I got there at 11.55pm and was the only person there waiting to buy one. Odd, I thought, but nevertheless great news as a) I wouldn’t have to wait for long and b) I’d be guaranteed to get one. I picked up the graphite version with 6 games – Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Shadow Wars, PES 2011, Super Monkey Ball 3D, Super Street Fighter IV, Ridge Racer 3D and Rayman 3D. Only Street Fighter stood out as a must-have game with the others all being a bit average, but with nothing else available for the console beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Around midnight just as I was paying for my items another guy turned up to buy one, followed by a couple of teenagers who also picked up a unit. It was hardly the rush that the gaming press had been predicting.

Six months on and the games haven’t really picked up. Apart from Zelda and maybe Resident Evil there hasn’t really been anything worth buying, which is crazy considering this is the follow-up to the DS – the most successful console in recent history.

The woeful supply of games and the steep price point of the console were obviously having an impact on sales because on July 28th Nintendo announced a global price drop of around 30%. Acknowledging the console’s performance as a relative failure (though it has still sold a significant number in its own right), Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and other senior management also handed themselves significant pay cuts – an example that we can only wish many a banker would follow.

Such a drop in price so soon after launch is unprecedented and was a sign that Nintendo officially recognised that things were not going according to plan. In an attempt to make up for the ~£100 extra that early adopters had paid for the console Nintendo came up with the Ambassador Programme which entitled users to 20 free game downloads on the Virtual Console. Although better than nothing, many 3DS early adopters – myself included – would have preferred a refund in all honesty.

As if the 3DS’ first six months on the market haven’t been disastrous enough, Nintendo has today announced a new peripheral that adds a second analogue stick to the console. It requires its own AAA battery and will be released on the 10th of December in Japan for around £12.

Home consoles have made use of dual analogue sticks for some years now. The idea first appeared on the N64 in 1996 but was refined to the more familiar design that we have today with the original PlayStation’s Dual-Shock controllers in 1997. Since then pretty much every home console has had them – even the Wii on its classic controllers.

In 2004 Sony released the original PlayStation Portable (PSP), and since then every time rumours have circulated of a redesign or a revamp the gaming community has pretty much begged for a second analogue stick as it makes FPS games in particular a lot easier to play. Sony resisted such calls throughout the lifetime of the PSP but has thankfully implemented the feature in their follow-up, the PlayStation Vita.

So, since the games industry has been asking Sony for dual analogue sticks on its PSP for seven years, one would have thought that any competing company who had a hand-held console in development would have made sure to include such a feature on their new hardware. A company that has led an industry worth billions both with its home console and hand-held would surely have its finger on the pulse and any widely-requested feature like this was bound to make it into the new hardware.

In a move that was either stupidly incompetent or cleverly deliberate, Nintendo chose to ignore seven years of such requests and include just one analogue stick on its 3DS. Spectators were forced to conclude that Nintendo’s intention all along was to use the bottom, touch-sensitive screen as a second analogue as some games had done on the original DS. However, the launch of this new peripheral demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the lack of a second analogue stick on the 3DS was in fact an act of stupid incompetence after all, because Nintendo has now decided that a second physical stick is so important that it justifies an add-on that not only has no elegant way of communicating with the console (there are no expansion ports on the 3DS so it will probably use the infra red port which would also explain why it needs its own battery), but when held symmetrically will shift the screen over to the left of the user’s field of view.

Shifting the console over to the left like this could be a problem because the 3D effect on the 3DS only works in a very narrow viewing angle and games that require motion controls can already push the user outside of it with enthusiastic use. By shifting the screen over by an inch or so the angle will be even tighter on one side.

The botched, home-made look of the console with the expansion attached is a far cry from the simple elegance of the DS Lite (though the original DS of course was no looker) and would suggest that a 3DS redesign is on its way; one that includes the second analogue stick in a more elegant fashion as should have been the case the first time round. This will probably be announced just after Christmas after Nintendo has cleared as much original 3DS stock as possible beforehand.

With that in mind it seems even more foolish for Nintendo to reveal the expansion now as it can only serve to dampen the sales figures that the console is getting since the price drop. It would have made much more sense to keep it under wraps until after Christmas when the redesign is unveiled, maximising sales of the current design for the holiday and providing Nintendo with an elegant new design to market while offering early adopters a way to play the games that will obviously take full advantage of the second stick. As it is, Nintendo is left with an ugly contraption to promote as its primary offering for three months to an audience that would surely rather wait for the inevitable redesign – while Sony will no doubt start marketing its drop-dead gorgeous PS Vita to stick the boot in.

Nintendo again only has itself to blame for the market so confidently predicting a redesign. For years they have capitalised on selling multiple revisions of their previous hand-helds as a means of generating new money for old rope. The DS gave way to the DS Lite which gave way to the DSi which shared the market with the DSi XL. Each version has also shipped in numerous colours and special editions, and even before the DS we had exactly the same scenario with the Game Boy. But never before has a redesign come so quickly after the original machine’s launch.

With such a long list of mistakes and poor decisions relating to the 3DS coupled with the poor response to the Wii’s follow-up the Wii-U, it seems that Nintendo has been riding high on a wave of success for the last five years through happy accidents and good fortune rather than any kind of deliberate strategy. I just don’t see how one company could have got things so right with one console and so wrong with another if the decisions behind them both were all deliberate calculations and part of the same overall vision. Rather than outwitting their competitors with genius decisions it seems Nintendo simply stumbled upon an open goal by accident and happily took advantage of it. With that once-open goal now packed full of other players and Nintendo left relying on outplaying the rest of the field for victory, it seems they’re not quite the gaming gurus they’ve made themselves out to be.

So, where does this leave the current 3DS? With several companies delaying software releases due to the poor console sales which are themselves a result of a lack of quality games (and its previous high price point), the console now faces an up-hill struggle to secure critical mass in the run-up to Christmas. It’s unlikely that the 3DS could completely fail with the vast reserves of cash that Nintendo has amassed over the last 5 years, but I’d say it’s highly unlikely to replicate the success of its predecessor because as lucky as Nintendo seems to have been over the last 5 years – and in light of their recent form it does appear that luck factored significantly in their success – everyone’s luck runs out eventually.

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 has an RRP of £225 while you can pick up the PSP 3000 for just £130. In May Sony CFO Bill Glaser called the Go’s sales “a little bit of a disappointment”, so recently it has gone through a relaunch 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.

Update: As of 21st of April, 2011 – just 18 months after launch – the PSPgo has been discontinued due to its failure to have any impact on the market. The full story is here.

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 :P

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!

The whole process took just under two weeks from initial discussions to delivery, with lots of play-testing and adjusting in-between to get the optimum experience.

Head over to the game page at Quak Multimedia for more information.

Since launch the games have racked up literally thousands of plays between them and although have proven pretty popular among the above-mentioned websites, the logs showed that there was a lot of traffic from certain locations that hinted at the games actually being used for educational purposes rather than as the trials they were meant to be.

I wouldn’t have minded too much if these users were contributing at all to the development of these games by providing us with some feedback, but despite requests, the comments sections have remained empty and we have received no email feedback on these games.

Quak Multimedia doesn’t exist to provide a free service – especially not to people who refuse to contribute anything back – and for providing educators with the necessary tools to help their students perfect their skills I’d have expected some comments and feedback at the very least – or preferably some sales figures that better reflect the usage statistics.

We could have made the games time-limited trials, but doing so would have meant putting more time and effort into developments that are already finished at a time when we are already busy, and all because a minority are happy to abuse good will. It just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do at this time, so instead the games have been removed from the site – but are still available to buy to anyone who wants to support us.

Thanks.

Having upgraded my PSP 3000 to firmware 6.1 today I was eager to take a look at these minis and see if there was anything worth buying, but I ran into a problem in that I couldn’t find any reviews for these games. Google yielded plenty of news and opinions on the new option but nothing in the way of actual game reviews.  I certainly wasn’t going to buy anything from PSN without reading some reviews first, so I was relieved to finally find pspminis.com – a site that has been specifically set up to bring you minis news, previews and reviews! They currently have two reviews on there – for Fieldrunners and Kahoots – and I did end up buying Fieldrunners as a result of reading that article.

Active Goal Challenge has been translated into Spanish, which makes it our first non-English game. It’s hopefully the first of many such projects though so watch this space.

The ball mechanics were simplified a little and the wind was removed. The branding was of course changed to reflect that of their website, with the starring roles going to Alex and Jasmine.

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.