PS3 and Universal Remotes

So now that Toshiba threw in the HD-DVD towel maybe you're thinking, "OK I should get myself a sweet, sweet PS3 and some Blu-Ray discs." But there's a problem and that problem is universal remotes. If you aren't using a universal remote than you're A ) foolish and B ) very likely a bachelor. I talked about my Harmony 880 remote before and there are newer Harmony remotes out there so I might not recommend buying an 880 today, but I really highly recommend the Harmony line. The fly in the ointment is that the PS3 doesn't have an IR receiver. It uses Bluetooth for the Sony remote. The Sony remote works well enough, but once you achieve one remote nirvana having that second around is really irking. I recently found out that Nyko sells a IR dongle and small little remote for the PS3, called the Nyko BluWave ($14 at Amazon). You plug the dongle into an USB port on the PS3 and then teach the remote codes to the Harmony. (I did that last night, but I've since learned today that apparently you can PICK Nyko->BluWave as a device on the Harmony and it will download the codes.) This isn't perfect. There are two minor problems and one fairly big one. The first is that a USB device can't turn on the PS3, so there's no power button on the Nyko remote. (The Sony Bluetooth remote does have a power button.) This isn't huge, it's only an issue if you already had a Blu-Ray disc in the drive and wanted to power it on from the couch, and don't have a controller within arm's reach. The second minor problem is that the Nyko remote doesn't have all the buttons of the Sony remote - it lacks both the 10 key keypad and the colored buttons. I'm not sure this is a problem at all, I've never used those on my PS3. I'm a little worried about the Blue/Red/Yellow/Green buttons because I assume those are for Blu-Ray features and I might want them at some point in the future. The much bigger problem is really annoying. If you have the USB dongle connected to the PS3 and you turn on the PS3 via a wireless controller the dongle apparently becomes controller 1. (The Sony Bluetooth remote somehow manages to always be controller 7.) The controller you just used to turn on the console ends up being controller 2. Most games won't play ball with this. Oddly enough if you turn the controller off and then back on it ends up being controller, but that's an awfully clunky workaround. After some thought my current plan is to leave the dongle sitting by the PS3 and only plug it in when playing a Blu-Ray. Figure I'm up there turning the console on anyway, so it's not a big deal to connect the dongle at that time. Given all that, personally I think it's worth $14 to let my Harmony control disc playback. I can't quite unconditionally recommend the BluWave, but I guess you can weigh the issues listed above versus the issue of having to use two remotes (the horror) to watch movies. Update 2/22/08: I realized today that if you're in a game on the PS3 that you can reassign a controller ID. There's a menu that comes up when you press the PS button. This is where you can turn off the controller or the system, or quit the game and return to the Cross Media Bar (XMB). There's also an option called "Controller Options" and from there you can reassign the controller ID. So now I leave the USB dongle plugged in, but I can grab a controller, start a game and then correct the whole controller 2 thing. Still a pain, but better than having to turn the controller off and on again.
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Mauvais Role

Boing Boing TV is a bit hit or miss for me, but they recently had a French CGI short film (of all things) on and I really enjoyed it. As Boing Boing describes it:
Today on Boing Boing tv, Mauvais Rôle ("Bad Role"), a short animated film about a computer game character who gets fed up with playing the same lame villain roles all the time -- and takes matters into his own (clawed) hands. His quest leads him to new and increasingly more ridiculous casting calls, each one weirder than the last. And they lead him somewhere he never thought he'd end up...
Take a look. I thought it was worth five or six minutes.
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Recent Games

Been playing a whole crop of new (to me) games lately, thought I'd summarize a few of them. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (Nintendo DS) Yeah, it's another DS game that could go on any console. The second screen makes some things more convenient, but it's not critical. They've even dropped the weird "two battles at once" mode from the previous AW title. Advance Wars has always represented great turn-based strategy and this installment is more of the goodness. There are several significant changes and I suspect it has made the game overly favor the defender, but I haven't played enough multiplayer to be sure. The AI has always been pretty bad, and that is still true. I haven't completely finished the campaign, but I'm only a few missions short (I think) and the last few missions weren't fun so I think I'm done. But there are something like 40 "Trial Maps" which are fun. This is the first version of Advance Wars to support internet play, and that seems fairly solid. It is worth nothing that it doesn't support saving an online game, so I'd give the edge to Field Commander on the PSP in that regard. It does support internet voice chat but it's terrible. Tony and I have been disabling the built-in chat and using Xbox 360 for chat, which is superior technology. Basically, if you enjoyed a previous Advance Wars then you'll enjoy Days of Ruin. Pixeljunk Monsters (PS3) This is a "tower defense game". I'm not sure this is a real genre, I'm only aware of two other games in the "genre" - Desktop Tower Defense (Flash) and Hordes of Orcs for OS X. Hordes is in mind a very inferior ripoff of DTD. Pixeljunk Monsters doesn't play much like the other two. On the one hand, yes you're building towers to attack oncoming monsters, and different types of monsters are vulnerable to different towers. On the other hand in PM you have an avatar that runs around the screen and you have to collect the coins, as well as the power-up gems (which aren't present in DTD). You also have the ability to level a tower by standing on it for a while. Lastly in PM you can only build towers on trees. Different levels have different tree arrangements and more complex monster movement patterns which makes each level a different and unique challenge. I like PM a lot. If you have a PS3 it's worth the $8 or so it costs (it's a downloadable store title) Mass Effect (Xbox 360) This is where Bwana will try to make a joke as I start covering November titles. I believe that Gamefly doesn't buy enough of the big Christmas season titles, because this happens every year. They start sending me B PSP titles from about 7 places down my queue and then after Christmas they slowly ship all my backlogged high-profile holiday titles. Mass Effect falls into this category. Historically I've liked Bioware's PC games and disliked their console games. Even Knights of the Old Republic I thought was a crummy console game with clunky mechanics and a PC interface shoehorned onto a console controller. I'm definitely in the minority here, but I didn't care for KOTOR. Mass Effect is finally fun in combat. They still have technical issues - the game drops frames like crazy and the "AI" of your squad mates deserves the quotes I give it. But if you can get past those the story is interesting, and it's not as pause-happy as KOTOR was. Now, I'll warn you it does talk your ear off at the beginning. I finished the very first tutorial story in a touch less than an hour. Then I got to the Citadel, and it was just "As you know Bob, it's been over a hundred years since blah, blah, blah," for quite a while. I got up to about four hours of gameplay before I saw another combat. If you think you can survive the RPG world-building datadump at the start it's a solid game. Commanders: Attack of the Genos (Xbox 360) Last week's Live Arcade title came out of nowhere as far as I was concerned. It's more turn-based strategy! I find the retro art-deco looks (tanks with fins!) amusing, and the game seems pretty playable. Haven't tried it online yet, but I like the singleplayer game. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) Woosh. I really wanted to like Uncharted. Truthfully this is a game that had I bought it I'd still be playing. But since I rented it I'm just sending it back. I had been looking forward to Uncharted, but when I played the demo I felt that A ) the melee system was stiff and awkward, B ) the attackers took entirely too much bullets to drop, C ) there weren't nearly enough bullets provided, and D ) the cover was both very "sticky" and just didn't work well. Having played the full game now I still think all of those things. The demo is Chapter Four of the game and I didn't see that very much had changed. I feel like the designers of the game decided it was too short so they compensated by making the combat encounters too difficult (they call that "adding replay value"). The platforming is a lot of fun, but I got tired of restarting combats multiple times until I learned where everybody was going to spawn from. Patapon (PSP - demo) I mentioned the crazy download process a few posts back but I checked out the game yesterday. It's cute, and it certainly has some interesting ideas. But at the end of it I sort of went "Meh." It seemed like too much work to try to figure out which command was needed when, plus the repetition of drumming the "march forward" command over and over just seemed plodding. I could be convinced the final game is worth playing, but the demo didn't raise my interest level at all.
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Congressman Reyes' Letter

If our nation is left vulnerable in the coming months, it will not be because we don’t have enough domestic spying powers. It will be because your Administration has not done enough to defeat terrorist organizations – including al Qaeda -- that have gained strength since 9/11. We do not have nearly enough linguists to translate the reams of information we currently collect. We do not have enough intelligence officers who can penetrate the hardest targets, such as al Qaeda. We have surged so many intelligence resources into Iraq that we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a result, you have allowed al Qaeda to reconstitute itself on your watch. You have also suggested that Congress must grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. As someone who has been briefed on our most sensitive intelligence programs, I can see no argument why the future security of our country depends on whether past actions of telecommunications companies are immunized.
Letter to President Bush from Congressman Reyes What a fantastic letter! There's lots of good stuff in there beyond my excerpt above. Go read the entire text. Makes me wish I could vote in Texas.
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