PS3 thoughts and adventures in minimalistic bass

Last night met up with some people I used to work with in Ruthin. The guy whose house we went to has a PS3 and a 40" LCD TV. So we spent the evening playing games and in between eating crisps and dip, followed by chips and chocolate cake. Yeah, it was a fat evening. After the Indian the previous night, cue massive guilt trip.

The PS3 was interesting. The machine itself isn't particularly pretty, it looks like a shiny, overly bulbous PS2. The menus are pretty much the same XMB interface as the PSP, which I always found easy to use.

The controllers...well, they feel just like any PlayStation controller from the last ten years, just much lighter and because of that, flimsier. Played MotorStorm and some F1 game which used the motion sensing. It worked, but was nothing like as good as the Wii sensitivity. Resistance: Fall of Man was better, and looked pretty good. Also watched a bit of Casino Royale on Blu-ray. It looked quite decent, but does HD really add anything to films?

In conclusion, the PS3 is OK. However it does appear to be a better hardware design than the Xbox 360. Mine has crashed twice while playing BioShock in the last week and also twice claimed that the disk was unreadable. It really does seem to be a case of not if it will fail, but when.

I revisited my homemade 2-string bass today. I had previously attempted to add a Precision Bass pickup to it and got pissed off with the wiring, before throwing it under my bed in disgust. I've modified it to have only one string, but the pickup works and it even has a jack socket. The whole thing is held together with duct tape and bits of plastic, but it can now actually be played like a normal bass guitar. If nothing else, it has taught me that I cannot play an unlined fretless in tune.

Other than that I didn't do much other than tidy the downstairs room. Quite a lot of the stuff in there hadn't been touched since I moved out of my old flat, and I found quite a few treasures. One of the things was a Milton Bradley Big Trak, which I think I paid £1 for at a car boot sale in St Asaph cathedral. I don't know if it works, it needs a lot of batteries. One day I'll get some and try it. It was one of those toys that I found fascinating as a child but never had myself, but I knew a couple of people who had one.

Also downstairs is a shedload of retro gaming stuff. In the flat I had a complex series of switchboxes hooked up to my TV which let me switch between a NES, SNES, N64, MegaDrive (with Master System adaptor), Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2 and GameCube. It was slightly OTT and very geeky, but it allowed us to have many and varied gaming sessions. Such as doing a direct and somewhat hilarious comparison between the Saturn Resident Evil and the GameCube remake, or switching between the NES, MegaDrive and N64 versions of Micro Machines. Somehow I never got around to reconnecting it all up when I moved home, so it's all down there in boxes.

I really, really, really need to have a clearout.

Currently listening to Don't Look to the Eyes of a Stranger by Iron Maiden, one of the few decent tracks from the not so great Blaze Bayley era (The X-Factor and Virtual XI). I edited a couple of minutes out of the middle of the track and it's much better.