So No 3D (Or Marketshare) For PSP2, Then?

THEY CALL ME KAZ

Oh Kaz, you silly little man:

“A portable with naked eye 3D does not have high precision, according to internal research,” Hirai said in an interview with Sankei Biz. “Presently, there are limits.”

Yes, limits on Sony’s imagination that has, already I’d wager, put the PSP2 6′ under while banking on glasses-based 3D tech (at some small¹ cost) for the PS3 which will be dead and gone within 5 years–even on large displays.²

Seriously: did Hirai actually think for a minute that the tech incorporated into the 3DS would be gimmicky crap? We’re talking about the follow-up console to what will soon be the best-selling game machine of all time and to believe Nintendo would do anything but get it right you’d have to be either a raving fanboy, the current president of Sony Computer Entertainment or Ken Kataragi.⁴

---

^{1 And by “small” I mean in the ‘mere’ four figures…during a crippling, worldwide, recession. Oh, who am I kidding: even in 2005′s economy (when everyone was using their house to finance a fleet of Ferraris) that price would have painted Sony as completely insane and, once again, using their game biz to try to shore up their other units3–in this case 3D TVs–is borderline suicidal.)
2 I can remember when Sony was actually capable of innovation: when they brought out stuff like the Walkman and PlayStation. Now they’re reduced to hocking their wares to the very affluent/rich which guarantees they’ll never soar to the heights of PS1/2 ever again.
3 Blu-ray really worked out well for them, as they claw and scrape for a distant, second, place, right?
4 Then again, Sony completely fubared the PS3, so maybe he’s just working from experience on this score.}

I’ll Never Say Another Bad Word About NEOGEO CD Loading Times

Wait for it:

And that’s where I was, ECM III, when the first manned Martian landing occurred way back in 2030 and your Dad, ECM Jr., was just graduating college…what? Oh, the video is over? Ah, good–I was worried for a minute that it might just go on forever…

The Last Man on Earth You Want Working to a Tight Deadline

If it took 5+ years to make one of these, there’d be no Ferrari

Kazunori Yamauchi, father of all things Gran Turismo (and Sky Blazer alas!) is, quite literally, the last person I’d ever hire to work to even a loose deadline, let alone one that would have cost me north of $60 million dollars (at last count some time ago) over the course of five, long, years¹:

“About 90 per cent of the game is done,” Yamauchi told Inside Line (thanks VG247). “We are just working on the last 10 per cent and polishing up everything.”

Which would be fair enough, except it’s exactly what he said in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And indeed roughly what he said in October.

Now I don’t care about this game at all, and I understand the idea of ‘not rushing perfection’², but someone at SCE should have, years ago, put the brakes on this out-of-control, high spec, game development type R if only because it probably could have shipped, well, years ago, collected rave reviews, sold millions, helped the PS3′s flagging fortunes and had a sequel ready to go this year.

Instead, they let the raving eccentric go on and on and on and on with no real end in sight and is, yet again, a microcosm for the serious problems Sony has had for 90% (see what I did there?) of this generation. (This is assuming, of course, Yamauchi doesn’t have pics of Howard Stringer caught using a Samsung TV at home or other, compromising, material like that Kaz Hirai’s biz degree³ is, based on SCE’s performance, from Okinawa CC.)

I think it’s even fair to ask if this game is going to make 2010, at this point, and you can pretty much write off Europe right now as the game powerslides into its eighth(!) year in development on its 3.6 millionth set of tires.

---

1 Did I mention that was five, long, years as of 2008? No. Oh, well, there you go.
2 There’s not rushing and there’s a laconic, eh, we’ll get it done when we get it done attitude that seems to infect high grade Japanese devs and leads, ultimately, to their destruction See: Suzuki, Yu and the debacle saga that was Shen Mue.
3 Haha, just kidding! Kaz has a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Internet>Sony: Fix PS3 YLOD For Less Than a Dollar

Math is fun when it doesn’t cost $100+

And here I thought Sony employed PhDs in engineering to build their products:

Since we see quite often people here in forums asking for help regarding ylod, I wanted share my alternative method for repairing YLOD since I consider it to be easier and it doesn’t require complete dissassembly. This method has also worked for GLOD(green light of death – all lights seem normal but no video/audio output and controllers won’t sync). I have sent email to gilksy some time ago, but since he hasn’t replied I decided to post my method here. I actually discovered this first time some time before gilksy published his guide but since hadn’t much experience using this I didn’t post this.

Since problem is very similar to xbox’s RROD the fix fundamental is similar: add pressure to GPU and CPU. I tried various things(shim etc.) before I figured out how is the fix would be. You need just 4 big washers(diameter 40mm, hole 8mm and 1mm thick. You can find these every hardware store for less than 1euro.) to do this.¹

This information is instructive for two reasons:

1. It beats sending your PS3 away to Sony and getting raped charged at least $100 to fix it as a part of Sony’s scheme ploy biz plan to put a PS3 Slim in every home.²

2. The fact that a fix this simple and innocuous wasn’t part of the original hardware spec for the device, leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that some dude on a random message board in the wilds of the Internet is more competent at electrical and mechanical engineering than Sony’s brightest bulbs.

Disclaimer: I have not, myself, tried this fix, so if your PS3 decides to hurt/maim/kill you for trying to tamper with its Planned Obsolescence^TM feature³ a la Hal9K, leaving your wife a widow and your child an orphan….can I have your stuff?

---

1 A Euro is worth, roughly, $1.30 as of today. (The washers will run you about 50 cents, tops, at Home Depot.)
2 Thus padding their hardware sell-through numbers, i.e. SOP for Sony since at least the PSOne.
3 One feature, I’m reasonably certain, Sony won’t be removing anytime soon.