures I adore most are from The Fairest because it shows absolutely awe-inspiring nature pictures.

While you can argue if this is funny…

…you can’t really argue that this is an really fair picture:

No one can deny that first person shooters (FPS for short) have evolved greatly from their ancestors like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. Of course graphics get better from year to year and the gameplay changes depending on the focus of the title (e.g. Hero-against-everyone-else or a tactical team shooter). But for a long time, the story told, and especially how it is told, was stagnant.

At the start, Doom had only a few screens of text mentioning why you were thrown onto a demon-infested Mars. Then came prerendered cutscenes and around the same time, ingame cutscenes that the 3D engine rendered. But if you wanted to tell a story good, back then you had to use cutscenes because the graphics engine couldn’t handle things like lip-syncing, detailed models and animations.
Half-Life was the first game to use ingame cutscenes, and to not change the viewpoint in them. Before that in most cutscenes you would see your own character through a camera, like on film. But Half-Life changed the way a story in an FPS was told. I think there was not a single moment in the game where you would see your character through others eyes. That was really an experience, to see the whole story through the protagonists eyes, without a cut.

Flash forwards a few years and the change of a century. First Person cutscenes are pretty much given now in shooters to let you identify more with your character. For me, there were 2 games in the last year that really stood out with their story telling: BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Warning: huge spoilers for BioShock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare up ahead!
If you haven’t played one or both of these, and plan to do so… then read on if you like but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

While both of them are excellent games on their own, BioShock had a more fascinating story and Call of Duty was more of your regular War-Against-Terror story, there were two points in those games that made me, even as an old school gamer, take a breath and ponder what just happened:

In BioShock it was the scene where Ryan makes you kill him by using the phrase “Would you kindly?”. It’s not that I havent killed countless thugs and bosses in first person, but the intensity of the scene - first you cannot do anything about it because you are brainwashed to respond to that particular phrase. And second it is a really gruesome death being strangled. After that scene I was vexed.

The scene in Call of Duty, while on a grander scale, felt even more personal to me: After heroically rescuing a female pilot from a downed Apache, you fly out with her and your crew, the city behind you. Then the unspeakable happens - a big missile explodes in the middle of the city, and the mushroom cloud it leaves makes it clear that it was a nuclear head. Your helicopter goes down and the screen goes black.
While the nuclear explosion surely was shocking, so far it didn’t me bother too much. The debriefing of the mission showed a board with dead and missing Marines, and listed your name on it. It wasn’t so much irritating that your character died because so far in the story you played 3 characters so you still had the others.
But when I started the next mission I was vexed again, and at the end of it, disgusted: The screen fades in from black, and you find yourself in the downed helicopter. Corpses around you. You cannot walk you can only crawl or kneel. You get out of the helicopter and look at your devastated surroundings, everything is reddish still, and on the horizon you can still se the big mushroom cloud. And then finally, after a few minutes in the debris, you fall to the ground, everything goes white, and you die.

Gulp.

That realy took me by surprise. A whole level just so you can experience your own last few minutes. As far as I know that is a game-first and has not been done before. And while it is shocking, disgusting and irritating, it is non the less - superb storytelling. After that scene I played through the rest of the game in one fell swoop because I was so pissed at the Terrorist who planted that bomb and I just wanted to get rid of him.

And that’s what good stories do: They move you.

I hope we will see much more bravely and oddly told stories in the future. Because a really good gameplay also deserves a really good story.

This seriously has to be the best (and geekiest) marching band ever:

Although the video is filmed upside down, I still watched in awe at their formations. And to do all this at a football game (where I imagine there aren’t too much video game players in the crowd) makes the spectacle even better.

Video games they march to:

• Pong (at the very start, looks like some guys running around aimlessly, but it’s definately Pong)
• Tetris (with the music everybody knows so well)
• Mortal Kombat (you can even hear a feint Mortal Kombat scream when the music starts)
• Pokemon (they even have a little Pikachu-ish dude fighting, probably the team’s mascot)
• Zelda (complete with Tri-Force and the Master Sword)
• Mario Bros. (the ending especially rocks, with the castle and flag like in the game)

Since the advent of Hollywood action blockbusters we’ve been pretty accustomed to characters dying on screen in various gruesome ways; sometimes crushed, sometimes slashed, sometimes shot, but always fatally injured. There aren’t many movies, especially those targeted for the mass market where the main character of the story dies. But so-called sidekicks (which, by the way are often the real character actors opposite the big and muscular action hero) pretty regularly bite the virtual dust. And more often than not they die in order to save the hero/heroine of the story.

And if the sidekick happens to be male and saves a heroine from the brink of death (or vice versa) they usually breath with their last words something akin to “I love you”, which according to Hollywood laws the hero/heroine has to respond to with “I will always love you” or something kitschy like that.
While this surely is a nice gesture for the dying person, it is all too often used in movies, and fiction in general. When grave danger awaits the protagonist, someone has to step up and sacrifice him- or herself for the greater good. Yada yada. Obi Wan did it in Star Wars to get Luke and the others an escape route, Bruce Willis did it in Armageddon for his daughter and her fiance, Boromir did it for Merry and Pip in the Lord of the Rings, and countless others did it too.
So, apparently, the story-act of a character sacrificing him- or herself for a more relevant character is often employed and people are kinda used to it. But here I have to add that especially in Hollywood movies the sacrifice normally happens all of a sudden when the to-be-saved character wouldn’t expect it; i.e. the sacrificee jumps around the corner to catch a bullet for the protagonist or some such thing. Getting shot, stabbed, etc. - things movies and stories often employ. Getting beaten to a bloody pulp is not often seen, because it is much more gruesome. And exactly that (and much more cruel things) happen to the sacrificial character I want to write about in this post:

This is Judeo from the manga Berserk, after getting his hand chewed, his back whipped and his chest stabbed by demons, while trying to save the love of the main protagonist (Guts), Casca. And although one as a reader could have picked up that Judeo himself was interested in more than just friendship and camaraderie with Casca, he did never say such a thing.
Why there are demons attacking and devouring them doesn’t matter to make my point, and it would spoil the story too much too (knowing that Judeo will die is a big enough spoiler already). It are the two very last pages of his life that matter only:
As I said before, at least I am pretty used to see characters die as a sacrifice to save others, and I have seen a lot of horror and splatter movies, mangas and animes where people die gruesome deaths. But never before has the death of a character touched me more, emotionally, than Judeo’s. That is because it is the most personal death I have ever seen. How much more personal can it get, than to watch something through the characters eyes?

“Are those my last words?”, “I’m glad to see - you cry”“; Just reading and writing these very two lines makes me shiver again. It is so very honest, personal, human. The last thoughts of a dying man, as seen through his own eyes. To me, this death scene is more gruesome and touching at the same time, than every on-screen death I have ever seen. Sure, the medic in Saving Private Ryan died a tragic death as did lots of others, but never before could you see the last moments through a dying ones eyes.


And the saddest thing is perhaps that she would never know that he was in love with her. Because only in Hollywood have the dying a chance to say “I love you” as their last words before they close their eyes. Life (and mangas) are another matter:

Those two pages I have to say are the most touching (to me) thing I have ever seen or read in fiction. Can’t get anymore personal than that scene.


Phew, what a long post, but at least I got time again to post my thoughts here… and I hope that I got you interested in Berserk, if so, you should try out The Hawks and Evil Genius if you can’t get your hands on the manga (because, as in germany, older volumes may not be available anymore, and newer volumes take their time to come out).

We all knew the Master Chief from Halo was badass. As was Samus Aran from Metroid long, long, before him. Now the time has finally come for the two to battle it out in a big city brawl. And to make things worse the hive is also swarming there.
So much for the “story” of this brilliant machinima. What really made my jaw drop here is the animation which is top-notch. Never before have I seen such fluid and perfectly choreographed fighting in a fan-made game video. There are a few scenes reminiscent of the Matrix action, but other than that it looks very original. As if the fight between Master Chief and Samus wasn’t enough of brilliantly choreographed styling, when the two have to team up against the hive they let hell loose upon them, double-team style.

I just wish that you would actually be able to do all these crazy moves in the video games!

Creating those self-made costumes must have been one hell of a job! I really dig the Optimus Prime one, but they are all great in their own respect.

Rockstar Games released the first teaser trailer for Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV today.

There isn’t much information in the trailer (as was expected) but now it is clear at last that the next part of the franchise will be settled in New York.

Do you know Jack? If you don’t, it’s no problem at all, because You don’t know Jack is back!

But the franchise isn’t coming back to CD-ROM games (or DVD-games nowadays), now it is a free online flash-game in your browser. Sweet!

Cookie, You don’t know Jack’s moderator of old is back with it too, and he is as witty and as cruel if you answer a question wrong as ever.
Each week a new episode is released featuring several questions, including a DisOrDat as well as Jack Attack round.

So wherever you are, be it at work, at home or even at the beach, go to www.youdontknowjack.com and play a few rounds of this great game, you might even learn something (you will laugh, that is for sure).

Did you know that there used to be a large forest swastika in germany, where some foresters planted larch trees in a pine area so people flying over it would see the swastika?
Have you ever heard of the little austrian town of Fucking?
Have you been to the penis museum in iceland?
Seen the tree that owns itself?
Did you know that the pin that holds the rotor to the mast of some helicopters is called a Jesus nut?

If such obscurities bring even a little smile to your face, the following page might be worth a visit: Unusual articles on the english Wikipedia

Gmail is just great. I seriously could not manage my daily emails anymore without the conversation view it offers, and of course the best thing is the powerful labeling/taging capability. Instead of moving your mails into specific folders, you just assign (one or more) labels to them, so one mail can show up in more than one of the virtual label folders. This is a great way to organize your mail, and I still struggle with the normal IMAP email I have at my new workplace, at least there are a few extensions, particularly GmailUI for Thunderbird that make the free mail program at least behave like gmail (it uses the same shortcuts with the extension and archiving is also done in the same way, although labels still are missing).

But back to gmail itself: There is even more to it, you can use it as your personal nerve center, doing things such as: Using gmail as a personal database, getting real-time news updates, bookmarking, calendar and todo lists, and even write blog entries via mail.

Read more: Turn Gmail into your personal nerve center [micropersuasion]

I have always said that Windows Vista has a far worse user interface than XP has - everything there is bunched up, the sidebar with linux-like widgets doesn’t provide and really useful functions and on top of that isn’t customizable, the aero GUI is too flashy and nobody really needs the 3d flip-through taskswitcher, especially when you can’t even see the windows you are switching through because it looks like a shuffled deck of cards.
And now there is an independent study about Vistas user interface from Pfeiffer Consulting, a french market research institute. And of course the study showed that you need much less clicks in XP for stuff to do than in Vista.

I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t get it that a flashy interface isn’t exactly the same as a resourceful and efficient interface. The first may get the product some new customers because it does look rather with all the eye candy, but the latter is what binds the consumers to the product - that you can do your work efficient and without the interface always getting in your way.

According to a press release, Intel was able to produce a single CPU with 80 cores, that is able to deliver 1 Teraflop (1 trillion operations per second).

The now-called Teraflops Research Chip is composed of a total of 80 independent processing cores, which Intel refers to as tiles. The tiles are organized in rectangular fashion, with 8 tiles placed across and 10 down, adding up to a total of 80.

Though the company has no plans to release the 80 core chip to the public market, it claims that it offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.

We’ll see what will come of it. In the meanwhile you can read more about the project here:

• DailyTech
• PhysOrg
• New York Times
• International Herald Tribune