Its friendship day....Sandeep came home and I finished Resident Evil 4

Its friendship day folks! So happy friendship day to all of my friends, old and new. 

Coming on regular topics. Sandeep came home today and will be staying for two days. I am planning to go to Chhoti sadri now and again on Rakhi, but will have to see how that turns out.

I finished Resident Evil 4 and it rocks! A full review is in pipeline. As of now, there arent many games to play. I am playing Flatout: Ultimate carnage and Condmned: Criminal Origins as of now.

Time is boring a bit. Apart from studies, what am I supposed to do? I have finished watching Friends and Joey, Smallville and Prison break are still far from their next seasons. No decent game is getting released. All I do these days is playing some remaining games and watching 'South park' here and there.

But when it will start, I will be under an avalanche of entertainment. Smallville and Prison break will return. Many high profile games like Far Cry 2, Dead space, Just cause 2, Tomb raider: Underworld, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear sky, Spore, Crysis: warhead, Brother in arms: Hell's highway, Fallout 3, Project Origin, End war, Call of duty: World at war, Mirror's edge, Need for speed: undercover and Prince of Persia will release. 

Also, right from the day Square Enix announced Final Fantasy XIII going multi-platform, I was angry at them. Partly because of being a Sony fanboy, but more because of the possibilities of corners cutting for the game. It was a consolation that Versus is still a PS3 exclusive. 

But the announcement from Enix that there DKS3713 (this is one mighty strange name I must day) event will turn the ball in favor of Sony, made me a little excited. Today was first day of the two day event where they announced a few things. All were related to Sony platforms. These can be summarized as follows-

- The 3rd Birthday will be on the PSP as well. Nomura's team will be working on it.  
- The FFXIII demo will be included in FFVII-Advent Children Complete, as will trailers for Versus XIII and AgitoXIII.
- There will also be a FFVIIAdvent Children Complete PS3 bundle. The release will be in March 2009.
- FF Agito XIII will also be released on the PSP, no release window. The 3rd Birthday PSP will be out in 2009.
- FF VersusXIII's trailer says "Playstation3 only Worldwide".
- Dissidia PSP bundle confirmed. Release date will be in Dec 2008.
- KH PSP is 2009.

All in all, these are surely good announcements from Sony perspective, especially for PSP (I love my PSP :kisses PSP:). But I still dont think that the ball is in favor of Sony now. How can you swing the ball in favor of Sony when you announce Last Remnant, Kingdom hearts and Infinite Undiscovery timed exclusives for Xbox 360, Star Ocean 4 an exclusive to Xbox 360 and making Final Fantasy XIII a multi plat? Sony remains with only one Square Enix exclusive then, Final Fantasy XIII- Versus.

There is a day left and there must be a huge announcement in favor of Sony to really swing the ball. Something as big as announcement of Final Fantasy VII remake, though I doubt that will happen.

Anyways, I am waiting for tomorrow.......... 

Bought a PSP today, my first console this generation

It was as sudden as these kind of things happen. I thought of it two days ago, and bought it today.
About it? Well....its as cool as I thought, probably more. What I am impressed from currently are its multimedia capabilities. I never thought that being a gaming console, it will be real good at multimedia functions. But I must say, its darn good. Sound quality (you must have real good earphones though) is real good. It feels like a theater. The video quality is real good too at default options. But if you have gor firmware 3.3 or above (if you have a PSP slim, then you have), you can play videos in its full resolution (480*272). Its a long process but I will tell you. First you will have to format your Memory card (if you bought one) through PSP (remember, not through a computer). Then, when you will connect your PSP to a PC (by USB), you will notice that there is a new folder created named 'Video' in the PSP memory disk. Now, the thing to notice here is that if you search google about playing videos in PSP, you will find many sites saying that make a folder 'MP_ROOT' in the disk, then make a 'Video' folder in it. Then put your video inside it with right naming system (that the file must begin with M4V etc.). While this works if followed, but the new 'Video' folder which PSP created automatically when you formatted, is much better. In this folder, you can give any name to the file and PSP will recognize it, you can put a JPG with the same name as video in the folder and the PSP will show that as a screen on video file in PSP and the best thing is that you can play full resolution videos on PSP only in this folder.

Now, download Xvid4PSP. You can download it from here. You will need Microsoft dotnetfx3.0 too.

After installing Xvid4PSP, run it. Click on Open, select the file you want to encode. In format, choose MP4 PSP AVC. Leave all other options as they are. Now click on 'Encode'. It will encode it (might take long time depending upon the file). After its done, copy the video (and the JPG pic which it will create, if you want) to the 'VIDEO' folder PSP created when you formatted. And now, you are ready to play videos on highest possible resolution and quality on PSP. In my opinion, the quality is real good. I am really surprised that a handheld can output such good videos.

Again coming back on my thoughts on it. I didnt buy any game as of now. Only downloaded some demos. Out of them, I liked Syphon filter and Killzone most. Initially it was awkard as I am a PC gamer and so wasnt able to control properly. But after a while, I started liking it. Probably I will be good at playing in a few days.

Browsed the net too through Wi-Fi. Settings were not that hard, and especially considering that I am on Proxy server of our university and the access point was a PC! The browser is quite decent. Almost as good as it can be on a handheld. Picture quality was good and text was easily readable. Obviously one wont find entering the URLs so easy, but it cant be easier.

All in all, PSP is a real good multimedia device on a very reasonable price. I would say that if you are thinking of buying an 8 (or more) GB iPOD, then buy a PSP rather than that. Many of my friends have iPODs and now I see them saying that why they didn't buy a PSP rather than an iPOD.