Reviews are beginning to appear for Guerrilla Games' upcoming first-person shooter, Killzone 2, a PS3 exclusive that has received a great deal of hype over the past several months. The reviews are mostly complimentary, but not overwhelmingly so; Ars Technica says it has "some of the best graphics yet seen on the PS3," and is a "solid take on the war-gaming genre." They also acknowledge that this is the latest game being held up as a standard for how good PS3 games can be, though the PS3 may not need such validation anymore. Edge Magazine is critical of the story, saying, "you could play the levels in random order to little ill-effect," but found the gameplay redeeming enough to warrant a 7/10. Concerns were raised early about the quality of the controls, but Guerrilla Games has affirmed that no changes will be made. Though the game won't be out for about a week yet, rumors of some fairly typical DLC plans are already cropping up. Giant Bomb recorded some video showcasing Killzone 2's multiplayer a while back.

Gizmodo is running a guide on how to install Ubuntu on a Playstation 3 and set it up to play vintage games through emulation. Quoting: "It still kind of surprises me (in a good way) that Sony was, from the start, very OK with PS3 owners tinkering with Linux on their PS3s. A modified release of Yellow Dog Linux was available from the very beginning, and some very handy hard drive partitioning and dual-boot utilities are baked right into the PS3's XMB; Ubuntu gets installed on an entirely separate partition of your PS3's hard disk, so your default system doesn't get touched and switching between Ubuntu and the XMB is a piece of cake. There is a flipside to this coin, however. Since the PS3's Cell Processor is PowerPC based, you won't be able to use any Linux software that's compiled for x86, which is, unfortunately, most of it. However, Ubuntu has always had a PPC distro, and most of the basic stuff will work just fine. You can even load up a PPC-compiled Super Nintendo Emulator, SNES9X, and play some classic games pretty easily on your Sixaxis controller paired via Bluetooth."

Kelly writes "An unsealed document in a Washington lawsuit filed last week at Seattle, Microsoft was well aware that the Xbox 360 was prone to damaging game discs even before the console was introduced in November 2005. Microsoft had three solutions for solving the issue, but all three solutions were rejected due to technical concerns or on the basis of cost. Microsoft settled on a cost-free fourth solution: a warning was added to Xbox 360 manual, which essentially placed the blame on users instead of the hardware." The scratching-disks problem was mentioned a few years back, too. I wonder whether more people would prefer a slight discount on the price of a console to the ability to reorient it while a disk was playing inside.