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"Hacking" the PS2

Okay, it's not really hacking, but I got your attention, didn't I? The story begins as follows: basically I had some old demo discs from PSi2 (an inofficial PS2 magazine) laying around. I had no idea what's on those discs, so a few weeks ago I started popping them in my phat PS2 and checking out the games and videos. I even found some "new" games I've put on my wishlist since then. But that's not the point right now. On one of these discs there were some demos written for a software called YaBasic . Well, I know QBasic from DOS times, so I got interested. YaBasic is apparently the *nix implementation of the Basic programming language and this was the PS2 port of that. Well, let's see what it can do! Oh, but wait. I don't have YaBasic itself. I never had an official PS2 demo disc which contains the software. Let's get to tha choppa! I mean, emulator! Let's get to PCSX2 ! I extracted the PSi2 games from my memory card wit

Paris Games Week 2017 - Sony Press Conference

I finally got around to watch the Sony Press Conference from Paris Games Week 2017 - almost 2 weeks after it happened. Which is a pretty good time, considering my track record. This was one of the best - if not the best - Sony press conferences I've seen over the years. I just want to give a quick shoutout to the stage designers and the people who made those extra-wide animations filling the stage: it looked absolutely stunning! Let's dive right into it! The first game shown was Ghost of Tsushima , which got a pretty big media response in the days after. Honestly: I don't care about samurai or feudal Japan, so I'm gonna skip this one. Sorry, Sucker Punch! Loved your inFamous series, but this game is simply not for me. Next up was Concrete Genie , which I'm gonna also skip. It seems like a cute, fun game for kids or people who are into this kind of stuff, but I was bored the whole time the trailer played. The first surprise of the night was E

Copyright needs to die

In latest gaming news: Mafia was released on GOG! Yay! That's great news, because it means that you can get the game DRM-free and guaranteed to work with your Win7 or Win10 installation! (And it's a real classic.) But wait! What's that? You're sitting in a car. Waiting for that famous tune everybody associates with Mafia . You don't know the title or the artist, but you immediately know that song. It plays on the radio. At least: it used to play on the radio. It's silent now. The radio is broken. No sound. Enjoy the view while driving... The game released on GOG all right. Unfortunately due to copywrong it was released without it's original soundtrack. No licensed music. No Django Reinhardt playing Belleville (that's the song you were looking for ;)). All this because copyshit still "protects" music (more like "extorts" people) after over 75 years! Yes, Belleville was first released in 1942. I mean I would get it if co

Gamescom Summary

Like I promised: a short summary of Gamescom. For the visual types - the pictures can be found here: https://goo.gl/photos/Gg3UxSHfJqasKMU58 This year Gamescom was a little bit different like the years before. I was very surprised, that 2K and Bethesda didn't have a booth (2K announced it pretty early, but didn't hear about Bethesda beforehand). Both have games coming up. I was looking forward on seeing - and playing - some of The Evil Within 2 . The game should be pretty much completed, since it comes out on Friday the 13th in October, which is less than 2 months from now. They had a presentation in the business area, but unfortunately I couldn't get an appointment... The other difference was quite a big and positive one: there were no more "cinemas" where they only show you some prerecorded gameplay after 3 hours of waiting. I guess many people complained, that those became very common in the last few years. This way everybody could try out ga

Story Time!

Okay, this one's not related to gaming in any way, but I felt like sharing, so here it goes! I was shopping on Friday so I don't have to starve on the weekend (my fridge was basically empty). I usually buy cheap frozen pizzas, because I really like them. While was standing in front of the cheap part of the freezer isle a bro and his girlfriend came into the isle. The guy stopped at the normal priced stuff (like Dr. Oetker and Wagner) and just said: "Mhmh... BBQ chicken." He was real enthusiastic, you could almost see his mouth watering. He really wanted that BBQ chicken frozen pizza. But in a split second his girlfriend reacted. She told him "No" and pulled him away. This is when our eyes met. We both know what we were thinking. Bro got robbed of his BBQ chicken pizza. It was a real bro-to-bro moment. You could feel his pain, like his eyes were saying: "Damn, only vegetables for me." So guess who's eating BBQ chicken pizza righ

Nintendo: Hey, listen!

This is a plea for Nintendo, I hope that somebody there will read it. A few days ago you announced the next "Mini" console in your attempt to make even more money of some 25+ year old games, released for the hundredth time. Please. Stop. Or at the very least change your business practices. I hope that I speak for a majority in the gaming community, when I say that we've just about had enough of yet another Nintendo console (or accessory...) which won't be available at launch because you simply can't (or won't?) make enough. We've had enough of the scalpers who pre-order all stock before we even get a chance to look the device up. Enough of the scalpers who then continue to sell those consoles on eBay for double or triple the price. Isn't it bad for your business? Let's talk about a hypothetical scenario: you could sell 1 million of the SNES Mini. But you produce only 500k. That makes 500k of your potential fans/customers angry, because

E3 2017 Press Conferences, Part 3

Well, I'm a day late, so sue me. Nah, just kidding. Please don't sue me. I watched the Ubisoft press conference yesterday, but then I took a break from all these announcements and watched Sony and Nintendo only today. Here is the finish! A big WTF ran across my face at the very beginning of the Ubisoft presentation and I'm sure I wasn't the only one feeling like that. The announcement of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle took me completely by surprise. Eh, what the hell. I'm gonna skip it just like I skipped almost every Mario game. Next! The Crew 2 looked pretty nifty, adding water and air vehicles to the mix, but since it's basically multiplayer-only I'm gonna skip this one too. Now there was something I definitely will be checking out: Transference . A VR thriller. The cinematic trailer looked promising, hopefully the game will deliver! Far Cry 5 wasn't really a surprise, since there was already a trailer out, but the gameplay demo was

E3 2017 Press Conferences, Part 2

Got to watch 2 more press conferences today, so let's jump right in! Bethesda got a lot of hate because of Creators Club and re-releasing Skyrim again instead of a new TES game, so I started watching the show with a little bias. Well, I was surprised. Positively. I think the show was pretty great. Short: yes. But did it need to be longer? Drawn out like the others? No. Since I don't have any interest in the world of Elder Scrolls (be it Skyrim, TES: Online or that card game) I focused on their other stuff. And for an FPS lover there was some awesome stuff in there! Let's start with probably the biggest of them all: DOOM VFR . ALL CAPS. HELL YES! I'm a proud owner of a PSVR so I can't wait to get my hands on this one. Like the guy in the animation sad: "Doom, so hot right now!". At least Bethesda know their memes. But what does VFR mean? Is it "Virtual Fucking Reality" as most people theorize? I need confirmation! After that came a

E3 2017 Press Conferences, Part 1

Since I live in Europe, watching the E3 press conferences live is almost an impossibility. Staying up late wouldn't be so much of a problem, but having to get up early next day for my 9-to-5 job makes it very hard. That's why I've been watching the recordings on YouTube. This also has a nice side effect: I can simply skip games which don't interest me. Let's jump right in! I'm watching them in order, as they happened, beginning with EA . Thanks to the fast-forward feature I could basically skip about half of the 3-hour long press conference and "after show". I have zero interest in Fifa and Madden (which made up a sizeable chunk) and I also couldn't care less for Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefield . Yes, you can all hate me now, I simply don't like either of those franchises. That was another hour which I could skip, because the live gameplay of both games was FREAKIN' LONG. The rest boiled down to Need for Speed: Pay

What is happening?

Please, can anybody explain to me what is happening in the world of cryptocurrency? I've had about 25.000 DOGE coins since almost the beginning (I mined them myself in 2014), but they never really were worth anything. Mostly the price hovered around $2 for 25.000 DOGE. Sometimes, just out of curiosity I looked up the price, but as you can see from this chart, nothing really happened in the last 2+ years: Until a few months ago. I read somewhere about Bitcoin soaring above the $2000 mark and decided to look up my cryptocurrency again. And to my surprise the 25.000 DOGE were suddenly worth about $40. What the F? 2 days later I checked again. Now they were worth $75. Double the price almost over night! A day later $80. But it was not only DOGE. All kinds of cryptocurrency - most of which I've never heard about - increased in their value. Double, triple, some even ten fold. All in the last 2 or 3 months. Currently we seem to be over the hill, the prices a

Heavy Rain

I know, I'm very late to the party - about 6 years, but I don't care. I just finished this masterpiece on the weekend and I'm still blown away. Usually I don't play interactive dramas. I'm more like an FPS guy. I play games where the story mostly goes like: "You are a (space) marine, here are some aliens/other enemies, kill them all and save the universe/planet/etc. (to get the babe)." But I've played the demo of Heavy Rain when I got a PS3 back in 2013. And it got me interested. Sometime later I bought the game, but somehow never got around to play it. It was sitting on my shelf, mocking me all these years - like about 300 other games in my collection, I still want to play. (If you don't believe me, go check it out: https://vgcollect.com/drunkenm666 ) About a week ago I was looking for a game to play and Heavy Rain seemed like a good choice. And man, it was a good choice . (Don't worry, I won't post any spoilers, so if yo

Buyer beware! (Me vs. PlayStation)

This is a bit similar to the eBay vs. PayPal thingie... A few friends bought me a 1-year PS+ membership Feb. 2016 as a housewarming gift. That was really nice of them. Initially I quite enjoyed the monthly games and playing online with friends (mostly Destiny). Later the (especially since Nov. 2016) the monthly games steeply declined in value  and in the last 2 months there were no games that would interest me. So I disabled the auto renewal and let my PS+ be cancelled early March. Now this is where I should've left it. Then, PlayStation made a pretty good deal by offering PS+ for 99 cents for a month. I though: " Shit, it's only 99 cents. " and I could get 2 more months of monthly games out of it. I bought the "cheap" month. That was a HUGE mistake. A week before the 99 cent month was over I got the usual mail from PlayStation, that my subscription will end if I don't have the auto renewal enabled. I thought: well, I disabled it be

New direction

Initially I only started this blog to show my feud with eBay and PayPal to the world. That's now resolved. But I still have some rantin', ragin' and ramblin' to do, so I'm gonna continue this blog under a new name and a new design (and from here on now only in English). So what'll be this blog about? Actually nothing in particular. It'll be a mix of gaming, IT stuff and probably things that piss me off (like the initial theme of this blog). Let's get to it then!