ph1nn - Slashdot User

Early Killzone 2 Reviews Looking Good 140

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @05:45AM from the console-exclusivity-wars dept.

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.

Setting Up Ubuntu On a PS3 For Emulation 81

Posted by Soulskill on Monday February 02, 2009 @01:20AM from the eight-bit-high-def dept.

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."

Comment Sounds good but.. (Score 0) 261

by ph1nn on Friday January 09, 2009 @05:09PM (#26391767) Attached to: Nvidia 480-Core Graphics Card Approaches 2 Teraflops

Doesn't the PS3's Cell processor do more than this, and it came out years ago?

Microsoft Knew About Xbox 360 Damaging Discs 583

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 16, 2008 @01:09PM from the dribbling-it-like-a-ball-may-also-cause-problems dept.

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.

Comment Too all the people hating on the performance test (Score 1) 544

by ph1nn on Monday October 27, 2008 @12:32PM (#25529035) Attached to: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?

It obviously wasn't the goal of their article to isolate to performance issues to help find the problems.

It WAS the goal to install each version separately and test different areas of the performance.

And the fact is that in most areas Linux performance (not just Ubuntu, it's not like they do anything others don't) is going down. This isn't the only benchmark that shows it. Whether it be in new kernel features like CFS, the file system, i/o changes, bad drivers, gcc changes, gtk issues and so on. Linux in general isn't getting any faster, and this is a huge problem that should be looked into by ALLLL distros. Ubuntu, for example, could put an entire (6 month) release cycle, or even 2 release cycles (Apple is doing this with the next version of Mac OS) into performance optimizations but it wouldn't do a lot of good because they would have to be looking into Gnome, GTK, and all the other applications that go into it.

Even for me I have noticed issues, windows resize much slower in the last few years, I can't even use NVIDIA drivers with Firefox as the Ajax performance goes to hell, even writing to USB flash drives is noticeably slower than windows. And it's unfortunate because Linux is all I want to use.

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