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So I’ve been playing the shit out of SOCOM: Confrontation lately (do you think SEALs have trouble getting travel insurance quotes?), and I finally got my 2nd Class Machine Gunner medal which gave me the silver trophy that put me over the threshold to level five. Wahoo!

In other news, our Netflix PS3 streaming Bluray came today – despite the annoyance of having to put a disc in to play the content (XMB integration would be a nicer touch, IMHO) it actually works out really nice. On a 480p tube television, the quality is fantastic… and in about three hours of content watched we’ve not experienced a second of stutter.

I’m not sure if I’m doing it wrong, but upon activating my brother in law’s PS3 and trying it out on his LCD – the quality’s not so great. Perhaps there’s a setting to get a higher resolution, but you can really see the artifacts and such.

My brother in law lucked out today – a store we usually go to, that’s rather ghetto, for some reason had Modern Warfare 2 for PS3 on-sale today. So he picked it up… I would have too but we’re cutting back on toys because of the incoming baby. ;[

Anyway he went out for a bit, so I jacked his copy. The story mode is once again, quite beautiful and engaging. I started playing it on “Hardened”, but I found it pretty aggravating. Besides, each of the levels has two main achievements – one for completing it, and one for completing it on veteran. I might as well kill two birds with one stone and force my way through it on veteran first go. So I restarted.

Then I noticed a trophy called “Pit Boss”, which you earn by running the pit mission in under 30 seconds. So I ran the pit through time and time again, until I got a final score of <30 seconds. No trophy. Okay, maybe you gotta have your first time, before the accuracy bonus.

So I spent about another 45 minutes running through the pit, and ended up getting a pre-bonus time of 29.8 seconds (which ain’t bad for a controller, I think – side note: a friend and I were arguing about controller vs mouse and I challenged him to beat my time on the PC version, at which point he said he wasn’t getting it because of the lack of dedicated servers) … IIRC my final-time was something to the tune of 24 seconds!

I finish the “S.S.D.D.” level, and guess what? No trophy. I’m a little upset.

So I rage quit and gave the game back to my brother in law, who got home a bit beforehand.

What about the negative press? Well as far as the nasty-bits go, yeah I can kinda see where people are coming from. It gives you the option to skip that level, and if you’re squeamish, I advise you to do so.

Spoiler alert!

You basically go undercover next to a Russian terrorist, and you stand next to him and help him and his team slaughter a bunch of civilians in an airport. I actually knifed an un-armed guy crawling away. I make no attachment between my behavior on a single-player game and real life, but I can certainly see why some people felt cause to get their knickers in a knot.

The multi-player? I certainly hope it’s because only something like 90k PS3 owners are in possession of it at the moment (because it hasn’t officially released yet) but at the moment it’s terrible. Expect to wait a good 10 minutes for a game at times, because very few people have their firewalls configured correctly to act as hosts (heck, we don’t even). So a lobby will start, and then it’ll give up trying to find a host and kick everyone out.

Hopefully when more people get it it won’t take so damn long to find a game, because the matchmaking component is having a hell of a time. There must either people some people who’ve had it for a long time, or some no-lifers on there because some people are ranked up a lot already. Judging from mic-chat I’d say it’s a bunch of pre-teens, skipping school out of some desperate need for acne treatment to avoid social suicide, so they resort to playing copious amounts of this game.

And they all scream so much it makes me think I’m playing Halo or something. Overall though, dedicated server issues aside – it’s more of the same. If you liked Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, you’ll like this one too.

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:

Some 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