Wii has finally joined the club

Got a Wii this Xmas (Santa really did stop by). Now i technically own all three consoles, Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii. What more can you get ?

Xbox 360 Elite

This is my 3rd Xbox360 in less than 1.5 yrs. Thanks to Microsoft for the infamous Ring of Death problem. I m lucky that i did buy warranty for the first and second one. Each time 60$. Last week my 360 's dvd drive crapped out. It quit reading any discs whether it be games, movie dvds etc. Talked to Frys and finally they agreed to give me the Xbox 360 Elite for an extra 50$ as the price of my Xbox 360 Premium unit was 399$ list and the current price of the Xbox 360 Elite is 449$. At the end of the day turned out to be a good deal, as the Elites have better cooling, a 120 gb hard drive and black matte finish which matches with my entertainment center. The Elite also came with two games free, Ultimate Alliance and Forza Motorsport 2. Mostly gonna sell this on ebay.

Orange Box : Half-Life2

Orange Box released on 10th of October and i rented off of Gamefly. Best bang for the buck, as you get 5 separate games for 59.99. With gamefly discounts i purchased this game for 40$. And sadly to say i have finished playing this game.

Halo3 End Credits - Spoiler Warning

Do not watch this if you havent finished the game yet..........You will see this video only after finishing the game in one of the difficulty levels and sit through the boring end credits for 5 minutes.......but worth watching it.....there may be hope for Halo4 [:D]

Halo3 Multiplayer - HiRes Screenshot

This picture was taken from in-game theater. You can save videos of every game that you play and then play it in theater and then edit and take snapshots. See Maccspayne in action!!!!!!

Some Halo3 Screenshots

Graphics could have been better, but the cut scenes look awesome!! Even though the game is FPS, when you use turret guns, you can get to see a TPS view of Master Chief. His armor looks shiny....looks like he polishes it every day...LOL.

A lot of really cool vehicles and guns have been introduced. Grenades are not just limited to plasma and frag grenades. Now you have the spike grenade and also the bubble shield. You also get a deployable shield, personal gravity lift etc. SOme of the controls from Halo2 have been changed, so it takes some time to get used to them. Like X is not used to reload weapon any more. RB and LB are used to reload the appropriate weapons (if dual wielded).

Halo Trilogy

I swear I will never sell these three games LOL

Halo3 Released - Sells 192 million

Can you F'ing believe that one game makes history, by selling more than any other video game released to date ? Even beat Super Mario Bros sales over 20 years in just 1 day. I pre-ordered the copy of my Halo3 from Amazon. I m getting old and dont want to experience like what happened to me last time when Halo2 was released. I had to wait in line for 2 hours in front of Gamestop on a chilly night in Novemeber 2004. Amazon shipped the copy a day before the release date so that it gets to me on the day it releases. and it did!! Thanks to Amazon prime trial for the 2 day free shipping.

Halo3 Fever

Dennis (my colleague) bought me this, as he knows i m a big time halo fan.....The game fuel from Mountain Dew....Tastes much like MDew: Livewire....has a cherry kick to it......gonna save this bottle being a halo fan.

Installing Yellow Dog Linux on Sony PS3

Many of my friends warned me not to fry the PS3 with in 2 or 3 weeks of buying it. Since Sony has been widely supporting Linux installations on PS3, i didnt think it was much of a risk to do the same. Several websites comment about Sony starting to officially shipping Linux OS on PS3 so that you can use it as a PC. After several weeks of reading through variouis blogs and websites, i was comfortable enough to perform this task of loading linux on the PS3. Now the big question was which version. There were websites talking about Fedora and Yellowdog which are the most popular. I decided to go with Yellowdog from Terrasoft (http://www.terrasoft.com/). Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is at version 5.0 now. It is the only flavour of Linux that is officially supported on the Sony Playstation 3 (Atleast thats what they claim).

I dont mean to make this post repetitive by describing all the nitty gritty details of how to install Yellow Dog Linux. You can find a very good article about this here.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-linuxps3-1/

The big step before installing Linux on the PS3 is that you are going to have to create a separate partition in the PS3 harddrive for Linux to run. Essentially, this is going to be a dual boot between Sony's game OS and the Linux installation. Since its been two weeks, I bought the PS3, i had already downloaded many game demos, videos and also save files from my favourite game Resistance : Fall of man that i couldnt afford to give away while formatting the harddrive to make Linux run on the PS3. I used a 1 gig USB flash drive to save the important files off the PS3 temporarily. Once that was done, from System Settings you can format the harddrive. Now Sony GameOS let you allocate only 10G towards any other OS installations (Big downside). But 10G is enough for the YDL installation.

Next step is to install a boot loader so that you can boot another OS. You have to download two files for this.

a. otheros.self

b. otheros.bld.

Both these are not that hard to find, if you do a quick google search, you should be able to easily find them. The otheros.bld is something that you download specific to the Linux distribution you are installing. The otheros.self is the PS3 OtherOS installer that you can download from Sony's official website for Playstation. Both these files need to be placed in the USB flash drive (Check the FAQ i posted above for detailed instructions). You can install the boot loader again from the PS3 System Settings.

Remember the last step before you start the install to download YDL 5.0 distribution disc (on ISO). Again links to download this is not hard to find (Google is your best friend). Download it burn it in a DVD. I used a slower rate to burn just to be on the safer side.

After i slipped in the disc for YDL 5.0 into the PS3 discdrive, I rebooted the PS3 and in a few seconds (30-45) the infamous penguin started showing up on the left hand screen (pictures above). The installation takes about 1 hour to complete though there were certain parts of the installation wizard that scared me to death. The installation wizard said "YDL cannot read the partition on the disk, so it needs to format the PS3 harddrive". My heart sank for a minute and then the first thing i do is freeze the installation, go to my laptop, search for any information on the FAQ about this. And then i was relieved, reading the information that YDL installation has no idea about the GameOS partition (the remaining 50Gb left in my 60Gb PS3). So its ok to format the 10gig partition as you wish. Still i think Terrasoft should have worded this properly to prevent future heart failures to PS fans.

Once the installation was over, there is a one time setup wizard that will run through setting Time, Date, Root password etc. The default resolution on the Yellowdog system uses 720p, So if you need 1080i or 1080p you have edit some config files to get there. "ps3videomode" is a command you can use to change the display mode (one time only) to various modes that are supported. All in all the YDL distribution looks very kool with its Gnome interface. It comes with all basic tools required to run a PC - IM software, media player, graphics programs, Firefox etc.

After doing all this you will be asking yourself....WTF ? what did i gain after installing Linux on my PS3 ? Some bragging rights....

Xbox 360 versus PS3 networking with Windows Vista

Installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my home PC and have ever since been getting the urge to network my Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with the PC. This would let you stream Photos, Video and Pictures across the network from your PC to Xbox or PS3. Detecting the Xbox 360 or PS3 happened in a jiffy.

Vista detected Xbox 360 for me automatically, but had to do a little setup for the PS3. Both requires WIndows Media Player 11. Simply go to Library Menu and click Media Sharing. Click the Share My Media check box. You may optionally need to enable Media Sharing under Network Connections and Sharing (Control Panel). Select the Xbox 360 that goes automatically detected and click the Allow button.

To setup the PS3 disable/enable Media Server Connection from System Settings (PS3) and then search for Media servers from Photo, Music or Video menu. This should detect your Windows PC. On the Windows PC make sure you allow the PS3 as an allowed device. Note that PS3 wont get automatically be displayed by its name (instead it will show up as Unknown or Other device with the mac-address displayed.

HD Collection

Here is my HD-Collection so far, 5 more free movies are on its way from Sony. The 5 I have so far are

HD-DVD format: 300 and King Kong.

Blu-ray format: Casino Royale, Apocalypto, Gone in 60 Seconds.

Hope to see a HD-DVD/Blu-ray combo disc sometime soon, what Warner calls it THD (Total HD Format).

New add on : Playstation 3

I have been a hardcore Microsoft fan for 6 years. Still is and will be in the future. Purchased an Xbox 360 and a HD-DVD player in 2006. You may see some of that blurbs in this same blog. Have never really been a Sony fan, nor have played a PS/PS2 game before. Of course the reason behind purchasing this are many, but i think a lot of that credit needs to go to the infamous Blu-ray brothers (Rit and Deepak). Yet another big reason was I d get a cheaper blur-ray player that could do many more than just play blu-ray movies. Plus there are some beautiful games that have been made for PS3 such as Resistance : Fall of man, Ninja Gaiden and the infamous PS titles such as God of War / God of War2 and the upcoming Killzone 2.


There was a very good offer on Amazon for the PS3 + 3 free blu-ray movies. Plus Sony has their five blu-ray movie offer (mail in of course). After using some gift cards (yet another complicated story, credit goes to Deepak), the price of the total bundle was 399$ with free two day shipping (again thanks to 30 day trial of Amazon prime, credit goes to Deepak too).


At first looks, PS3's black color gives it a sexy look, but the box is bigger and heavier than the xbox 360. Not to forget that the 360 has a big ass power supply (external) that you have to find space to hide. The PS3 controller is a lot smaller and compact compared to the 360 controller. The keys on the controller are very similar to a PC gamepad. On top of all this, for past 6 years, i have been used to Xbox/Xbox 360, that i m having a tough time getting used to the keys on the PS3 controller. I guess practice makes a man perfect.


So far the games i have got are Resistance Fall of man and NfS Carbon. Resistance looks awesome, but graphics could have been better. After all its a war game. NFS graphics look a little washed out, i guess they didnt port the game very well. Most of the other game demos have been downloaded from Playstation Store. Have to admit and i would rate, Ninja Gaiden Sigma as the best game for graphics on the PS3.

Bluray disc looks sweet on PS3. I am waiting to draw some comparison of how a movie looks on hd-dvd versus bd-rom, now that i have a Xbox 360 hd-dvd player and the BD-ROM player on PS3. . I will upload some pics of this benchmarking as soon as i get some time to do it. Bluray doesnt have cool features like hd-dvd movies have today (PIP Interviews etc). But definitely the picture clarity looks very sweet on the Bluray discs.


Too bad Sony doesnt have a similar service like Xbox Live has. That would have made the console complete. More pictures, game screenshots, comparison between 360 and PS3 are to follow as soon as I get some time....

Playstation 3 shots contd....

Resistance Fall of Man

One of the most recommended game for PS3, i bought this with the PS3. The graphics could have been better.The world looks great in this game, plus awesome AI. I am half way somewhere in this game, playing in Hard level can slow you down sometimes...Enjoy some of these screenshots.

Resistance - Fall of Man - Videos

It really looks like i am a retarded FPS shooter in this video, unfortunately i didnt have anybody to hold the camera, take a video, while i kicked some of their asses. This video goes on to show some taste of how it is to play on hard level on Resistance:FOM, u r dead with in 6 seconds of exposure...

Acer Laptop for 499$

This was a sweet deal i got from Circuit City, of course after mail in rebates of 259$....(hope it all comes back)..The laptop is from Acer, has AMD 64 bit Turion processor (2.0 ghz) with 1 gb ram, Windows Vista Home Premium, 120Gb hard drive (This is good, but only 4200 rpm drive), 256 mb ram on the Video card (ATI Mobility Radeon), built in wireless. For 499$ this is a good deal. And guess what for this same price, I also got a Lexmark printer and a Antivirus software from Computer Associates......

Multiplayer - Ridge racer

Few friends from good old days at CET who are in the US had visited recently. They seem to be very busy racing with each other on Ridge racer on my xbox360.

My new Casio Exilim Z1050

My Xbox Live Gamer card