More Fiddling

Another geeky day with the Playstation 3. I tried something out that I was curious about. Over in Singapore, the locals who bought a PS3 quickly came to realize something; the Asian equivalent of the online “Playstation Store” left something to be desired. When you buy a PS3 and hook it up, the console creates a user profile/account filled to the brim with information on you, provided you answered all the questions honestly, and then, assuming you actually told the machine where you really live, locks you into an online Playstation Store appropriate to your region. The Southeast Asian version is, apparently, in not so terrific shape, so what many Singapore PS3 owners had been doing was faking an American address so that they could get access to the North American store. The only catch was that they needed a valid North American postal code, since the North American system actually went to the trouble of checking online to verify the postal code address put in actually existed.

After doing a little bit of homework, I realized that the European, Australian and of course, the Japanese versions of this store all offered a few things that the North American version did not. The European store, for example, offers a demo of a game that the North American version doesn’t. In Australia, PS3 gamers can download music videos and watch them, a service not available here. And of course, in Japan, the Land of Games, they have much earlier access to demos of games, since those games come out there first, before being subjected to months of translation to ready them for an English release. So following in the footsteps of the Singapore gamers, I went into my system and created a bunch of new dummy accounts, one for England, one for Australia and another for Japan. To my amazement, neither the British or Australian versions of the store cared about a valid address, and simply took me at face value when I said I lived there. The Japanese store was a lot trickier, if only because once I designated my residence as Japan, the consoles–surprise!–switched over to Kanji. Fortunately the registration process was exactly the same, and I muddled my way through until I got to the bit asking for a residential address. It turns out the Japanese ALSO want to confirm an actual postal code, and they have a bizarre address system that I needed to take a crash course in, learning about odd things like how prefectures work and how the Japanese use the AGE of a building, rather than its location, to determine its hierarchy in address numbers for a particular street. In the end, I ended up hitting up an English speaking expatriate site that had apartments for rent in order to track down my legit postal code and fortunately that was all I needed to get in.

Not a bad haul, though. In the end, I managed to get my grubby little paws on a Japanese demo called “Folksoul” who’s English name will be “Folklore” when it finally releases, a music video from some Australian singer with weird, almost Kate Bush-y sort of feel to her voice, and a demo for comic book based first person shooter, The Darkness, which amazingly is not offered in the North American store.

I also finally got around to getting that HDMI cable. Looking around in normal retail stores, the cheapest cable I could find sold for about $70. However, on the internet, I found some guy that claimed to sell them for $15. So we hopped on down over to St. Clair West and promptly found ourselves in a very nice, sleepy little neighborhood that lacked the same bustle in the middle of the day that our usual haunt, Bloor Street possesses. It seems like a really nice place to live, and I’m glad we actually got an excuse to go down and see the area.

It turns out the guy in question was NOT lying. Instead of a little electronics shop, we ended up at a house that was inhabited by what the Wife tells me were Vietnamese folks. We entered the guy’s bedroom and found wall-to-wall electronics. I have no idea how he came across them. I have no idea how he could sell them at such unbelievably low prices and still make a profit unless he didn’t pay for them himself. Frankly, I don’t want to know. I got my HDMI cable and we got out of there and went back home. Hooking it up and turning the PS3 on, that big black box once again amazed me by automatically detecting the new connection and optimizing itself for it. I had thought that the jump from standard AV cables to S-Video cables was noticeable when I first tired it on my PS2 years ago. The jump from S-Video to component was similarly noticeable. I knew that there would be a change, because the component cable I was currently using for the PS3 was analog, meaning that a loss of signal due the entire damn thing not being shielded with gold plating–or something else similarly arcane–was inevitable. However, HDMI is pure digital, so the quality of the cable itself means nothing, as long as it works, the purity of the image is preserved. But I wasn’t quite prepared for just how sharp and crisp the PS3′s graphics became when it finally got its “native” cable, the one it was really designed to work with (and yet, is not included with). The vibrancy of the image is really amazing, and I now understand what other folks have been saying; if you’re any kind of technology geek, once you get a taste of High Definition, there’s no going back. Even old PS2 games and regular DVDs look noticeably better thanks to the PS3′s ability to “scale up” standard definition images to pseudo-HD.

I’m extremely curious now to see what an actual Blu-Ray movie will look like. Guess I’d better mail that damn coupon out for the free movies.