Retro Gaming

I remember reading online about people's retro games console collection, so for the sheer fun of it I thought I would post this image of my old school games consoles sitting on the top of my bookshelf.


I have owned other consoles in the past like an original Mega Drive, a Playstation and an Amiga 1200 but they seem to have gone walkabouts.

Playing With PlayTV

I have had a PlayTV attached to my PS3 to turn my games console into a Freeview PVR for a few months now and after wanting to write about it for months I thought I would finally get around to it.

I bought the PlayTV to replace my existing Sagem Freeview box, which was getting a bit old and using my PS3's existing hard drive the PlayTV would allow me to record TV.

Setting up the PlayTV is very simple all I needed to do was plug in my existing coaxial cable into the PlayTV and then plug that into the PS3 via one of the spare USB ports on the front, however the USB cable sticking out the front is a bit noticeable. The kit also came with a sticker to stick on my existing PS3 remote so it would label what the buttons on the remote would do with PlayTV. Once I turned my PS3 on I just popped in the supplied DVD and the software installed within a few minutes.

Once the software has installed the PlayTV shows up in the Playstation 3's XMB in between the Video and Game options. When you go into the PlayTV the menu system is easy enough to navigate and reminds me of Apple's old Front Row interface with options appearing in a circular shape.

You get a weeks worth of TV listings in the guide and as far as recording features there's nothing amazing but you record and pause live TV as well as setting up scheduled recordings.

Navigating through you recordings isn't too difficult as they are just in a list format and you can change the sort order to help you find what your looking for.

The picture quality is good and on a par with some stand alone PVRs. However the picture does freeze for a second every now and again, but this is somewhat rare.

When I first got the PlayTV I did notice a few issues such as the guide taking a few minutes to load however this seems to have been fixed in a software update.

My PS3 came with a 60GB hard drive which due to the amount of programs I recorded filled up very quickly and instead of just deleting some of the programs I had watched I choose to replace my PS3's hard drive with a larger 500GB hard drive. Replacing the hard drive wasn't too difficult after watching a few clips on YouTube on how to replace my PS3's hard drive and only took a few minutes to swap out the drives (however it took over an hour to back up my data and over another hour to restore my data on my new hard drive).

My poor old Xbox 360 and my PS3

For the last 3 weeks I have been without my Xbox 360. After almost 2 years of use my 360 decides to throw up the dreaded Red Ring of Death. What makes it worse was that it decided to do this the night before my holiday started. I ended up spending the next week with very little to do.

I sent my 360 off to Microsoft to get repaired but after endless phone calls and each representative on the phone telling me something different about my repair I doubt I will see the thing again any time soon (and I have heard the Microsoft don’t even send you your own console but send you a refurbished console back instead).

I think my Xbox 360 decided to die on me because that week I had bought a PS3. I bought the PS3 because that week the 40GB version was launched and the 60GB version was given a price drop. I bought the 60GB version as it has backwards compatibility, SACD playback, 2 more USB sockets, a card reader and 20GB more hard drive space for an extra £50 when compared to the 40GB version.

I bought a PS3 bundle which included 2 games and 2 Blu-ray movies. I have not really used the PS3 as a games console as I prefer my Xbox 360 and games seem to be missing something when there aren’t any achievements. The main reason I bought a PS3 was for Blu-ray movie playback and for its price it’s a good player as the picture quality is on a par with my HD DVD players.