I used to be an absolute, hardcore, pasty faced gaming individual, but ended up getting a proper job and feeling guilty about lost hours. Two broken legs’ve put me firmly in a wheelchair and sofa combo, and all we have in the house is a Wii. It’s sending me mental. All I want to do is shoot people with a large dollop of gore, but all I have is sacharrine sweetness and feckin’ Mario!

Keep up the good work in .net, it’s the best section by far!

I used to use sony headphones exclusively, but in the last few years I’ve found the quality’s been pretty poor – with in-ear jobs anyway. I was only getting about a month from a set, because the flimsy cables would go where they join the headphones (not just a Sony problem. I’ve had the same thing with other in-ear phones too). So instead of paying £30 for Sonys I doubled the budget and bought a pair of Shure E2Cs, which I’ve had for ages now. Superb build quality, amazing sound (bass is particularly good) and they double as earplugs on planes.

I don’t see many ads – I very rarely watch TV that I haven’t recorded – but I saw the open-head ones the other night. Terrible.

Hear, hear.

> I find Sony (who I used to consider to be the best consumer electronics manufacturer) to be a bit hit and miss.

Their DVD players and TVs are still generally very good. Laptops are good too, but overpriced. Especially their £900 netbook.

All of Sony’s PS3 advertising was utter garbage. They were trying some sort of tarantino vibe, I think, and it just didn’t work. Some of the Xbox stuff was really good (like the banned play soldiers one (which I thought was ace)) and a lot of it was shite (like the current open back of head stuff). The wii stuff tapped into the who celebrity culture thing, which is what people seem to be into these days.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the wii. I’ve just spent the last hour bashing the drums very badly and I’ve got a sore shoulder from an boxing the other night. :-)

>>I have a simple rule now for Sony stuff:

My rule is simpler – I don’t. I find Sony (who I used to consider to be the best consumer electronics manufacturer) to be a bit hit and miss. If you buy a Sony product it might be good but it’s equally likely to be shite. Not a good thing.

I have a simple rule now for Sony stuff: If it’s analogue, I might buy it — they still make great headphones. If it’s digital and has any way of interacting with anything else I own, forget it.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s apparent just from reading the back of the box in a lot of cases.

> Again, it’s all back to marketing. Sony brought out the Eye-Toy, Singstar and a lot of other things which were even more casual-gamer friendly than the wii is. They didn’t market them very much or push their development so they were a bit of a damp squib.

Aye, but I think the point of marketing is that it’s not just customers you’re marketing to, it’s developers as well. Which is why a console the whole point of which is the interface is always going to be a completely different deal from a console with an extra interface option. I take my hat off to Nintendo for the Wii, I really do. Yes, it was a huge gamble, but I think it shows that it was a gamble made by people who really knew what they were doing.

> The accuracy is a big issue too – which is why the motion+ thing is due out.

Computer hardware will always improve, regardless of what you’re doing with it. I think part of Nintendo’s genius here was to invent the concept and interface first and let the hardware follow later.

I know I mentioned this earlier, too, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of Nintendo’s advertising containing more footage of people than of games.

The iPod was a combination of pretty and marketing. I reviewed an early iPod against its rivals, and IIRC I decided that the Creative machine was the best. iPod was nice, but others sounded better and had more features. My archive’s not on this machine but I’ll try and remember to dig it out tomorrow.

FWIW for a long time Sony made *the* best sounding MP3 players, but buggered it up with insistence on ATRAC and shit, shit PC software.

I want to read some of my old reviews now and see how wrong I was :)