And it's pretty awesome. I'm not much of a tech-freak, but the things you can do with a PlayStation 3 are pretty astounding. Not only is the Cross Media Bar, or XMB, very user friendly, the colors of the background changes by the minute or even second. I started noticing it after a friend of mine said that he had a black background, and the next morning it was all reddish and had a little green in it. So I decided to take look at it for myself, and it turned out to be true. The colors do change dependant on time of day, which is a little nifty feature that the people at Sony thought about.Using the CDDB the PS3 can give tags to almost all your albums, and it even has the option for you to add an image to it, getting rid of the folder icon. Customization is key, and looking at it this way, the system actually delivers. You can add small 15 second animations to a movie-file, getting rid of the movie file icon, alter your own user icon, instead of using the smiley faces the system initially provides. It's all in the options a system delivers to you, and with that, Sony has brought a force to be reckoned with.
Ofcourse, Microsoft will not be put behind. But only now, with the Spring Update, will they give us some much wanted options seemingly 'borrowed' from the PS3. I'm not going into much details about it, but everytime I put in a PS3 disc into my sleek black dust-magnet, it shows which game is in by changing the background and playing a small clip combined with music. It does that with all PS3 games, and the demo's and the full PSN games. I don't know what it is, but I love simple features like this. Microsoft decided to up the ante, and put in dedicated Game folders on it's Marketplace, which should make a little more bearable to look at. Cool in my book I say.
Also new is the fact that the Open Tray bar, which changes into Play Game whenever you put in an Xbox 360 or Xbox game, will finally show which game you're actually about to start. I, however, dislike the fact that this new update will also incorporate Microsoft's MSN list into my Xbox Live Gamertag system. It's annoying enough to be on MSN at times, but if I can also be bothered by people on MSN while playing on my Xbox 360, I'll just keep my status on Live as offline. The rest of the update I hardly care for, but this feature just screams annoying to me. Might as well have left that out to be honest.
On a different note, I'm finally making a slight start in the gamedesign & development side of my life. I've recently started a project with Panajev and Kiriku, two talented persons who were looking for more meat for their project, and I'm happy to oblige. My role in it is designer/director, the function I am aspiring to, since that is what I can do best. Create stories, complete universes, and tell others how to create them. They would only have to obey my command and I'll live the easy life. Well, not really. Because there is a whole lot of work to be done to be honest. Creating characters, giving them personality's is not that easy. Luckily I'm a pretty skilled writer, even though I do say so myself, so it's not big of a deal.
However, combining that with DGS (which has started to come on strong), and relaying my vision and wishes to my fellow enthusiast developers, is a bit more demanding than I initially thought.
Want to keep your eyes on this project? Go and visit http://panajev.blogspot.com/ where we will try to keep everyone updated. A friend of mine, who goes on the internet by the name of Dante, is currently working on the music, and we might share a bit of that once we get further in development.
-Vash Out-
posted by Peter @ 3:26 PM
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