Who doesn't like new podcast episode Monday? Productive people that's who. Let us help you start your week off on the unproductive tip with this episode of our podcast.

Sans MagicMystic yet again, the sistah's stick to the gaming topic covering both the new and upcoming starting with Panda's take on the game Project Origin and Ninja sharing some of what she was able to take away from the assorted E3 coverage.

From talking about the survival horror game genre to specific experiences with titles like Manhunt and Silent Hill to the thriller-chiller types including the "I don't think NinJa is ever going to finish it" BioShock game. Ninja talks God of War 3, Animal Crossing: City Folk, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Portal 2, and Oneechanbura.

It's another one of our lively podcast episodes people, here are some of the titles we decided not to use to name it:

• Don't. Stop. Waitin' Fer RockBand 2, Yeah
• Who? Guess Who?
• Don't Sell Your Soul For Tic-Tacs
• The New Animal Crossing Lets Me Be Mii
• Kratos Makes Ninja's Gamer Boner Hard
• Kratos Was A Red-Headed Step Child
• Panda's Birthday Is Another 11 1/2 Months Away
• Killing Me Softly with Her Sword
• We Will. We Will...Flock Ewe
• Videogame Word of the Year: Booty
• E3 Didn't Want Me? Well, They're Not Invited to My Place Either
• We Have Nothing To Fear But the Sequel to Fear Itself
• This Guy's Full of Beans, and That Is a Bad Thing
• Don't Ever Attend a Zmbie Reunion
• and finally
• Brain Exlax, I Like that

If that hasn't told you everything you need to know about this week's podcast, then saddle up and give a listen to ESH podcast episode 106: Did I giggle That Outside Loud?

Finish What You Start...

Yesterday SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) announced the new online features for the Playstation 3 that will be available on July 2 along with 2.4 enhancements, in the form of an automatic firmware upgrade that will deliver some of the features requested by gamers.

Press Release:
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe today announced new online gaming functionality for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™), which will become available on July 2, 2008 with the 2.40 enhancement, an automatic firmware upgrade that delivers several of the features most requested by gamers. Combined with PLAYSTATION®Network’s unique service of free* online gaming, the enhancement makes PS3 an even more attractive platform of choice for the online gamer.

Firstly, the 2.40 enhancement allows XMB™ (XrossMediaBar) access in-game. This means that you can access the PS3 menu at any time while playing most games, simply by tapping the PlayStation button on your controller. With 2.40, you can check if any of your friends are online (thanks to their own user profile), read and send messages, change some settings for games, all without having to quit the game you are playing. While you can’t pause an online multiplayer game involving other people, you can rejoin play at any time when you’ve finished browsing. Along with these enhanced communications features, the Friends list capacity will double to 100 Friends.

2.40 also delivers trophies to recognise players’ achievements in the online arena. Other competitive activities recognise winners with trophies – so why not gaming on PS3? Many online games will have gold, silver and bronze trophies – with platinum available for those who snag all three – all displayed on the XMB for everyone to see.

Super Stardust™ HD, a PLAYSTATION Network-exclusive released last year, will be the first game to leverage the Trophies system and will offer a variety of trophies**. The following first-party games are also slated to offer Trophy support:

• BUZZ! Quiz TV
• LittleBigPlanet
• MotorStorm Pacific Rift
• NBA 09 - PS3
• PAIN**
• PixelJunk Eden
• Resistance 2
• SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation
• Warhawk**

The 2.40 enhancement is just one more reason to join PSN, the online network for PS3 users that lets you game online for free*. All you need to do to join is connect your PS3 to broadband and register, or go to the connection guide at www.eu.playstation.com to find out more.

Once in, you’ll find online matches and leagues for all of your favourite games – whether that’s MotorStorm™, Resistance™, Warhawk™ or Gran Turismo™5 Prologue – absolutely free (although users are responsible for paying their broadband fees) and at any time of the day or night. You’ll also find PLAYSTATION®Store, where you can download entire games as well as extra levels, content for your existing games plus internet browsing, video chat thanks to PLAYSTATION®Eye and much, much more.

There’s never been a better time to join PSN. Sign up now to make the most of the 2.40 firmware enhancement - see www.(website).com to find out more.

* No subscription required, broadband fees apply

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Activision really would really appreciate it if you stopped being obsessed with RockBand long enough to remember that Guitar Hero 3 does, you know, still exist.

So to remind you of that, from December 20th, you will be able to download an original rendition of "We Three Kings" for your Xb360 or PS3 by Steve Ouimette. Best part, they are absolutely free!

If you are looking to expand your GH3 song list have no fear: a new track pack featuring songs by Linkin Park, The Used, and some group called Mastodonas well as single tracks "So Payaso" by Extremoduro, "Antisocial" by Trust, and "Ernten Was Wir Säen" by Die Fantastischen Vier.


And if that wasn't enough, the "13 Days of Holly Rock" tournament for signed by former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash GH3 gear and other prizes is still going on.

Remember people, Activision still totally hearts you.

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On a recent trip to Best Buy (for The Orange Box), we picked up Tokyo Drift 2 in the $10 box. Apparently they haven't been able to sell it. It's not surprising given the linked review.


I'm particularly curious about the disparity between the editors' review and the review of the gamers. At the time of writing, they were 5.2 and 8.3, respectively — a healthy sixty percent difference. What's immediately clear is that the editors don't really have a clue what's going on. First, they say that the cars are hard to handle, but they don't phrase it that way, as such. Rather, the cars don't handle well. They also talk about a story being "nonsensical," when anyone who has familiarity with Initial D and/or haraschiya and zero-yon will tell you that it makes perfect sense.

They tell you to start with an FF (that's front-wheel-drive, front-engined). And they even offer you these cute little Daihatsu trucks and everything to do this with your initially very limited purse.

So, like anyone who learns to drive fast, you learn to drive slow first. You get to carve up mountain lines through cherry blossoms in the spring. You get to do it in the winter. You can do it in the rain. And all this teaches you how the car moves. You get a feel for the controls, which are admittedly very different from, say, Need For Speed or Project Gotham Racing, but neither of those titles quite deals with vehicle dynamics like Tokyo Drift does.

Witness: You can buy different brakes for the car, different tires, and different suspension. So if you want to stiffen up the rear end of your FF car, and put sloppy tires on it, it will hang its tail around turns like the meanest of FR (front-engine, rear-drive; think Corvette) vehicles. Of course, you have to be real careful when you do this, and every time you buy or sell parts, you lose a little money, so you gotta learn what you put on the car. This is what makes the little Daihatsu competitive on these tracks, just like the legendary Initial-D Hachi-Roku.

They then tell you to progress to an AWD car (such as the Subaru STI or Mitsubishi Evo) because, no matter what those people tell you about the cars being bad-ass, an AWD car is easy enough to drive. This also introduces you to more power, and power-sliding, as you can use the power-over (or throttle-steer) to bring the tail around, and not have to rely on suspension tricks.

Again, this is missing from the PGR/NFS franchises, and every other American car game I've played (and I mean all the way back to Spy Hunter on the 8 bit Nintendo, kiddos). It's absolutely crucial for understanding how to drive in a drift, or really, how to handle any car that's ass-over nose or vice-versa. You get the STI or the Evo in PGR and NFS, and you just go faster. They "handle" better, which means they respond better to the stick and they stick to the road better, but the dynamics of the cars don't change much at all.

In NFS:Carbon, we had the "drift" segues, and that was simply a matter of timing arrows on a course. And even then, your only technique was the power-over (and possibly also the feint).

So while the AWD cars are a little more fun because they can scoot a little faster, you still have to build up your skill, and this is where the reviewers for the magazines probably got pretty bored.

From AWD there's really only one place to go, and that's rear-wheel drive. There are basically three configurations of RWD vehicles, the MR (mid-engine, rear-drive, like an MR2 or some Ferraris), the FR, as previously mentioned, and the RR (rear-engine, rear-drive, like a Porsche; Automobile magazine once proclaimed the Porsche 911 to be the "king of oversteer," where oversteer is just a polite word for ass-over-nose, or, more currently, "drifting."). There are plenty to choose from, and we have your average Supra and so on. I don't really need to go into detail here, because we can mostly just repeat the section above about AWD.

Going faster does not mean you drift better. Having more horsepower does not make your car drift better. It's entirely about the dynamics of the vehicle while on the course. Tokyo Drift 2 forces you to focus on the course, the car, and even the car's components and more importantly what they do before you can get very far. This means there's a steep learning curve. For those willing to pay that price of admission, it's a very rewarding game.

There is one downside to the game, and that is the graphics are a little on the poor side. While it is a PS2 game, it looks almost like a ported PSX game, or even something from a Super Nintendo. It's pretty not-so-great. However, I am definitely willing to give it a huge amount of credit for the locations — more than the cars, which are pedestrian, as drifting can be done in anything, even a bicycle — all I wanted to do in this game was drive through the flurry of sakura cherry blossoms in my little Daihatsu truck. The more advanced I got in the game, the more I had to focus on the car, and the less I could pay attention to how actually beautiful the graphics are, despite the low polygon and texture count.

The one thing you must remember with drifting is that it is not a sport. It is frequently not even a competition. Drifting happens all the time, people, alone, on a road, just enjoying their vehicles (recently watching the foot-dragging KTM 990 Super Duke drifting has gotten my tongue lolling). Hockey, you could say, is a sport. Drifting, as my friend Gabe likes to say, is a lot more like figure skating.

It's just there to be beautiful.

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This week the Sistahs cross their axes and do battle in garages, dives and giant amphitheaters as they compare notes (real and musical) in this week's podcast about Guitar Hero III.

Find out which songs are easy, which ones are hard and which ones took Ninjasistah and Pandalicious completely by surprise. They also offer valuable tips on just what to do (if you see it, just buy it) and what not to do (start on Medium level) when you start playing the game.

So do yourself a favor and listen in to the Sistahs' experiences before you dive into your copy of Guitar Hero III.

To give you a flavor of the proceedings, here are the titles that were turned down for this episode:

The Genius Hamster Is Stuck In the Tubes

Sexual Harrassment Makes for One Sad Panda

No Boners About It, PS2 Love Only Goes So Far

NinjaSistah Will Never Get Hard

The Devil Played Boonga-Boonga On Me

Never Mind the Bollocks, Always Start On Easy Mode

As Emperor Joseph Told Mozart, "The Problem? Too Many Notes"

In Guitar Hero III, Easy Is Not Easy

That 9-Year-Old Has Great Motor Skills, And I Hate Him

Looking Forward to Accordian Hero

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It's yet another clip show, but this time we're joined at the mic by videogaming superstar Mario. He adds his 2 cents worth as we present some of the best comments about videogaming from earlier episodes of the ESH podcast.

In this episode, we concentrate on the subjects the Sistahs love talking about most: videogame addition, the controversy about violence in games, what it's like to be a girl gamer and the platform wars. And, of course, the sistahs talk about Boonga-Boonga.

So join Mario and the ESH regulars as they present the best in videogame talk in Episode 72: Super Mario Brothers and Sistahs.

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As the rumor mills continue to churn for the possibility of Sony's repricing of the PlayStation 3 to $399 for the holiday season, analysts were shocked today when Sony representatives announced that they instead would be selling U.S. $500 bills for the unprecedented price of $399.

"We know people are going to be calling us crazy," said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), "but, hey, we're Sony. In the past year we brought out an HD DVD player that nobody wants, some batteries that spectacularly set some computers on fire and a game system for which there are no games to play on it. We know we're crazy."

The $500 bills, which display the picture of former U.S. President William McKinley, who was shot at the 1901 Buffalo World's Fair and later died, were last printed in 1945 and withdrawn from circulation in 1969.

When asked why anyone would want to own a $500 bill that they cannot use as legal currency, Hirai said, "Hey, they already own a PS3 that they can't use. A worthless $500 bill is a conversation piece, just like that PS3. And it isn't half the fire hazard the PS3 is.

"Sure, a $500 bill can catch on fire, but it won't explode in the middle of the night and kill your whole family like a PS3 might."

Hirai added that the $500 bill costs much less to ship. "Just pop it in an envelope and stick on a 41 cent stamp," Hirai said. That compares with the PS3, which weighs approximately 38 pounds (288 pounds when you add the weight of the postman who hauls it reluctantly to your front porch).

Although selling a $500 bill would mean a $101 loss for Sony on each bill sold, Hirai said the price is much less than Sony would lose on selling the PS3 at the same $399 price point. "Think of all the money we're saving just on marketing," he added. "Heck, $500 bills practically sell themselves.

"Nothing says Christmas more than a crisp $500 bill. It's even green on the back."

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For those of you who are tired of reading bad news about everything, today we present the first in a series of Good News/Bad News stories. For those of you who just like good news, pay attention to the left side. For bad news junkies, enjoy the right side of the page.

News item: You can't go Home -- at least not until next year. Sony announced that it's Home virtual world for the PS3 will not be available until Spring 2008. "We want this to be a worldwide service," said Sony CEO Kaz Hirai. "We want to make sure that we have a range of services which can be satisfactory to our users throughout the world... so we decided to delay the service’s launch date... Please be patient in this regard."
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
It leaves more time to design Mii's on your Nintendo Wii.	It leaves more time for Sony to develop add-ons to Home, such as in-game ads, email and other things gamers don't really want.
News item: Nintendo has announced that starting with the December issue, Nintendo Power Magazine will be published by Future US, the folks behind the Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, and Mac|Life.
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
Future already publishes a Nintendo magazine in Britain.	Chopping down treees, turning the wood into pulp, painting the pages and shipping the results by snail mail is so 1929. Wake up, people. Magazines are dead.
News item: Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, told the assembled audience at the Tokyo Game Show that he considers the PlayStation 3 to be "a game machine."
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
After a year touting the wide and varied uses of the PS3, it was refreshing to hear someone at Sony admit that the primary purpose of the PS3 should be to play games.	From Wired: But outside of announcing the DualShock 3 controller, Hirai made no announcements of new products -- certainly nothing that would by itself represent a change in PlayStation 3's fortunes in Japan, where it is being outsold about three-to-one by the Wii.
News item: It doesn't look any different, but reports say it feels heavier. What is it? Why, the new DualShock 3, a new controller for the PS3 that brings back the force-feedback "rumble" functionality left out of the original controller.
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
It'll be available in the U.S. in Spring 2008, and will replace the Sixaxis controller in new PS3 boxes. The list of games that will take advantage of the new rumble features is a long one.	Ya gotta buy a new %&*$@#! controller!
News item: LucasArts has announced Krome Studios will release a Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed that will let you use the Wii-mote as a lightsaber.
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
Although some bloggers originally announced that the lightsaber action was available only in duel mode, in actuality you can use the Wii-mote as a lightsaber throughout the game.	You're going to have to push buttons to work the lightsaber in the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP and Nintendo DS versions. May the Thumb Doctor Be With You.
News item: More anime is coming to Xbox Live. From Joystiq: "Beginning today (and continuing over the coming weeks) you'll be able to find titles from the Starz anime library like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Seasons 1 & 2), Street Fighter II V, Noein, Tokko, Virus and Astro Boy on the service."
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
Starz has a tremendous catalog of anime titles.	I'm trying to code this item in a way that NinjaSistah doesn't see it. Between Xbox Live and iTunes, she won't even have to walk the three blocks to the local anime store to get her fill.
News item: The E for All Show shoots itself in the foot by moving its 2008 date from October to the same weekend in August at the very popular Penny Arcade Expo.
GOOD NEWS	BAD NEWS
This should put the final nail in the coffin of the badly managed spin-off of the old E3 Expo. It is a fitting end for E for All show host IDG, which killed the summer Mac Expo a few years ago by moving it from New York to Boston.	This is all everyone is going to want to talk about in the run-up to the 2007 E for All event in October (which Sony and Microsoft have already vacated).

Finish What You Start...

Here is the horrible, horrible truth: Stay away from the new PS3. The old PS3 out there, the one languishing on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Circuit City, the one you don't have to stand in line for, the one you don't have to wait by your mailbox for, well, it's, uh, better.

That's right. The 60-gig PS3, the one that's been around since November, the one that they just reduced in price by $100, the one that... oh, stop it. The word from E3 is that the older, 60-gig PS3 is better than the new 80-gig model. In fact, if you still play some PS2 games, you should positively stay away from the 80-gig PS3 model.

Why? Emulation. The original PS3 also contains the PS2 Emotion chip to help it play PS2 games. Now that the Sony folks have come up with a way to emulate PS2 capability in software on the PS3, they have dropped the Emotion chip from the new machine.

And we all know what happens when you emulate a chip in software, don't we? Incompatibilities. That game you've been playing for years suddenly doesn't work anymore. The disc spins and spins, but doesn't go anywhere. You're left with unexpected crashes -- or eerie silence.

So here's the warning: If you've got several PS2 games you intend on playing on the 80-gig PS3, test them out on the machine before buying one. Better yet, stick with the original PS3. We suspect the 60-gig model isn't even being built anymore (they've got a few million on hand gathering dust at places like Amazon.com and GameStop), so when they're gone, they're gone.

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Sony would like you to think that they have reduced the price of the PS3 today. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Remember when the PS3 first came out in November? They brought out a lame version for $499 and a better version for $599. Today's announcement simply reinstates that pricing model.

Sony dropped its $499 version a few months ago because nobody was buying it. Now the $599 version has been repriced at $499, but it's all window dressing because Sony has already announced a premium-ier version packaged with an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a racing game called "MotorStorm." Guess how much it costs. That's right -- $599.

To reiterate today's announcement: Sony has a lame version of the PS3 that sells for $499 and a better version for $599. Just like in November 2006.

And the PS3 forts grow higher and higher at Best Buy.

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Sony Playstation 3 owners are going to have their hands full in the next few days, downloading software and updating their systems. What will it mean for gamers? Pretty much nothing.

The updates aren't for gamers. You can see that right here. They're for people who want to watch a slightly better picture when they're using the PS3 to show DVD movies. They're for people who want to see bigger renditions of pictures they've got saved to their Playstation Portables. They're for people who... uh... well, that's about it.

If you're a gamer waiting for a reason to use the PS3, you'll just have to keep waiting. Sure, it can upscale PSOne and PS2 games, but from what I've seen thus far, those games simply play better on their original systems -- and the PS2 is still beating the PS3 in sales, six months after the introduction of the PS3.

Of course, you could treat the installation of the new PS3 firmware as a game itself. Score 10 points for yourself when you get the thing downloaded. Subtract a point for every hour it takes to download it properly. Score 10 points for yourself when the firmware update is installed and running. Subtract a point for every hour it takes to get the thing working right. If you're lucky, your score will still be a positive number in the end.

Then add it to your gamerscore and... oh, yeah, the PS3 doesn't have a gamerscore.

Do ya think Sony cares about gamers anymore?

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Take MySpace, Nintendo’s Miis, and Xbox Live then mix it up and throw it all inside of a Playstation3. What do you get? You get a little something that feels like, well, Home.
It’s no secret around here that I haven’t been a big Playstion3 fan because of its extravagant selling price. I do have to say that Sony’s new Home interactive feature has me a bit curious and intrigued. Home is Sony’s social gaming network that allows players to interact with each other and display their gaming achievements. Think of it as Xbox Live and Nintendo’s Miis on steroids. You create your avatar and off you go. Character creation is similar to that of certain MMOs, allowing players to choose from a variety of facial characteristics and proportions. Apartment furniture and character clothing is freely downloadable, while some will be paid premium downloads. Additionally, some items will be unlocked simply by playing particular PS3 games. There are minigames such as bowling and billiards as well as arcade games to keep you entertained. You can display your achievements as trophies in your apartment and watch movie trailers or other video content on in-world TVs. Other PS3 owners can be invited over to hang out in your pad and socialize before jumping into a video game.

For all of those who have a PS3, the Home beta started showing up in the Playstation store a few days ago for those who were accepted. Here’s the ironic part for me. I think it may be the Home feature of the Playstation3 and not an actual video game that turns out to be a system-seller in my case.



Take a look at this video from the 2007 Game Developers Conference. It pretty much sums up the Home concept. I know I’ve been hard on Sony for a while, but I’ll also give credit where it’s due and it’s definitely due here. Good job Sony! I think I’m starting to understand the “potential” you spoke of. You just might get my money after all…grumble, grumble…bastards.

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News item: Ken Kutaragi, creator of the PlayStation console, will retire from his post as Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.'s chairman and group CEO, effective June 19, Sony Corp. said.

Do you know how you can tell Kutaragi chose to retire?

By the splinters underneath his fingernails!

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I don't mind taking credit for it. I made the prediction in May 2006, and now it's all coming to pass.

Last May I wrote the following post about the pricing of the XBox 360 and the two forthcoming game consoles, the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii. According to this story, it seems that I may have been on target after all...

An executive from Sega, one of Nintendo's largest publishers, told Forbes.com last week that he expects the Wii to sell for less than $200. With a $200 price point, the Wii might not only be a video game system, but the new currency exchange unit for video game system sales. Consider this:

Nintendo Wii: 1 Wii
Microsoft XBox 360 Base: 1.5 Wii
Microsoft XBox 360 Deluxe: 2 Wii
Sony Playstation 3 Premium (retail in November): 3 Wii
Sony Playstation 3 Premium (on eBay in December): 6-8 Wii
Sony Playstation 3 Premium (retail, next May): 1.5 Wii

Sure, I got the Wii price point wrong (it was $250, not $200), but I was otherwise close to the target.

And to all those Sony fanboys who have been berating me for my disparaging comments regarding the PS3, I'd like to point out that they sold a whopping 167,000 PS3's in February. At that rate, they'll clean out the entire initial 6 million PS3 run... by, uh, June 2010.

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Oooooh, Sony's gotta be a tad peeved on this one but just in case you missed it, DMC4 is going to be on the XB 360 as well as the PC.

That's gotta smart.

So remember back a few months ago when Capcom SWORE that it was going to be exclusive to the PS3. Like, the pinky swore to Sony and before God that it was going to never EVER going to have any other home than on the PS3. Well, they lied. They are dirty, rotten, skinky, [I mean in desperate need of a bath] liars... but that's a good thing. Why? Because, more DMC4 madness on more platforms means more likely to have an online component.

Can you imaging Dante and Nero and maybe even Virgil grudge matches over XBLive? What about those old mansion survival modes? Remember those? [I made it 35 levels once... once] Imagine rooms and rooms of those mansions filled with other Live players in a winner takes all type melee battle. Can't imagine it? I hope that Capcom does.

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I had no intention of doing another installment of Douce’s Jewels this early, but this is one that I couldn’t keep tucked away.

I’m going to make this short and sweet because believe me when I say this jewel speaks for itself. What do you get when you spray paint a Playstation 3 candy-chrome red (That’s right. I said red.) and put it on Ebay? If you thought the intense PS3 bidding on Ebay was over then you were sadly mistaken. I’m saving my comments until you guys see it you’ve had time to process it. Then we can all discuss this craziness together.

Now brace yourself. Seriously, you REALLY need to brace yourself. The only name I could think of to call this jewel is, YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

See it. Process it.

Now let the comments begin…

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I'd like to blame it on NinjaSistah. After all, she's the one who damned it in her very first post on this site. She killed it, but like Frankenstein's monster, it lives on.

The Official U.S. Playstation Magazine (that was always a tough name to swallow) died with the January 2007 issue -- killed by lack of advertising sales, the introduction of the lame PlayStation 3 and, I think, by NinjaSistah's devastating post about it almost a year ago, which you can read here.*

You can read about its death here.

But OPM lives on -- in Britain. And they're even putting Blu-Ray demo discs inside. How well they will survive the trip from Europe to America is anybody's guess, though. Read more about it here.

* -- A little postscript on NinjaSistah's experience with OPM demo discs: She cancelled her subscription to OPM last year after having been a subscriber for several years. A few months later she started receiving the magazine free through a different distributor. The discs were packed perfectly and she never received another bad or broken disc. And then OPM stopped publishing entirely. C'est la vie!

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Since it's Monday an all we figured we better keep to script and give you guys a new episode of our podcast. It's with great pleasure I give you Episode 46: Care Bears Are Racist Bastards.

In this episode of the ESH podcast Pandalicious shares the first of her "A Thought, by Pandalicious" series. You might be asking yourself, "...what could that girl be thinking about now?" Well, she wonders about what the western world would be like if it was more anime in nature. Yeah, wrap your mind around that. Deep, man. Just deep.

MagicMysticGrl jumps into the mix with her take on Saiunkoku Monogatari a.k.a. Tale of the Land of Many-Colored Clouds. Saiunkoku is the tale of a girl pursuing a path of enlightenment that is not afforded women in her country and the trouble and hijinks that unfailingly follow on such a journey.

Then NinJaSistah brings home the show with her take on the new PSP push by Sony to save a sinking mobile gaming device ship. Will the new price point, ad campaign, and re-focusing of the target demographic help or hurt the so called killer app?

All you can do is take a listen and share your thoughts. So grab a cup of joe and a bagel, it's time for Electric Sista Hood podcast episode #46, Care Bears Are Racist Bastards!.

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Sony has once again recommitted itself to its claim that it will ship 6 million Playstation 3 boxes by March 31. But just where are those boxes all going? We think we might have the answer in this comic...

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With Sony's announcement of PS3 Home last week, the company's got some work to do in order for their avatars to catch up to Nintendo's avatars, as you can see in this comic...

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There's a big rumor going around that Sony has discontinued the 20-gigabyte version of the Playstation 3. So we present a comic that shows just how quickly things change...

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Judging by the expression on this woman's face, she is having the time of her life. Obviously, it is the result of what she is viewing on the Icuiti video eyewear. See if you can guess what she is watching:

A. The L Word
B. Apple's latest "I'm a Mac" ad on TV
C. A giant fort of unsold PlayStation 3 consoles at Best Buy
D. Porn
E. Nothing at all -- she's a model, dammit!

The answer, of course, is E. A woman who looks like that wouldn't be caught dead wearing a plastic pair of wraparound shades connected to a video game (as you can see from the expanded view below).

The nerdy guy also portrayed on this page? His expression is much more believable. The device, called the iWear VR920, purports to let you "step inside" the game via a "3-degree-of-freedom head tracker."




Icuiti is marketing the device for players of MMORPG games like World of Warcraft, but it can also play on consoles, according to the accompanying literature. Here are some other features of the device:

• Designed for use with a laptop or standard PC through a simple USB and VGA connection
• Big 62-inch virtual display viewed at 9 feet
• Built-in noise canceling microphone for Internet VOIP communications
• Integrated “non-dangling” headphones that can be upgraded or removed to allow the user to plug in their own headset
• Supports component video-in from the latest generation of game consoles

We've seen lots of virtual video headsets over the years and none have yet caught on in the gaming world. Will the iWear VR920 catch on? Not as long as it makes you look like Geordi LaForge hanging out at the beach.

Finish What You Start...

I have to hand it to TechRepublic, their side by side hardware comparison of the PS3 and PS2 hardware is pretty sweet, and a tad eye opening.

I've never had the balls to crack open my PS3 case. In all honesty, after the green screen freeze of last week during DVD playback I've been weary of touching that thing at all. But the courageous folks over there at Tech Republic have broken down how the guts of the PS3 compare to those of the PS2, and they've done it all with pictures... good looking, non-grainy pics no less!

It's when you get to this picture that the fun really starts, at least from my point of view. You can see that the internal parts main layout is similar on both systems, the only difference is that you can fit the entirety of the the PS2 components on the left side of the PS3 and still have some wiggle room. Hell, the PS2 is the size of the damned Blu-Ray drive! Oh, we can't forget that cooling fan either. You see this? See how large that PS3 fan is? Makes that poor lil PS2 fan have an inferiority complex. At least it would, if the PS3 didn't run warmer than all get out. I have to keep mine on a level all by itself in my AV rack so it can get enough air circulating in order to keep it happy.

And the award for best image in the whole gallery goes to: the PS2 mainboard vs. Blu-Ray Drive. Sure, it's probably a tad bit unfair to compare a redesigned to be compact generation 2 PS2 to a first one out the gate in a hurry generation 1 PS3, but who in life said things had to be fair? The fact is, the system is bloated... but many gen 1 systems are. After looking at all the innards of the box, it's obvious that Sony has done their best to make use of every square inch of space that the PS3 encompasses, my question is when will the slimline PS3 be available?

We know that Sony is hard at work trying to iron out the kinks in the backwards compatibility between the Cell Processor and previous PS titles so they will not have to include the PS2 hardware in the system. That will be a huge step towards reducing the physical size [and weight] of the PS3, but what about the size of the Blu-Ray drive? Will there ever be a reduction in it's size to allow the PS3 to get down to the size of the original PS2? [Give or take an inch or two] I think if they can get these issues addressed by next Holiday, the PS3 will be able to cut into the next-gen console war lead that Nintendo and Microsoft have on them.

I still can't find another damn Wii for Pandalicious or another damn Wiimote. Can you?

Finish What You Start...

It's new podcast day here at Electric Sista Hood... and this week brings us to episode 39: Alligators Should Not Hump Children!

In this episode Pandalicious gives us the low-down on the wacky, weird, and well, bestial nature of the anime He Is My Master. She says it's only slightly pornish, I reserve my judgement until episode two gets reviewed. MagicMysticGrl tries to untangle the woven path of the manwa Priest and NinJaSistah talks exclusivity [or lack there of] between game developers and the PS3.

Another fun episode wrapped up and delivered with a bow: Enjoy!

Finish What You Start...