Guardian Force UK

Oh dear today is not a happy day for PlayStation gamers worldwide.

Earlier today several news sources(that’s right I cited the Christian Science Monitor, what you gonna do about it?) began reporting that a very bad bug had crept into the old “fat” (as in, not slimline) PS3 consoles that caused some major problems when it came to connecting to the PlayStation Network, syncing trophies and generally playing games.

** UPDATE ** Apparently all is well now, Heavy Rain here I come…

Sony got around to doing an official announcement soon after and to be fair to them have been pushing Twitter and other updates out to try and keep people happy.

So what are the facts?

• Firstly this problem only effects the old fat black PS3’s and most reports have focused on the original launch ones being more of a problem.
• Yes that’s all of GF:UK!
• Upon trying to sign in to the PSN you will receive the error “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
• Launching any game with trophy support will result in the error “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.” and even worse may remove any trophies you had earned for this game.
• The clock will reset to Jan 1, 2000
• If you try to change the clock you will get, “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
• You won’t be able to playback rental content from the PSN Store.

Basically if you have a fat black PS3, don’t turn it on for the next 24 hours.

OK so there are definitely some serious issues here with a majority of people getting this error not being able to play games at all. Especially annoying considering that Heavy Rain has just come out and Final Fantasy XIII is out in 9 days!

Negative stuff aside this is actually no where enar as bad as some people are making out. I’m no console fanboy and no matter what this is a major fuck up for Sony however comparing it to Red Ring of Death is retarded. Firstly this is expected to be a temporary issue, secondly it is unlikely to reoccur since the fault has now been identified and thirdly it is not writing the hardware off, look at the error the complete worst case is you loose a few trophies. No doubt it’s annoying but it’s hardly having to post your console back to the factory and wait a week for a new one with no fucking data on it at all.

Sony posted around 3 hours ago that they will have the issue sorted within 24 hours so take a deep breath, go to the gym, put on your PC or 360 and wait until tomorrow before getting too excited.

Oh and in case you are upset here’s the seemingly undying Hitler Internet meme done up for Sony’s latest fiasco!

For those who didn’t see it on TV yesterday or haven’t watched it elsewhere yet, here’s the new trailer for season five of Doctor Who.

I think it’s pretty cool. The whole thing seems a bit odd in places, but when you remember that it was made to be show in 3D and on a cinema screen, that weird time vortex sequence suddenly makes a lot more sense. Not much longer to go now!

OK so you are probably pretty excited right? Well I’m not actually lying there is a Left 4 Dead movie in the works with real actors! The catch? Well it’s fanmade but don’t worry these guys are pretty pro and if you do nothing but check out the awesome trailer and posters I am sure it will convince you.

OK it wasn’t very revealing but come on it was kind of cool right? Here are some mock-up posters they did with the actors, they look really cool. I included smaller versions since the dudes running the website embedded 1MB versions (serious guys your bandwidth must be dying) but you can download the really pretty large versions if you click the images. (more…)

As part of my job I tend to keep up on what Microsoft, Google and the other big Internet companies announce at TED. I never expected however for Microsoft to unveil something this impressive. Check out this video that demo’s the new functionality of their advanced augmented-reality maps. It’s extremely epic.

If you weren’t impressed by that you should probably stop reading now. (more…)

If you have been gaming for any serious length of time then you know that Red Alert was one of the best games ever to grace us. In it’s day it was a groundbreaking, pretty and general stunning adventure with a fantastic range of multilayer support. Some of the earliest GFUK memories are multilayer LAN games in the cyber cafe (yeah we didn’t always have the Internet in our homes!) between 4-6 people.

Nostalgia aside this is still one of the best RTS games ever made and not only that it’s for-bearer (Command & Conquer) and it’s less impressive but none the less fun offspring (Tiberian Sun) are also available, completely free, just visit http://www.commandandconquer.com/classic and get downloading.

Also this game series was one of the first to actually employ actors (real life!) to do cut scenes and I don’t think any man who played Red Alert ever forgot Tanya (shake ‘em baby!) so get to the site and download Red Alert at the very least, if not all of them. (more…)