The PS3, Revisiting Predictions & Other Odds & Ends

The PS3 came yesterday, so I’ve spent most of the time since then in a Blu-Ray and Video Game induced haze. I was lured out by my brother this afternoon to watch the Eagles playoff game (we won!) and maybe feed myself too. While I’m out, I figure I should at least make some pretense at updating the blog with something…

  • Might as well get this out of the way first: The PS3 is actually pretty great. At this point, I’ve spent most of my time playing Assassin’s Creed, which is great so far (though my understanding is that it gets repetitive and that’s certainly something I’m starting to see…). I also watched the Final Cut of <a href="Blade Runner“>Blade Runner. The set I got comes with 3 other versions of the movie and like 15 hours of extras (these are in standard definition though), including an almost 4 hour in-depth documentary on the production. I also got Resistance, Call of Duty 4, and The Dark Knight, but have yet to fiddle around with those. The PS3 online system seems decent, though I haven’t really done anything with it just yet. All in all, I’m very satisfied with my purchase so far.
  • Last January, I made 5 predictions for 2008, and it turns out that I was mostly correct! Neal Stephenson did announce a new novel (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I was wrong about the setting (though I admitted that possiblity in my prediction). The WGA strike did end, and for the most part, TV didn’t recover much of what they lost. There were few new shows that did well and big ratings drops for existing hits like Heroes. Box Office numbers were a bit skewed by <a href="The Dark Knight“>The Dark Knight and <a href="Iron Man“>Iron Man, but admissions were down (on the other hand, they were only down 4%, which isn’t bad when compared to the rest of the economy). I predicted Blu-Ray would pick up ground, but not that Blu-Ray would win so decisively and so early. My DRM prediction seems rather stale – not much has changed in either the music industry or the movie industry. And Barack Obama did win the election. So overall, I’d say 4 out of 5 wasn’t bad… but that’s probably more because I didn’t really go out on a limb with any of my predictions! Not sure if I’ll be making any predictions for 2009, but you never know…
  • As I have for the past two years, I’m going to do another Kaedrin Movie Awards series of posts for 2008. As I’ve mentioned before, 2008 hasn’t been a particularly great year (perhaps still feeling the effects of the writer’s strike?), so I’m still trying to catch up with some films in order to compile my lists. if you have any nominations for the standard awards (see last year for an example) or any arbitrary awards you’d like to see, feel free to leave some comments or send me an email…

That’s all for now. I believe I have some evil people to assassinate. Or perhaps I should repel an alien invasion. Or maybe I should just watch The Dark Knight again. Decisions, decisions…