Why Men Love Gaming More than many other things...

Having a shitty night, so wanted to play my PS3..it has been a long time since I touch that black lean machine. Gaming is such a good escape, and you now know why most men play it...and I've been at it since early 1980s when my dad got me my first gaming console - Atari. Kudos to Nolan Bushnell who co-founded Atari back in 1972. Read this article about his ideals, cool shit.

“When I hired engineers and people on the creative side, I never looked at their grades,” he said, referring to the teams he built at Atari and beyond. “I interviewed them strictly on their hobbies, and if they did not have a hobby in technology I wouldn’t hire them….

I bet I'll get hired. It's so easy to conjure out 10 good reasons why men love gaming...easier than well, a lot of other things non-important style.

1) Because you can always restart the game if it goes wrong. Slightest itty bitty wrong step, restart...no problems asked, no worries.

2) A good game is smart - knows that if it is too difficult, noone wants to play it; and if it is easy, gamers find it no kick. Basically it coded in degrees of difficulty at the right time with the correct adequate training. Basically hardly any sudden surprises that throws off your ego and makes you want to throw the game away.

3) It builds up men's ego, top scores or completing a game makes one feel accomplished. Perhaps a short term goal which seemingly makes that $80 you spent on the game worthwhile.

4) It is easily understood, perhaps because most programmers are men. There is no need for complicated instruction manuals, no need to take a class to complete a game. Basically not much effort is needed besides trying.

5) There is hardly any pressure. The only reason why you want to play that game, is because you want to. Nothing else, no pressure whatsoever.

6) You do not have to attend game forum, or groupie discussions, or game clubs etc. You only attend it because you want to improve, learn more and not because you have to rub shoulders with everyone else in order to do well in the game.

7) Because the game will never tell you to stop having fun. The very purpose of the game is to have fun, to loosen you up, to chill you off from all the pressure you are already getting at work and at home. It gets you away from the mundane life you are already having.

8) The game will not mind if you are yelling at it because you've just lost a game and you feel shitty making that one wrong move that cost the game but you can do better next time. There is no game nagging at you to admit you made a wrong move and it wants you to admit your mistake and eat your ego for breakfast and die and repent NOW.

9) The game allows you to cool off, pause, take a walk, think about things, sleep on it, do some research on the next best move...take a month off pondering about nothing at all. No explanations needed.

10) You can love your game and have your peace as well, you can turn off the game without guilt.

Time for some space out time. I'm out.

PS3 or a Girlfriend - Choose

Ok seriously my heart will break if a girlfriend breaks my PS3... This is why girlfriends and PS3 don't mix..haha
Unless you get a gamer girl..but seriously...on a safe side, no girlfriends when you are addicted to some cool game.

Gaming Consoles

Pictures shamelessly stolen from here

During my childhood, my dad tried to get me exposed to all sorts of indulgence, from music to even gaming. Back in the 80s, my dad bought me a set to get me hooked onto gaming. The Atari 2600 was first released in 1977, but probably only reached the shores of Singapore in the early 80s. It is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges, and I could have so many game choices to change. It was well built and survived until the Computer PC AT/XT series came about and I was playing 5 1/4 floppy disc games which were under the 360kB the Double Density (DD) disk can hold.

Next came in the early 90s, where the graphics on the PC paled comparing to dedicated gaming consoles. And I was addicted to the Nintendo Famicom System (The Nintendo Family Computer aka Famicom was first released in 1983) which I purchased from a friend as I dabble back into game consoles again. It was tough convincing my parents as the focus for me now was studies. Thus pocket money saved bought me this wonderful console.

But then PC made its debut of improving medium from FDs to CDs and now DVDs, and the slew of graphics card, sound cards made it more worthwhile and enjoyable to be able to play using the computer. You can have controllers, keyboards, wheels to play FPS, racing, strategy games. This brought me to the present time where gamers can choose between consoles or computers as game developers release titles across all platforms.
What makes it interesting is, why should the game consoles survive?

Well I have previously mentioned that game consoles these days are value for money as the makers actually lose $ for every set they produce. I made my decision based on many other factors which I will explain now.

I currently have a PS3, 2 PSPs, a DS Lite and a Wii, besides the PS3 for local warranty, the rest of the devices are bought from Japan with no supporting warranty but have not much issues so far - it's been more than a year. These Japanese gaming toys are well built and provide a lot of entertainment for myself and my family and lately Rainbow Six on the PS3 has given myself and my girlfriend a lot of collaboration time. The only mishap so far was my 1st generation PSP (Black 2004) which has the button dropped off after much aggression playing the NBA Live 2008. 4 years and just a button drop off, that shouldn't be too much to ask right? Even my battery is made in Japan and is still the same one that came with the portable.

My first semiconductor engineering job was with a Japanese company which instilled quality in my workscope. They are very stringent with reliability, quality - it is shown in their attitude towards work, design etc. I used to manufacture Non-volatile memory (NVMs) otherwise widely know as Flash, the memory cards you used in your cameras and DS Lite, PSPs etc. The NVMs I built was tested with many parameters, going through many stages which explained why they used to cost so much, but I tell you - they last. I managed to perform reliability tests on my devices which showed a memory retention of about 200 years! But that was probably on your 32mb card which is probably obsolete right now.

With the Koreans, Taiwanese and Chinese coming into the memory business and slashing costs such as test, reliability monitoring etc. It is why memory is now a commodity business which is now so cheap, it can be considered as a Harddisk option. The price you pay now, is the price you pay for less reliable things. You pay peanut, you get monkeys. Everything comes at a price.

But saying that, who now still uses a 256mb memory stick? Within a year, everyone will be clamouring over a 16gb SDHC card or double that next year. There should be no issue with losing your pictures, as the memory card would be sitting around collecting dust.

That saying, I hope Jase is happy with his PS3 as the Microsoft Xbox 360 is making headline news on its quality and reliability. Apparently, this disc scratching issue was known before Xbox 360 was launch in 2005 and could have been avoided with a USD$0.50 solution. I remembered Microsoft rushing to release the console while Sony was having delays and prefer to lose market share rather than release a bad console.

Lately from the impending economic depression, I have observed that greed over integrity is the root cause of what is happening to the world. But let's not get depressed and enjoy life in some way or another.

Do check out this game console website covers the entire history of game consoles.

Loving my PS3 - why? Because its cheaper than its worth!

Love to buy stuff for what its worth. And the PS3 is well worth its price. Sony just announced losing over USD$3 billion on production of PS3!

So if you cheapskates who bought it cheap..even more worth it. Got mine early at S$799 with no discounts and no white color!!

The PS3 main components consists of its RSX Cell chip (a 90nm IBM processor),and Blu Ray Drive which initial cost is about USD$100 each. 4 x Elpida XDR DRAM (Elpida is Hitachi spin off whereas the XDR technology is a better product from the RDRAM days from Rambus technology). Not sure about the DRAM prices but going at a whoppping 8Gb per sec it has enough bandwidth to support the 3-D graphics, superb digital imaging and advanced multimedia for the PS3 (>4 times the peak bandwidth of DDR2 RAMs)

Coming from a semiconductor engineering background, Sony invested USD$1.83 billion into developing and producing the RSX Cell chip alone.

Anyway support my ricebowl industry, go grab a PS3 and hopefully Sony recovers from the games/movie revenue as the pirates have not moved into this region yet.