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Achievements are the greatest thing ever to happen with gaming – being able to look at your game experience and compare it to others in a non-directly-competitive manner is an awesome thing. In particular, some of the trophies on LittleBigPlanet are just plane cute.

Homemaker: Decorate your pod with 10 stickers.  Pretty much anyone who manufactured homes for themselves in LBP got this – we got this by accident, during the infamous “Dangerously Cheezy Pod” incident:

The secret trophies, in case you’re wondering (those with ??? in the Trophy List until you acquire them):

Trendsetter: This is the easiest to get, in fact you may already have gotten it if things get a little heated in multi-player. Just attack someone with stickers or objects – all you have to do is place a sticker or object on another sackboy to unlock this bronze trophy.

Cranium Collector: Get this bronze trophy by killing 100 creatures – I’m not entirely sure why I don’t have this yet, but I’ve hardly been keeping count.

Secret Stickerist: Awarded for unlocking the “race” in “First Steps”. I might go get this one right now.

Sackbird: Spend 8 seconds or more in the air? After the exploding-rocket-powered-skateboard incident which awarded me with “incredible speed” and “incredible height” I don’t fully understand why I don’t have “Sackbird“.

It’s probably no secret to anyone who knows me that I used to be a huge fan of the SOCOM series… ever since that fateful day when me and my brother-in-law came home from the flea market with two network adapters and two copies of SOCOM: US Navy SEALs we were hooked for a good 5 years.

SOCOM2 came along, quite probably the best in the series – if not for the copious amounts of cheaters it’d probably still be stupid fun as well.

SOCOM3 held our attention for the longest time, mainly because of the community features… Seriously, InfinityWard take note – SOCOM3 and/or Combined Assault is more or less exactly how a console FPS community system should work.

SOCOM: Confrontation made headlines, with screen-shots of the glorious maps making prior fans of the series swoon… and then? Nothing. It was buggy, aggravating, and then other shooters came along. CoD4 is notable, but there are plenty others… Confrontation sits basically empty at the moment, at any given time I can find around 7,000 players at any given time… compared to I’m sure there’s at least a quarter mil players still on Combined Assault right at this very minute.

Even with the hideously expensive Sony Bluetooth Headsets, it’s not even really a very attractive bundle any more. You’re better off hitting up discount stores looking for a $10-$15 copy of Warhawk if you want a cheap BT headset (though honestly you can find headsets for that cheap anyway).

So what’s the result? From my experience the majority of the bugs are fixed now – I didn’t have any annoying experiences with the game despite a server outage. The game plays really well – basically like vintage SOCOM. The vehicles are gone, the maps are small enough to keep the action reasonably hot but not a giant cluster-fuck. The game looks positively gorgeous, though on my 19″ SDTV I’m left squinting as with every other PS3 shooter – looks like I’ll be heading in for wrinkle treatment at a young age unless I can pick up an HDTV sometime soon.

So if your copy of SOCOM: Confrontation is one of the many, many copies on half.com right now I suggest you take it off and give it another shot. If you never picked it up because you heard it’s junk, go search for a good copy on half – you can grab it for as low as ten bucks, and I personally think it’s well worth it.

Our computers are stone-age. It’s true, and it sucks.

When we moved to Indiana, all our computers somehow managed to die on the trip. I don’t know if it was vibrations, static in the air, change in temperature, or the shock of them not being turned off for years then suddenly spending two weeks shut off – but the only machine I still have that works is my SGI Indigo2.

So we bought these machines, because we needed PCs. Unfortunately, we bought them at an awkward time – they were the last of the machines that used DDR RAM, the last of the machines using AGP ports for graphics cards, and a bunch of other limiting factors.

We bought graphics cards for them, but over time they died. I managed to pick up a cheap GeForce4 TI on eBay – which is a fantastic card for it’s age, but the 512MB RAM in our machines was seriously limiting. I used a modified w1rex config for TF2 to keep the frame rates up – at the expense of it looking terrible. The tiles and textures on the walls and everything just looked plain awful.

So a while back we noticed that DDR RAM was finally at a reasonable rate on newegg, so we picked up a 2×1GB pack. The manuals for our motherboards said that the RAM had to be in matched pairs, but I knew that to be a lie so we each ended up with 1.5GB.

Everything I want to play runs really well, except that the GeForce4TI doesn’t have DX9 support. Which sucks, because I can’t run Windows 7 (which otherwise runs fantastic on this PC) and I can’t run Left4Dead or any of the other newer games.

Who wants to buy me an AGP DX9 graphics card or Christmas? ;D

So I was reading with much interest about Microsoft’s latest alleged mistake, and I was thinking… sure most people are just going to suck it up and forget that they spent $50 on a device that’s now useless, but there are some folks who are genuinely considering jumping ship because of this (not entirely sure why).

I admit I’ve pondered at times how nice it would be to have a 360. When I played the console various times in department stores it just wasn’t exciting like the Playstation 3 was, but it’s pretty clear that XBL has PSN beat hands down. This new update to XB360 could alienate a few people, but I really don’t think after being spoiled on XBL, that PSN is enough to sway people over. I really don’t.

So now’s your chance, Sony. Stop playing years-later-catch-up, and catch-up now. Give PSN users a better experience – for fuck’s sake, XBL users are soon to have Twitter! They’ve had MSN integration for a long time too – as well as voice chat rooms and a bunch of other junk that leaves PSN players going “huh, well at least it’s free”.

And as far as charging publishers for bandwidth on PSN – what a terrible idea. You know the running joke “PS3 has no games”? That move will only make it ten times worse – Xbox360 already has an exclusive on Lost and the Damned, but that idea would simply ensure we never get any DLC ever. Here’s an idea, enforce a monthly bandwidth limit on a per-console basis. Heck, you could even make it scale up with how much money a person spends on the PSN Store for that month.

So I saw a discussion thread earlier today comparing Mumble to the forthcoming TeamSpeak 3. Admittedly at first, I was slightly worried – I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into hosting Mumble, and I have a roadmap in my head for helping it gain a better market share later on… and my kneejerk reaction was to see TS3 (which was initially thought of as vaporware because it’s been “coming” for years now, but apparently the “date” is now set for New Year’s Eve) as a threat to that.

On the whole though, I think it’ll be good. We’ve always done well at niche markets, and if anything the release of TS3 will hopefully “thin the herd” of hosters a little bit.

It’s also an opportunity for fresh ideas for features, so I thought I’d document the few things I’d like to see borrowed:

Friends/Foes: Mumble 1.2 has a friends list, but it doesn’t really do too much yet. I’d like to see it improved upon, but also the “foe” option added which would essentially just auto-mute the person when they’re in the same channel as you. Personally, my wife and I would use this feature on each other – because we game near each other, hearing the other person’s voice twice is quite annoying… so we’ll typically mute each other, but upon a reconnect to the server, it has to be repeated.

URL Logger: Stemming from using it back in the days of mIRC, I don’t really think it needs to be explained why this would be a great addition – and probably not hard to add either. I might even do it myself for my first adventure into QT4 programming!

Spatial Sound: For games that have support for it, Mumble’s 3D positioning trumps TS3’s “Spatial Sound” – but for games that don’t, and for non-gaming purposes, a plugin or a feature in Mumble core that doesn’t connect to any game but instead allows the user to arbitrarily position players where they want would be a great addition.

Other than that, and the possibility of it being a little bit cleaner, I really don’t see TS3 being that huge of a threat to Mumble. Quality is effectively a non-issue when dealing with wide-band codecs, but for absolute sticklers… Mumble’s out in front (CELT allows you to stream music over Mumble at fantastic quality).

I may have to adjust my pricing a little bit to compete with what I’m sure will be an influx of other hosts offering TS3 services… we had planned on offering it ourselves, but I think I’ll stick with the niche instead, and I’ve always had a soft spot for open-source software, particularly if it’s BSD licensed.

I’ve not quite reached the pinnacle of ecommerce fulfillment, but it’s growing steadily. We were for a time making pretty reasonable contributions to Mumble via SourceForge, but we had to upgrade our Dallas Server which ate up most of the profits again so we’re still working our way up.

We’ve been working hard at improving our Mumble 1.2 service which we hope will coincide with the release of 1.2 – if you’re wondering, word on “the street” is 1.2 is anywhere from two months to twelve months away from release, most of it depending on what happens with CELT, an important part of Mumble 1.2.

Every day, more and more bugs are tracked down and squished. Most of the desired functionality is there and works great, there are just a few things that’ll require a lot of thought to ensure they’re implemented correctly.

Now I’ve finally tracked down the issues I was having with Mumble’s overlay feature, I started to play with it some more:

Since I wanted more of a “watermark” than an overlay, I’m using Alpha value of 16 for idle users and an Alpha value of 96 for people who are speaking. In the above image, Tidler and SoulThps are both using the standard text overlay because they haven’t uploaded a user texture. Tidler is transmitting (because his voice activation is broken so he’s transmitting 99% of the time) and SoulThps isn’t.

You can see my name looks a little different however, because I wanted a little extra flair so I created a custom user texture and uploaded it via the client. I then decided it wasn’t fancy enough, so I went trawling Google images for “cartoon cow” and pretty quickly came up with this cute little fella. 30 seconds in Photoshop and I have a new and improved user texture!

On the whole, the overlay is a fantastic feature – you can run fullscreen games and still know exactly what’s going on with your voice chat. Frame rate drops for me are practically non-existent, and my PC is garbage anyway.