One thing I found quite frustrating however was the 140 character limit. I mean, for status updates I suppose that’s fine, but for discussion? That’s less than a single text message, and yet within that you also have to include the topic that you’re posting to and if you’re replying to someone specifically then you even have to include their name with an @ symbol before it. Already that takes you down to around 120 characters to convey your point no matter how complicated or intricate it is.

At first you keep forgetting about the limit. You compose a message that you already feel is much shorter than anything else you’ve written that day, only to glance at the screen to find that you’re actually 15 characters over the limit and unable to post. You then read through your message, replacing longer words for shorter equivalents (which never have exactly the same meaning) and substituting shorter words for txt spk. If you’re lucky you get below 140 characters, but if you’re not then you have to start the whole process again. Finally, when your message is hardly legible and barely makes the point that you initially set out to make, it’s short enough to post.

Twitter started out in 2006 as a status update website. I remember checking it out at my old workplace – the tagline was “what are you doing?”. I registered, posted a short message, then dismissed it as pointless and moved on. A couple of years passed, some celebrities stumbled across it and all of a sudden it was the place to go to talk to people you’d never met.

Fast forward to today and millions of people are posting on twitter on a daily basis. Twitter is finding itself included on more and more services – most recently Xbox Live and PlayStation Network – yet many people (myself included) are still wondering what all the fuss is about. Twitter is like Facebook but without the good bits; in fact, it’s not like Facebook at all – it’s just the Facebook status update feature by itself. As far as I can tell, people haven’t tried to hold a discussion through Facebook status updates, so why are they doing it with twitter?

Twitter has exploded for the same reason that Nintendo’s Wii is dominating the other, technologically superior consoles: ease of use and the casual market. In the same way that certain gamers who are reluctant to pick up a controller to play Halo or Call of Duty are happy to pick up a Wiimote to play party games, certain content authors are much happier using twitter than a technically superior alternative that they perceive as more complicated. To a lot of these people, the 140 character limit and the omnipresent Fail Whale are necessary evils because the alternatives are all just too difficult or time-consuming to get into. Of course, anyone who has taken the time or made the effort to set up one of the alternatives – personally I’m thinking about an IRC server here – knows that the extra time invested in setting everything up and learning how to use it is more than a worthwhile investment with with the extra features and flexibility that are available. IRC is actually designed for discussion and file-sharing rather than just posting about what you’re currently watching on TV or how sunny it is outside.

A lot of twitter users who use it for discussion are now becoming frustrated by its limitations – as I was after just a few minutes. Twitter never claimed that their service should be used for lengthy discussion though (although they are trying to bolt-on extra functionality now to try to satisfy demand), so to complain about its shortcomings as a discussion medium does seem a little unfair in all honesty. After all, you wouldn’t kick a cat for not being able to bark as it never claimed to be able to in the first place. So, what can be done to help people find a more suitable means of discussing hot topics without having to do anything too difficult or time-consuming?

Since I work in the educational sector, I’ve decided to set up the Learnalot Educational Discussion Rooms which are dedicated to the educational discussions that currently take place on twitter. They’re free, quick and easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, allow proper discussion and file-sharing and also provide transcripts of the discussion for archive purposes. So far, #sschat, #mathchat and #gtchat all have a dedicated room with the possibility of more coming on board in the near future. The rooms will be used (in conjunction with the usual twitter discussion) from this coming Monday. More information is available on the Learnalot blog.

The website prominently displays a host of award badges from sites such as Softpedia and Tucows, and the list of available software, available languages and support forum all suggest some degree of professionalism.

I downloaded Video Converter 6 and installed it. My first impressions were that the software looked reasonable enough. There were a couple of more clues that English wasn’t the developer’s first language (why don’t these guys ever get things translated properly?) but the features looked pretty impressive. I tried it out with a Blu-Ray copy of Gran Torino and once I watched it rip 15 minutes’ worth without crashing, I decided to support the company by buying a license. As I went out later, I didn’t actually get a chance to use the software to back-up any movies until this morning.

This morning I put in a DVD – Breach in fact – and started the backing up process. Immediately I noticed that AVS4YOU’s software was much slower than the FREE DVD Video Converter from DVDVideoSoft. I’ve used this software to back up some of my movies in the past but had decided to buy a product in the end because of the annoying popups that DVD Video Converter gives you when you close the program. Nevertheless, I let it complete the backup as I wanted to make sure that the default quality settings gave me comparable results.

After the backup had completed, I opened the file. Pretty much immediately I could tell that the audio and video were out of sync – just enough to be noticeable at first, but as I skipped through the movie the delay between what you saw and what you heard got bigger and bigger. Annoyed that AVS4YOU’s software couldn’t even make a backup of a simple DVD at default settings, I went to the support area of their website and opened a ticket to ask if there were any special settings that I was supposed to use to make this software work. That was around 8 hours ago, but so far I’ve received no answer.

Immediately after posting the support ticket, I checked out their forum to see if anyone had had the same problem and – more importantly – had offered a solution. I found a thread dating back 2 years where some guy had experienced exactly the same problem when trying to back up to AVI. This didn’t look good. I progressed through various similar posts and the company’s poorly-written replies before finally ending up on page 10 where I submitted my own account.

I basically laid it all out – I’d bought the software yesterday, found that it didn’t work properly and was disappointed to see that these issues had been going on for over two years. I stated that a free alternative from DVDVideoSoft was able to give me perfect results in half the time and asked if these issues were going to be fixed or if I was going to get a refund.

All day, I had no reply – nothing from the forum and nothing from the support ticket. Then, around 20 minutes ago I decided to check out the forum to see if anyone else had posted anything after me. To my amazement, I saw that the post I made this morning had been edited – gone was the mention of DVDVideoSoft’s free software and gone was the bit where I asked if I could get a refund. To top it off, there was no reply! Someone had actually taken the time to edit my post, but hadn’t bothered to reply to it nor to my support ticket!

I composed another message on the forum that left the company in no doubt that I wanted either working software or a refund and that if they messed around with my posts again, I would write about my experience here. A couple of minutes later though, I decided that it would be best to write about my experience on here anyway so that others can avoid making the same mistake that I made and avoid buying sub-standard software from a company that would rather spend its time editing its users’ forum posts than offering any kind of support.

I uninstalled AVS4YOU’s poor excuse for software and found that it left behind two more applications – an “update manager” and a “software navigator”, both of which I had to manually uninstall despite having just uninstalled the tool that was responsible for them both.

As I’m sure AVS4YOU will edit my last two posts (or maybe even delete them completely) rather than offer me some customer service, here’s a screenshot of the forum as I left it.

Update #1: AVS4YOU still hadn’t replied by the next day, so I opened a dispute on PayPal in order to get a refund. I guess AVS4YOU would prefer that its customers don’t know that they can do this (for up to 45 days after purchase), but they can and they should.

Update #2: AVS4YOU have now deleted all of my posts on their forum bar the original one that was heavily censored. They claimed that each post broke one of their forum rules – either by “advertising another product” or by “making a complaint against a moderator”. It seems you have to be happy both with their sub-standard software AND with their questionable forum censorship practices in order for your posts to be left alone on there. I’ve made one final post, making absolutely sure that it doesn’t violate any of their “rules”, which contains a link to this article – let’s see how long it stays on there and what the excuse is when they remove it!

Update #3: It’s gone! It lasted 24 hours but now Vlad has deleted it and emailed me to inform me of the deletion, though he’s completely neglected to tell me which forum rule it broke in order for it to be deleted. I’ve replied and asked for clarification. That Vlad and AVS4YOU continue to demonstrate the kind of censorship rarely seen outside of North Korea even though I’m reporting every instance is astounding.

Update #4: Incredibly, Vlad replied to tell me that the post was deleted for being “off topic”. This whole thing has become farcical so I’ve asked for ALL of my posts to be removed immediately. I have no wish to have any posts on what is an absolute JOKE a forum – especially ones that have been doctored to say something totally different to what was intended. So far he’s deleted everything except my initial (doctored) post, including his own fake reply, but he’s now disabled my account so that I can’t post any more links to this article.

Vlad, you’re lucky that I have ethical standards or I’d have edited your post to say “Our software sucks and we are all unprofessional clowns!”.

Mercury supports a great number of interactive and customisable elements that come together to create a rich learning environment for learners. Video, audio, animations, drag and drops, click and reveals, images, quizzes and assessments are all on offer.

Included in the price are 12 months’ updates and enhancements as and when they are made available.

Interested? Head over to madewithmercury.com for a live demo.

As a result of being both difficult to program and the subject of a much smaller user-base, the Saturn was often the recipient of low quality, rushed games that looked (and sometimes played) terribly compared to PlayStation equivalents. Yes, there were obviously a number of greats on the Saturn that, in my opinion, eclipsed much of what the PlayStation had to offer, but I’m not talking about exceptional cases here – I’m talking about the way things were in general. Sometimes this was down to developers porting over PlayStation code with minimal effort which meant no optimisation (for instance, Acclaim‘s Alien Trilogy only used one of the Saturn’s 2 32-bit Risc processors) and sometimes it was simply down to developers not being skilled enough to get the most out of the hardware. Sega’s non-existent software libraries meant that writing code in Assembly language would yield speed increases of 300-500% over code written in C, but few publishers and developers were willing to spend the time – or the money – to do this. Yu Suzuki himself estimated that only 1% of the industry’s programmers would be skilled enough to get the most out of the Saturn, which compared to the high percentage of developers who could easily get things done on the PlayStation thanks to Sony’s comprehensive C libraries, just wasn’t good enough.

However, while most developers and publishers were happy to release sub-standard crap on the Saturn, there were a few who were willing – or maybe more importantly able – to achieve impressive results on the machine, sometimes even achieving things that were impossible on the PlayStation.

One such company was Lobotomy Software. I remember reading a preview of their first Saturn title, Exhumed, and being overjoyed that finally someone was putting some proper effort into a Saturn FPS. Deadalus, Doom and Alien Trilogy before it had all been horrendous, so I was really looking forward to playing what looked like the console’s first proper FPS game. I pre-ordered the game and remember being late for school the day it arrived as I had been unable to wait til later to try it out. Over the next few months I completed the game several times over and unlocked every single secret, earning the in-game ability to levitate and even fly. The game was just awesome in every way.

On the success of this game (at least technically if not commercially – this was the Saturn after all), Lobotomy Software was commissioned by Sega to also convert Quake and Duke Nukem 3D to the Saturn; both of which also turned out to be favourites of mine.

The brains behind the SlaveDriver engine that powered all three games and put every other Saturn FPS to shame was a guy called Ezra Dreisbach, and although I’d never met him or even seen his photo, I had some serious respect both for him and what he had achieved where so many others had failed.

I’ve read five interviews with Ezra that relate to that period; a cheesy, biased, pro-Sega one conducted by SSM (and now available on UK:Resistance), a more informative one by a guy called Aydan on SS:UK, a somewhat brief one by GameFan Magazine, a much more recent one on Eurogamer and one that I found on www.curmudgeongamer.com a few years ago that is sadly no longer online. Luckily though I had made a “backup” of the interview before it was taken offline so I’m able to post it here for posterity as a thanks for all the hard work that was put into making those 3 games the best console FPSs of that generation. Enjoy!

Contributed by: jvm

Back when the Saturn had reached its apex in the US market, I had just obtained a used one and several games and had done some research on USENET for which games I should investigate. Among the games that seemed to be highly acclaimed were three by the company Lobotomy Software. Those titles were all first-person shooters: Quake, Powerslave, and Duke Nukem 3D. The last of these even had the functionality to play over the Sega Netlink modem network device. I bought all three and enjoyed them immensely. As it turns out, I was able to track down Ezra Dreisbach, the lead programmer on Powerslave and actually got to ask questions. Ezra now works at Snowblind Studios where he worked on Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Here’s the result of that communication.

Matt: You were the lead programmer on Powerslave for the Saturn by Lobotomy, but also on the team for the Saturn ports of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. Did those all use the same engine?

Ezra: Yeah, they were all based on the Powerslave Saturn engine. It was on the strength of that engine that we were able to get the contract for Duke Nukem and Quake from Sega.

Matt: What were your contributions to that engine? What were your roles on the other games that used it?

Ezra: I was the only programmer on Saturn Powerslave, but after we got the Sega contracts our whole company started working exclusively on those two projects and I moved into more just doing the core game engine work to support them.

Matt: Powerslave and Duke Nukem 3D on the PC both used Ken Silverman’s BUILD engine. Was the engine you designed for the Saturn a port the BUILD engine?

Ezra: Both games were pretty much rebuilt from the ground up. There is no shared code at all.

Those games work very differently from the way that things need to work on the Saturn, so there is really no way to do a port other than to basically remake the game. Doing ports isn’t the most financially or personally rewarding work. So there is no way that we would have wanted to do these if we hadn’t already known how to make Saturn first person shooters.

Matt: What, besides data like textures and models, was carried over from the PC versions? How about porting Quake?

Ezra: For Quake, all the levels were rebuilt by hand using our in house tool “Brew”. For Duke, we had a way to import the level data into Brew, but it still required substantial reworking.

Matt: What kind of system did Brew run on? I presume a PC, but then I’m not aware that I’ve ever heard a Saturn dev kit described before.

Ezra: It ran in Windows. The original idea was that it would be a tool that Lobotomy could use to create first person shooter levels for many games. We used it for Powerslave (Saturn & PlayStation), Mortificator (PC, unreleased) and the Quake and Duke ports.

Matt: You were a member of the “Design Team” for the PlayStation version of Powerslave. Does that mean you were a programmer, or did you fill some other role?

Ezra: No, it doesn’t mean programmer. On a project with so few people, everyone who works on it does some of the design. For instance, I designed some of the boss behaviour.

Matt: How did you feel about the two platforms, Saturn and PlayStation?

Ezra: I did do some work on the PlayStation later. After Saturn Quake was done I did a quick port of it to the PlayStation. Lobotomy was really hurting for cash at that point, and I hoped that we could get some publisher to sign us up to do PlayStation Quake. But for some reason, we couldn’t get anyone to go for it. Lobotomy folded soon after.

Matt: A PlayStation port of Quake? That’s terribly interesting! I’ve wanted a version of Quake on the PlayStation so I could compare versions on all three of the consoles from that “generation”. If you’ve the inclination, I’d truly like to hear how the port turned out on the PlayStation hardware, compared to the Saturn and (if you’ve seen it) the N64 version.

Ezra: The most striking thing about the PlayStation port was how much faster the graphics hardware was than the Saturn. The initial scene after you just start the game is pretty complex. I think it ran 20 fps on the Saturn version. On the PlayStation it ran 30,but the actual rendering part could have been going 60 if the CPU calculations weren’t holding it up. I don’t know if it would have ever been possible to get it to really run 60, but at least there was the potential.

Other than that, it would have looked identical to the Saturn version. Except for some reason the PlayStation video output has better colour than the Saturn’s.

So I know something about the PlayStation. And really, if you couldn’t tell from the games, the PlayStation is way better than the Saturn. It’s way simpler and way faster. There are a lot of things about the Saturn that are totally dumb. Chief among these is that you can’t draw triangles, only quadrilaterals.

Matt: I think I’ve seen an example of this in Tomb Raider on the Saturn. Very early on, in the caves, you can find a rock with a triangular side. In the PlayStation version, a rectangular texture was cut down the diagonal and mapped onto that triangle. In the Saturn version they had mapped the entire rectangular texture into the triangle, reducing one side to a point (in the sense that a triangle is a degenerate quadrilateral with one side of length zero).

Ezra: Ha! That’s pretty weak. What you do if you’re really trying is you pre-undistort the texture so that when you pinch one side down like that you end up getting what you wanted. We had to do this for the monster models in Saturn Quake.

Matt: Do you recall some of the internal differences between the Saturn and PlayStation versions of Powerslave?

Ezra: If you find all the team dolls in the Saturn version, then you get to play Death Tank. I’m not sure what you get in the PlayStation version. Jeff [Blazier] (the programmer of the PlayStation version) was working on a DT-like multiplayer minigame based on asteroids, but I don’t think he put it in the final game.

There are laser wall shooters in the Saturn version, but not in the PlayStation. It was a long time ago. There are plenty of differences, but I don’t remember any more major ones.

You can play a more advanced version of Death Tank if you’ve got Saturn Quake and Saturn Duke. Just boot up Quake so that it makes its save game, then start up Duke and a Death Tank option appears in the main menu.

Matt: Who designed the four exclusive levels for Saturn Quake? And while we’re talking Quake levels, what happened to one of the most memorable secret levels in the original Quake, Ziggurat Vertigo? Was it just too much wide open space for the engine to handle? Or were there other reasons for leaving it out?

Ezra: Yeah, exactly. That level was way too open to run well on the Saturn. One of the main problems with both the Quake and the Duke ports was that, on the Saturn, you can’t just draw a huge flat wall as one huge flat polygon. For one thing there’s no perspective correction, and some other limitations prevent you from even trying to work around that problem by dynamically subdividing the walls. So a flat wall has to be drawn as a mesh of quads. This means that huge walls have to be a lot of polygons, so huge open areas just can’t work. One of the Duke Nukem secret levels had to be replaced for the same reason.

The exclusive secret levels were designed by the whole quake team. They were actually built by the Quake Saturn level designer, Paul Knutzen, who I’m happy to again be working with on Snowblind’s new project.

Matt: One of my blogs gives a quick amateur comparison of the Saturn and N64 versions of Quake. Any comments?

Ezra: I like this part:

“The next part is even more disappointing for the N64 port. Many of you may recall the three switches that light up as you descend a spiral ramp down to a pool of sludge. In the N64 version, the lighting is almost completely static in this section. Apparently adding coloured lighting to sections of the game is easy, but the addition of dramatic dynamic lighting is too hard to do. But wait…Lobotomy managed to pull it off on the Saturn. Crazy.”

I remember being really grumpy about implementing the dynamic-world lights like the three switches in this area. I’m glad someone appreciated it.

Matt: Do you generally like first person shooters? Or was the work on Saturn shooters a business decision, given the popularity of the genre?

Ezra: Yeah, I like first person shooters, Halo was my favourite game last year. But at that point, what I wanted to do didn’t really have anything to do with what Lobotomy decided to do. I was hired to work on Saturn Powerslave, so the decision to do that game was made way before I got there. And even after that I didn’t get much say it what we were going to work on. Not that we had much choice, people weren’t exactly lining up around the block to offer us work.

Matt: What others kinds of games do you play, in your spare time?

Ezra: I’ve already played a ton of games, so I like games that are not ordinary. In the past year, I liked Halo, Rez, Ico and Jet Set Radio Future.

Matt: Porting a game to a platform is said to be far less rewarding than creating a new game, tailored for a specific platform. If you could return to the days of Lobotomy, with the experience you have now, would you have done anything differently?

Ezra: As an independent game developer there’s always a big difference between what you want to do, and what a publisher is willing to fund you for. So usually you end up doing stuff that’s lamer than you’d like. Nothing you can do about it really.

Matt: Any plans for a Death Tank Drei hidden in any of your games?

Ezra: No. I would like to make a stand-alone DT game someday though.

Matt: Thanks for taking the time to share your answers with me. And, as I’ve said before, thanks for the work on Powerslave, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D… I know I enjoyed playing all three of them.

So, it turns out that getting their arse kicked by the community for coming up with such a stupid idea was all part of the plan.

To celebrate this revelation, I have prepared a couple of images that show other people’s plans coming together.

The PSPgo was released in Europe and the US on October 1st, 2009 as an alternative – not a replacement – to the recently released 3000. At launch the unit price was £250 – around £100 more than the 3000 – though due to the substantial resulting backlash many retailers were discounting the machine to around £225 from day one.

The Go has exactly the same hardware specifications as the 3000 except that it can’t play traditional UMD games as it lacks a UMD drive and it has a smaller screen due to the console itself being half an inch smaller and 43% lighter than the 3000. Depending on who you ask, the smaller size is sometimes a positive and sometimes a negative – yes it’s easier to fit into your pocket but yes a larger screen is always better than a smaller one.

Sony’s decision to launch the original PSP back in 2005 with a UMD drive was quite controversial. Back in 2005, solid state memory was pretty expensive and the UMD allowed a cheap method of providing up to 1.8GB of storage space for its games which would have cost almost as much as the console itself in solid state. However, the drive was slow, it drained the battery and as soon as your games collection surpassed the grand total of 1 you had to find another pocket for your (cumbersome and delicate) UMDs. Some cases allowed up to 3 UMDs to be carried with the console but quickly got bulky – anything more than 3 and you were looking at a bag.

The UMD format shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone though as Sony’s history with bespoke formats is long and colourful. Among the success stories are the CD, the Memory Stick and Blu-ray, but on the flip side are BetaMax, DAT tapes and Mini Disk. Cynics were adding the UMD to the latter list as early as 2006.

At the beginning Sony seemed to have high hopes for the UMD format. As well as providing the medium for the PSP’s games, the UMD was also used for PSP versions of the latest blockbuster movies (the original PSP came with Spiderman 2) though this aspect was actually poorly thought out.

Firstly, a UMD movie could only be watched on the PSP – a rumoured UMD set-top box that would allow UMDs to be watched on your living room TV never materialised. Secondly, this PSP-only version of the movie often cost considerably more than a DVD copy that you could watch on anything. It was even possible to rip DVD movies to memory card and watch them on the PSP at no extra cost, though Sony artificially crippled the resolution of movies played back this way to 320×240 as a way of forcing people to watch their movies on UMD – which could use the system’s 480×272 screen to its full potential. With custom firmware removing this limitation however and UMD movie sales slumping, Sony eventually removed the limitation from their own firmware in revision 3.30 as part of a larger drive to try to stem the flow of custom firmware installations.

So, the UMD failed as a movie format and here in 2010 you can get memory cards of a higher capacity for next to nothing, so surely the PSPgo is a no-brainer and everyone should upgrade from their PSP3000, right? Sadly not, and the reasons are all down to yet more stupidity on Sony’s part.

First there’s the console’s price. Even today it costs £200 while the PSP 3000 costs £130. The Go has recently gone through a relaunch due to lacklustre sales to an indifferent public and now includes 10 “free” games, though again all is not as it seems. The first and most obvious issue is that you’re paying for these “free” games in the inflated price of the system so they’re not free at all. The second issue is that while 6 of the games are either critically or commercially acclaimed, four of them are not and so are unlikely to be on your wanted list, and lastly, although Sony claims that there’s £200 of games being given out for free here, you could actually get all 10 for closer to £70 on UMD if you were to shop around. Still, if this offer is enough to tempt you, be warned that Sony fully intends to make back any money that it’s losing with this promotion as soon as you start buying more games.

Assuming you swallow the £70 higher price tag of the Go, you’ll then be wanting to buy some more games for the machine. The only place to buy games for the Go is on Sony’s online PlayStation Network (PSN), and for some reason nearly a year after the console’s launch there are still a LOT of great games that aren’t available on the service simply because they were released before Sony started selling games online.

When you do find a game that you want to buy on the service, be prepared to pay a premium. Despite having zero distribution costs, everything from brand new releases to bargain-bin golden oldies costs significantly more on PSN than on UMD. I’ve heard clowns make excuses for this, claiming that it costs publishers more to sell on PSN than it does to sell in shops and therefore the games simply have to cost more. Whether this is the case or not I don’t know, but I don’t think the average customer cares about the politics behind it all and I think they just want fair prices. Besides, I’m not sure how any of this is supposed to excuse Sony’s own games which also cost more on PSN than they do on UMD – are we to believe that Sony’s gaming division is charging itself extortionate rates to sell on its own platform? That seems to be quite a stretch for the imagination – even for a Sony fanboy.

Lastly, if you’re one of those people who sells their games once they’re completed or no longer played (personally I keep all of mine, unless the game is just total garbage) then you’re out of luck on the PSPgo. Games are digitally signed at the point of download to only work on your PSP, so you’re stuck with the game whether you like it or not. You can’t sell it to anyone and can’t send it back for a refund – this really is a one-way trip here. Of course, with a UMD copy (which cost you less in the first place remember), you can either sell it on eBay or part-exchange it for another game in your local games shop.

I said earlier I’d come back to why the PSPgo has so far sold so poorly that Sony felt it needed a relaunch. Unfortunately for Sony, it appears that the gaming public isn’t quite as stupid or gullible as Sony likes to believe.

When the PSPgo was first announced and the lack of a UMD drive was confirmed, thousands of PSP owners who initially wanted to upgrade asked the question, “How do I get all of my [UMD] games onto it?“. Sony promised a solution, though wouldn’t give any clues as to what the solution was until shortly before the release of the console. Speculation was rife, including – though not limited to – the idea that Sony would install booths into games shops all around the country that would turn UMD games into digital copies.

It turned out however that the “solution” was this: for people who had an existing UMD games collection, Sony was willing to give them an incredible 3 games for free with their PSPgo. That included those who only had 3 UMD games as well as those who had 100+. Also, the selection of games to choose from was very limited. Unsurprisingly, few took up their “trade-in” offer and most stuck to their older PSPs instead.

Those who were new to the world of PSP weren’t stupid either – why would they pay extra for a system that also forced them to pay extra for a smaller selection of games? And then prevent them from selling those games when they were done with them?

The result was, quite naturally, poor sales of the PSPgo which lead Sony to conclude that the gaming public “was not yet ready for digital distribution”. I’d say that on the contrary, digital distribution is doing just fine when done properly and that in fact what people aren’t ready for is to be ripped off three times over with a single console. Had the pricing of the console reflected the lower manufacturing cost and the pricing of the games reflected the zero distribution costs, then I think the PSPgo could have been a contender – even with the smaller games selection. As it is, to answer the question at the beginning of this article – is is worth buying a Sony PSPgo? No it isn’t – get the PSP 3000 instead.

First off, the console is gorgeous. It’s noticeably smaller than the original and very shiny. The power and drive tray buttons are both touch-sensitive so you only need to tap them for them to work and there are 5 USB ports instead of the old one’s 3 – which means my USB hub is now unemployed.

Somewhat annoyingly, the connection to the power brick has also been changed so I had to go behind the TV and untangle a load of wires to get the old brick out so that I could put the new one in.

Anyway, once all that was done I looked again at the console. The hump that housed the HDD on the old model has disappeared and in its place is a little slot with a little cover clipped on it. I took this cover off and found a little HDD case about a half inch tall and about 3-4 inches wide. I pulled out the HDD to take a look at it and saw a couple of standard Serial-ATA connectors on the other side. Was Microsoft finally letting people upgrade their machines with unofficial drives that were bigger and cheaper than the official offerings?

A discussion with @XboxSupport on Twitter revealed that no, this is not the case. Somewhat annoyed by this since my PS3 is happily running a 7,200RPM 500GB drive since I got it, I asked why. The ensuing conversation (after the jump) has been edited to make it more readable but the content is untouched.

g4r37h: Hey guys. I got my 360 Slim today. The HDD has standard serial ATA ports on it – does that mean I can install a bigger drive?

XboxSupport: It is not possible for a larger hard drive to be installed into the console. ^RH

g4r37h: Hmm, so what would happen if I connected a 500gb laptop drive? It would physically fit, right? But the software would block it?

XboxSupport: The drive would not be properly formatted to work with the 360. ^RH

g4r37h: So the answer is yes you block it through software. I guess that’s so that you can charge twice as much for an official drive?

XboxSupport: The official drives have been formatted to work with the 360 software to ensure security of the files and system. ^RH

g4r37h: Come on guys, I know formatting is nothing more than the file system which is controlled by software. You could make unofficial drives work quite easily. In fact, you’ve clearly gone out of your way to stop them working if an unofficial drive won’t work. I think it’s down to being able to charge crazy money for official HDDs. Tell me I’m wrong.

XboxSupport: If you’d like to use an external USB drive you can for storage from 1-16GB. ^RH

g4r37h: I don’t want 16GB USB storage. I want a 1TB drive in there. There’s no hardware reason why I can’t – the connections match. So can you confirm that a 1TB drive wouldn’t work because your software would block it? I have a 500gb drive in my PS3 and have done since launch. Why can’t I do the same with my 360?

g4r37h: OK I’ll be honest – I know it’s so that you can charge crazy money for official drives. I just wanted to hear you say it

XboxSupport: It is not a feature supported by the 360. We do not have specifics on why that decision was made. ^RH

g4r37h: Of course you do – check out my previous post!

XboxSupport: We do not have specifics on those decisions that were made. ^RH

g4r37h: OK let’s make a deal. We’ll agree that it’s so that you can charge double for official drives until you give me an alternative.

XboxSupport: We don’t have details on that decision but it is not for that reason. ^RH

g4r37h: Oh come on. If you don’t know what the reason is, how do you know what it isn’t? It’s not hardware – the hardware is the same. It’s not software – because you control that. The only other variable is price. Why let people buy 500GB if you can charge them the same amount for 120GB! It’s a great business plan.

XboxSupport: The official hard drives are there to be trusted sources and help keep the platform secure. ^RH

g4r37h: Trusted sources? So a brand new drive with twice the capacity and half the cost wouldn’t be secure? Can you explain why? Because as far as I know you could still format the drive, encrypt the content etc just the same.

g4r37h: I was happy to let this go with a gentleman’s agreement but since you’re trying to tell me it’s something else now I’m curious!

XboxSupport: We don’t have details on that process, sorry. ^RH

g4r37h: Sony’s PS3 is a lot more secure than the 360 and yet they allow unofficial HDDs. I’d say secure sources isn’t a factor.

g4r37h: Hmm ok then. Is that your final word on the matter? Because all of this is going into my blog as we speak.

XboxSupport: It is a decision that was made by Microsoft when developing the console. Sorry, we don’t have any details outside of that. ^RH

g4r37h: Yes I know when the decision was made and who made it. The question was why. I’m saying it’s all down to pricing.

XboxSupport: We do not have full details on why the decision was made. ^RH

g4r37h: Yeah I got that the first time! Then I said it was so you could charge double for official HDDs and then you failed to retort.

g4r37h: Never mind. I think everyone else knows the reason even if you’re not allowed to confirm it. Thanks for the chat!

XboxSupport: Have a good day. ^RH

So, there we have it. When I put it to Microsoft that there was no plausible reason for blocking unofficial HDDs other than the fact that they want to be able to over-charge for official drives, they had no reply. I know we all knew that anyway, but it was still somewhat disappointing that Microsoft couldn’t just admit something that is painfully obvious and instead tried to fob me off with some rubbish about security and reliability – security on a console that is a lot less secure than its main competitor (which freely allows unofficial HDDs) and reliability on a console that is plagued by RRODs – none of which are related to the HDD.

Microsoft, if you’re going to lie about the reason you don’t allow official hard drives, at least come up with a half decent excuse!

Here’s a photo that I took of a road that’s less than a mile away from my home – clearly this is not the weather for hosepipe bans. United Utilities: sort out the leaking water pipes, you clowns. We all know it has nothing to do with the weather!

The portal isn’t yet taking subscribers as there’s still some work to do on the resources themselves, but with the portal now completed it made sense to unveil it for three important reasons:

1. It gives people who are interested in what we’re doing (and Google Analytics shows there’s a fair few of you out there!) an opportunity to take a look and to get excited about what’s coming.
2. It allows people to register for the newsletter and be kept up to date with resource progress and more importantly, the portal’s launch.
3. Finally, it allows the search engines to start indexing the site so that when we do launch, potential users will be able to find us.

Registrations on the forums are welcome to all those who are interested in the portal or who wish to ask questions or provide feedback. Naturally, the portal will also serve as a support forum when we launch.

I got the HTC Desire with 300 minutes, 3000 texts and 500mb data on a 24-month contract for just £20/month with the phone itself costing me £55.

If you look at what the competition is offering, the same deal would cost £30/month at the Carphone Warehouse (although the phone would have been free), which over 24 months means that I’d have paid £185 more overall – including the cost of the phone.

It’s a similar story at Phones4U where the same deal again costs £30/month although the duration of the contract is lower. However, all is not as it seems. While Phones4U would claim that an 18-month contract is better than a 24-month alternative, in this case it simply isn’t. Allow me to demonstrate:

£30/month for 18 months and a free HTC Desire = £540
£20/month for 24 months and an HTC Desire for £55 = £535

At first glance Phones4U looks only slightly more expensive here, and if you speak to them on the phone they make a big deal about it “only” being an 18 month contract. However, for that you’re actually getting 6 months less service, and to have a working phone for the same length of time you’d need to extend the contract by another 6 months which would cost an additional £180 which brings it up to the same cost as the Carphone Warehouse. No-one only needs a phone for 18 months, and that’s what they’re relying on here to make their deal look more attractive. It doesn’t take much to see through their false logic though.

You could argue that with Phones4U you’d be getting your upgrade 6 months earlier than you would with Vodafone, but the £185 more that you’d be paying for a phone that works for 24 months would cover the price of an upgrade from Vodafone (for a similar phone) over 3 times over.

Vodafone’s UK Deals Team is also offering the HTC Legend on a similar contract for just £15/month (which is the one my father and two of my sisters have taken) and they have lots of other deals for different manufacturers as well.