Year: 2018

The Surprise Goodness of Subnautica – A Review From Scroo

I love the ocean. In fact I once had an opportunity to work on an ocean research vessel that routed between California and Hawaii. I didn't take the job. I was too young and I wasn't ready to do something that big yet. But thinking back on it now I kick myself. I've swam with sharks and sting rays in Bora Bora. I've swam in the shallows in Tahiti. It was lovely to be there floating in that warm, crystal clear water. But deep -truly deep water, scares me. Earth's oceans are the least explored places on the planet. And for good reason. It's a beautiful place, romantic and mysterious. It piques our human curiosity and makes us wonder while also being a dark, hostile environment that would crush anything not meant for it's cold depths to dust without a moments hesitation. Subnautica is a story about an ocean. But also more. Stick with me and I'll tell you what I thought of my play through. Read more

The Sole Reason Why Consoles are Garbage

While you read this, try to remember that you are a consumer of goods and not a member of a blue or green team okay? Giant corporations like Microsoft and Sony are not your friends, and they market themselves to make you feel defensive when people like me criticize what they do.   Don’t. They do not care about you, just your money. And I’m here to explain with one, and just one, simple reason why all Modern Consoles are absolute trash compared to PCs. And even compared to mobile phones... Read more

New Year WRUP

What's up everyone? Looks like Twinstiq went down for some reason or other over the holiday break, but we're back now. Speaking of Holidays, hopefully everyone out there had a great one. Mine was nice, lots of good food and family and my sister got me trip to Ireland. How cool is that? Anyway, it was a busy and fun time for us around here. Here's hoping you all shared a great experience doing whatever you did as well! And happy new year! Read more

Game Store WRUP

Steam has some new competition in the release of the EPIC store, which offers quite a bit better financial split that's more in favor of the developers. The deal is that devs get eighty eight percent of the money their games make. But on top of that, if you happen to be a developer using the Unreal Engine, Epic will pay for five percent of the cost of using that engine out of their twelve percent take. That's a pretty tempting deal to be sure. Hopefully they'll start seeing a big user base build up and EPIC will actually bring some real competition to Valve in the digital service market. Read more

Don’t Feed the WRUPsters

Another week down. This one was a lot slower, for me at least. The weather has turned downright cold and wet here. I can't help but feel like it's going to snow any moment, in fact, it's supposed to at my elevation during this incoming storm. Hopefully I've got some comfort food laying around in here somewhere... Read more

After Thanksgiving WRUP

Well here in the states another turkey day has passed and we're all still full to excess from eating and drinking the typical foods and beverages that come with it. I'm going to have a few more days of leftovers and that's alright because after spending all day cooking and cleaning I'm happy to just nuke some plates of turkey and ham and dressing to keep me strong. I'm a growing boy after all. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and the family arguments didn't supersede the fun.

In other news, the Camp Fire in Northern CA is officially out! Thanks to all the fire crews who've worked endlessly for the past couple of weeks and a good soak that we've been desperate to receive the smoke is washed out of the air and the fire has been laid down. I imagine the mess in Paradise is unbearable, but at least the nightmare of the fire itself is over. Now comes the clean up and hopefully search for all the missing will resume with as little interruption as possible. Stay Strong up there. Read more

The PlayStation 3: A 12-Year Anniversary Retrospective

Well, it's another 12-year anniversary today and that means it's time once again for a retrospective of one of the great consoles of recent gaming history. This time around we have the distinct pleasure of taking a look back at the somewhat-remarkable run of Sony's PlayStation 3. Though news of its release came with lofty expectations, a series of unfortunate decisions over its lifetime (particularly at the start) did keep it from becoming the console titan it was meant to be. Despite this however, an extremely solid and varied library, along with a couple of strategically competitive moves allowed it to still finish out the generation neck and neck with the competition.

Coming off of the runaway successes that were the PS1 and PS2, it seemed as though Sony could do no wrong. Regrettably for them however, this was not the case. In the years and months leading up to the launch, Sony made a series of blunders that all contributed to a less-than-stellar start. For starters, they let Microsoft beat them to launch with the Xbox 360, a full year before the PlayStation 3 would be released. This gave the 360 plenty of time to carve out a decent foothold in the market and prove itself worthy of gamers hard-earned dollars. In addition, Sony selected the uniquely designed Cell processor for their system, which, while theoretically capable of delivering better graphics than the Xbox's more traditional Xenon processor, didn't really do so in practice. Making matters worse was the fact that the Cell's unorthodox design initially caused many third-party developers to struggle to deliver games that looked even as good as the 360 versions.

As if those two shortcomings weren't bad enough, there were two arguably even bigger issues with Sony's system. At the time Sony announced the PS3 to the world, they were in the midst of a legal dispute over the vibration technology in their controllers. As a result, the PS3 ended up having to launch without it. At that point in time, vibration had already been an industry standard for nearly two generations and was utilized with both the PS1 and PS2. More importantly, the previous year's Xbox 360 had it (and even the upcoming Nintendo Wii was advertising it). Sony was eventually able to settle the dispute and release a vibration controller for their new system, but not until almost a year and a half after the PS3 had already been released.

Finally, the most egregious error Sony made was with the price. Whereas the 360 was competitively priced, the PlayStation 3 was anything but. Questionable design decisions, such as their risky gamble to go with their expensive new (and not yet industry standard at the time) proprietary Blu-ray disc format, as well as the inclusion of additional internal hardware to enable backward compatibility for PlayStation 2 games, drove production costs through the roof. This resulted in a significant price disparity between the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, to the tune of 125 to 200%, depending on which models you were comparing. This means that in some cases Sony was asking for twice as much money as the competition, for a system that, to many gamers, was an arguably inferior offering.

Thankfully, despite these regrettable decisions, Sony was eventually able to turn the system's fortunes around. Shortly before correcting their embarrassing lack of a basic vibration controller, Sony pursued an aggressive (and costly) campaign to ensure that their Blu-ray technology did in fact become the industry standard. Then, starting in 2007, Sony also began selling PS3s with revised hardware configurations (such as the lack of an ability to read PS2 discs) in order to bring costs down. All of these measures together, in addition to the ever-increasing strength of exclusives available for the console, managed to change the PlayStation 3's reputation from a largely unnecessary exercise in extravagance to a genuinely compelling and competitive entertainment machine.

That library, in particular, is what we're here to talk about. And while it was a bit difficult to limit this list to just these 12, it's hard to argue that they're not all fantastic titles. So without further ado, here are 12 of the very best reasons to have owned a PlayStation 3:

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