I was literally screaming at my iPod listening to this week’s 1up Yours podcast. I think I spent half an hour venting to my brother about it and Metal Gear yesterday. I should have recorded it because I am struggling to write it up here.

Suffice to say Shane Bettenhausen and Ryan Payton don’t get it. They are in a bubble that resides up Kojima’s arse.

I find it hard to read game reviews these days, not just for the appauling hyperbole Shawn points out, but for the whole meaningless nature of scores and the subsequent arguement that ensues. MGS4 just highlights the immaturity of the entire enthusiast press be it Edge, IGN or whoever.

Play the game, critique it, done. Your scales and scores are meaningless.

As for MGS4, my opionion can be summed up in one sentence. If I wanted to watch an overly long and overly complex movie I’d go do that, I don’t need a game to do that for me.

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Devices such as the Drobo and the ReadyNAS NV+ offer implementations of this but at £400 to £500 without any drives included makes them ridiculously over priced. So I looked back at my linux box and wondered what could be done in software.

The much hyped Sun file system ZFS offers these features and more but with it only being on Solaris and a Linux port not even close I ruled it out a while back. Then I remembered that FreeNAS is BSD based and that ZFS has been ported to FreeBSD 7. Well it turns out that FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 6 but they specifically mention in the roadmap that ZFS support will be coming soon.

So now I just have to wait a bit and soon I will be able to build my own free software alternative to the overpriced Drobo.

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The fact that there are still Windows 3.1 style widgets in Windows Vista is unforgivable, it’s the kind of thing that makes it feel cheap and mashed together when using it.

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Steam is where the most exciting things in PC gaming are happening right now. It’s where I spend most of my PC gaming hours and it has a subscriber base larger than any of the major consoles. For this reason it only seems right that a dedicated site be created for such a wonderful community.

I very much hope you bookmark it, subscribe to the RSS feed and perhaps even follow us on Twitter. As always we are open to feedback so drop us mail, leave us a comment or tweet us!

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PS Wordpress limit XML imports to 7mb. Mine was 15mb. Now imagine how fun it is to trim a 15mb XML file - not good.

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There is no technical need for it to be exclusive to Freesat. It all comes from the same satelite orbiting the Earth regardless of which service you sign up for. BBC HD which is available on both proves this. As far as I can see the only thing they need to do is maintain two EPG formats - thats it.

We all know how well it went the last time ITV were a platform holder (hint: horribly) and it looks like they are well on their way to screwing things up again.

Not that I watch anything on ITV.

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I have been saving this rant since last week due to the blog issues. I still think it’s relevant.

When I read this blog post by the BBC’s Darren Waters last week I started to get very angry. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I can make a cool rational judgement - something I suggest Mr Waters tries.

“The BBC’s announcement of a deal with Nintendo to put the iPlayer’s streaming service on the console makes something of a mockery claims by Sony and Microsoft that their consoles are the true multimedia machines.”

I don’t care which side he is on but the fact is that he and the BBC should not be taking sides. It’s all very well to brag about how amazing your online video service will be on the Wii but it’s another thing to shit all over Nintendo’s competion. It’s called impartiality buddy.

Now to the techie meat of the issue. Any browser that supports the latest flash can play iPlayer content. So that’s why Wii and PS3 support is on the way - they have browsers. The catch is that this is the low quality version, the high(er) quality video must be downloaded. Unlike that BBC blogger I have a PC connected to a large screen and attempted to watch Doctor Who via the flash player this week. It looked horrendous. I couldn’t watch it. The same video I couldn’t watch will be what is offered on the Wii and a download option can never be implemented that platform.

People don’t mind watching YouTube videos on their PCs in tiny windows but when you stretch it out on a huge screen they will not be impressed.

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It’s Mario Kart people, not Bioshock.

[via Andy via IM]

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