The optical drive is making weird sounds, the discs are getting some kind of grease on them and are possibly even getting scratched. It’s out of warranty by a year too.

What do I do? Do nothing and hope it fixes itself and doesn’t actually do real harm to the discs, or bite the bullet and buy a ps3 slim 250 and transfer all my stuff over?

At the moment I’m leaning towards playing more games on PC and Wii and hoping for the best with the PS3.

It seems like even though I don’t own an Xbox 360 (this is why) essentially every home system I’ve had has had some issue. My Wii bricked its wi-fi when it downloaded a patch at launch, my ps2 had issues reading games and so on.

Having said that I don’t remember having any problems with my old Mega Drive or PS1, so I guess as the tech has got more complex, the more errors happen, which is a great shame.

Consoles should be built as bulletproof as possible but it seems that as much as anyone tries, it’s almost inevitable these days that things will go wrong no matter how many precautions you take.

But you know what the worst thing is? It’s stopping me from enjoying some incredible games. I absolutely love both Uncharted 2 and Ratchet and Clank: A crack in time as well as Modern Warfare 2, but when I play them or watch them being played, the enjoyment is ruined by the noise my drive is making.

I suppose you could say that I’ve got good value for money out of my PS3. It’s been used essentially every day since I got it and I’ve loved it. I’m sure if I was forced to buy a slim, I’d get good value for money as well, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I hate buying the same thing more than once when I shouldn’t really have to.

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and its various 3rd party apps along with it.

I started out with twitterific on mac and then iPod touch. Eventuly though I found myself drawn to the more complex, more stylish apps available such as TweetDeck. It is still my favourite because of how feature rich it is and how it let’s you group up people you follow.

The group syncing can be a bit temperemental sometimes but for the most part it’s a great free app.

Now that Twitter has launched lists though, which is essentially their official version of groups, it will be interesting to see how tweetdeck merges the two together.

Surely this will eliminate syncing problems as eveything will be stored online. Not only this but it will allow you to carry across the same lists to any app seamlessly which is vey cool.

As good as tweetdeck is now and as much promise as it has, sometimes you just want a very lightweight app for when you don’t need to check all your groups and you have a more simple goal in mind like DMing someone or checking your replies.

There are a lot of simplistic apps out there but most people favour tweetie, echofon or twitterific along with a few others. There’s too many to mention really.

Like I mentioned earlier, I started with twitterific for mac and iPod touch. Now I prefer to use either tweetdeck or just twitter.com when I’m on the pc or mac and tweetdeck and tweetie 2 now on my iPod. That way you get a fully-featured and lightweight app in both places.

I also have the free version of tweetie for mac so I may use more of that soon especially if it syncs with the mobile version.

As far as tweetie 2 for the app store goes, I like it. The price put me off for a while but I feel like it does justify it. The only real issue I have is that I hope they don’t continue to release each update as a new version and charge for each. I can understand that they need to make it a business, but it’s generally poor form when tweetdeck and others are free.

Another issue is that the search is basic compared to twitterific because you can’t distinguish between only messages from a user and all messages to and from them. So if you want to see the tweets from someone you don’t follow who gets a lot of mentions you have to search for that user every time. Saved searches will get mixed up with lots of stuff you dont want to see. It’s not a big isssue by any means but a little disappointing nonetheless.

Overall the two best apps appear to be tweetdeck and tweetie. Both of which are available in desktop and mobile versions.

Combined, they provide the best combination of stylish minimalism and feature richness.

If you’re a serious Twitter user it’s hard to go wrong with either. That said, if you don’t require as much in the way of customisation or features then you might want to consider using just the web interface for desktop use and a free app like twitterific (which has ads) for mobile. The mobile Twitter website is just too basic to recommend.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you decide on the right Twitter path for you.

Wii Fit Plus doesn’t officially come out in the UK until Friday. However, I was lucky enough to get mine early mainly because of how weird the mail system has been recently. Stores have been sending their games early to make up for strikes, but it ended up getting to me early instead which is always nice.

As far as the game itself goes though, It’s clear that this is another of of Nintendo’s patented “barely enough” type of games where they literally give you just enough new to stop you from feeling ripped off, but it’s not by a lot.

They do make a few good advanced in this updated version. The most notable is probably the My Wii Fit Plus menu where you can select from pre-made workouts designed for usefulness in a particular area of the body, or what mood your currently in.

This is helpful but for me personally, I mostly play the aerobic exercises and these workouts only let you include Yoga and Muscle workouts. That’s great for people who enjoy those exclusively but for me I have not much reason to use the feature going forward. As far as Yoga and Muscle workouts go, there are only 2 or 3 new in each of those categories so its not like you’re getting double the amount in this new pack.

There are also quite a few new games included in Plus. Some are definitely worth playing again but quite a few are also more novelties and once you play them once or twice for fun with family or friends, once you go back again for mostly fitness purposes, they won’t be very appealing.

Skateboarding in theory is something I would enjoy. The issue with it though is that it is incredibly fiddly, just like snowboarding and skiing that are returning from the first Wii Fit. I used to skateboard and I can say that in real life, if you’re just trying to skate along the ground in a straight line, it’s not very difficult once you get the hang of it. This is way too sensitive and is too frustrating to make me want to keep going back to it.

Multiplayer was something I wished the first one had so when I found that it was going to be in this one, I was excited. In the end though it’s pretty poorly executed in my opinion.

In the original game, if you wanted to play multiplayer and compete with scores rather than everyone playing as the same mii and confusing the leaderboards, you had to log out and re-log in as the other person. This was a big waste of time.

In this version, you can do quick multiplayer switching but in a multiplayer session the scores each person gets in that particular session are erased when you leave. As we like to compete with scores over time it means we have to do it the manual way still. This new mode will be fun for people who don’t care about the scores and just want to have fun, but it’s strange that they didn’t do something so seemingly simple.

My next issue is the price. Yes, it is a discounted game. However, I don’t think its discounted enough. £17.99 seems to much to me for what is essentially less that half a game in terms of content.

What they’ve got in this package count be £5 worth of DLC and a patch for most other publishers. Of course the Wii doesn’t really do downloadable content for the most part. So yeah I wanted to get into wii fit again and this gives me a reason to do that, but for a few new mini-games and a semi-broken multiplayer component, not to mention an old game that is completely useless. It can’t be sold because everyone already has one, or wouldn’t have a board to use it with.

As I already mentioned, this should be £5 DLC if it wasn’t on the Wii, and because it is, £10 would seem reasonable as a simple upgrade, and £15 max. Of course they’re trying to make money, but there just isn’t a ton of content here. After a few hours you’ll feel like your just playing Wii Fit.

I would say there are two audiences for this. Casual families who won’t get bored quickly, and people who are serious about using it as a fitness tool rather than a game and will make heavy use of the new custom workouts. Otherwise, unless you love every new mini-game I would say don’t bother with this unless you can get it reduced.

I don’t think I mentioned this online before, but I am a really big fan of F1 racing.

I’m not even that into cars. I don’t drive and I don’t have any plans to learn. However, racing is really appealing anyway. It’s competitive, highly skilful and intense.

Of course, the big news right now is that Jenson Button won the drivers title and Brawn GP (formerly Honda) somehow won the constructors title to go along with it. It’s a great story and even though it was touch and go for a while as we saw other teams get closer in performance, they managed to pull it out and it’s great to see.

Jenson really deserves it after the time he’s had in past years. He hasn’t had the opportunity to show how good a driver he is until now unlike someone like Lewis Hamilton who came straight into a leading car in his first season.

There may be doubts about whether or not Jenson would have been successful had it not been for the performance advantage they had at the beginning of the season. However, F1 is about team and driver combined and you can also look at how he outscored Rubens Barrichello in the first half of the season despite them being in the same car.

It’s clear then that Jenson is a worthy champion and I hope he comes back next year with a monkey off his back and just going for broke. It’s exciting to imagine what he could be capable of when he’s feeling totally relaxed and at one with the car. I also hope that he stays with the Brawn team. It seems very likely that he will because of the emotional ties they have, and he’s not a greedy guy from what I can tell. He took a very big pay cut at the beginning of the season in order to just get on the grid at all, so he clearly isn’t too concerned with the money side of things.

The only thing left to say is I hope he goes to Abu-Dhabi totally relaxed and gives a performance worthy of a champion. A win would really prove it to any doubters and end the year on a great high.

Apple today announced a plethora of new products. All of which were leaked online before-hand. Before I get into the detail on everything, I must say that I’m incredibly disappointed about the new MacBook.

The rumours going around were that Apple were going to lower the cost of the MacBook by a significant margin. In the end, they not only failed to do that but instead, they actually increased the price by £100. Honestly I have no idea what they are thinking. I assume the reason they increased the price is because they took the uni-body design of the aluminium MacBook Pros and applied that same principal to plastic. While it may be impressive that they did that, it’s also very poorly thought out in my opinion.

This new macbook is essentially the same specs as the 13 inch pro model but plastic instead of aluminium. I think the only difference in specs other than possibly different ports is a bigger hard drive on the macbook. But then who really cares about that? Surely the pro audience would want a bigger hard drive anyway.

So why wouldn’t you just spend the £100 extra to get the pro? Well yes, it is essentially the same, but they aren’t offering really anything useful with the macbook. It’s not quite a high end laptop, and it’s certainly not a consumer laptop in terms of pricing, so what the hell do Apple think they’re going to achieve with this? If you can tell me, I’d love to know.

They continue to ignore the netbook space entirely, which is weird considering it’s growing so fast. I’m sure they will think that the tablet they will release is going to fill that gap. If it’s more than £300 or so then it will probably be more of a niche item.

Moving on to the iMac now, it looks impressive. At the same time, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you wouldn’t really notice a lot of difference in my opinion. The real changes are on the inside. If you go to the official page of the iMac and watch the video you will see what I mean. The design has been great before and the performance is improved, but the price is the real issue. They should be being more aggressive and they aren’t.

So the iMac is very consistent, and still a great desktop computer for people who are ok with the price, and don’t care too much about games.

The Mac Mini is much the same. They’ve boosted the specs a bit and kept the pricing the same. Not much else to say. The issue I’ve always had with it is that it’s too much money for an entry level system. I bought a Dell Inspiron 545 over it and I don’t regret that decision. It’s just so much more value for your money.

Now moving on to the new Magic Mouse. I have to say this this looks great. As many people, I was not a fan of the Mighty Mouse. I bought one and the scroll ball stopped scrolling down. Only up. This made using it incredibly frustrating. This one looks to get rid of this problem entirely by using just gestures to scroll and do all kinds of multi-touch things. It will definitely be interesting to see how well it works.

That about covers everything. Overall I was impressed with the iMac and the Magic Mouse, so so on the Mac Mini and beyond disappointed with the MacBook. I’ll be keeping my first gen MacBook as long as I can and be hoping for a price cut by the time I decide to upgrade.

Uncharted 2 is out this Friday in the UK so I’m quite excited about that. I still haven’t played through much of the first one so that’s a little disappointing but I’m sure I’ll go back to it soon.

The game looks amazing and Naughty Dog have really outdone themselves.

What’s funny is that I’m actually looking forward to Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games. We got the first game as a Christmas present a couple of Christmas’s ago and even though it may not be technically a great game, we still had fun with it.

In recent times I’ve sort of come to accept Nintendo and the Wii and DS for what they are. They may not offer a lot of the things I wish they did, and they may be a little gimmicky in some ways too (DSi Camera) but in the end, they possess that certain Nintendo charm that makes you like them anyway despite their various shortcomings.

In the end, Wii has a big place in gaming regardless of what people may say. My only issue really is that Nintendo and other developers can’t be lazy and take advantage of new gamers by ripping them off with poor games.

What will eventually happen is people will get wise to these games and eventually will expect more. Casual gaming doesn’t have to mean crap games. I hope more people start to realise that. Only then will we begin to see quality casual games which can provide much more lasting appeal along with better graphics, smarter controls and everything else that makes a good game.

That about wraps up this post. I’ll leave you with this message: If you own a PS3, but Uncharted 2 this week. If you don’t own a PS3 and are on the fence, buy a PS3 and Uncharted 2 this week (a 250gb bundle with U2 is coming out). I very much doubt you will be disappointed.

This game is a really cool DS game. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s a game where you solve puzzles and complete tasks by using anything you can think of. Most nouns will be recognized and placed into your game when you type them in.

I haven’t got that far through it yet but I can definitely say that it fills the need I bought it for. I wanted something fresh and fun to get me playing my DS again. I haven’t really touched it in quite a while but this definitely reignited my love for the system.

The only real issue with the game is the control set-up. You control the main character, Maxwell with all touch controls. The stylus also is used to manipulate items in the world and therefore sometimes things can not do what you intend.

Obviously with such a broad scope for the game you can accept most of these issues, but I think the game woujld have benefited a lot by using the d-pad and face buttons to control Maxwell and keeping the touch controls exclusively for interacting with objects. Hopefully a sequel can address these issues but it’s a shame that they hinder the experience a bit when they didn’t have to with this game when it could have easily been avoided.

Regardless of control problems, it has a lot of charm and it’s truly astounding that they took such an out-there concept and actually pulled it off very successfully. If you have a DS and are looking for something to play then you can’t go far wrong with Scribblenauts.

The thing that sports games remind me is that its not all about epic storylines and frantic online shooters. If a game is fun then that’s all that matters in the end.

I just got NBA live 10 and FIFA 10 and I can say that both are really fun.

I haven’t been able to play much of FIFA so far but it definity feels better to play. NBA even more so feels so much more fun.

The real interesting thing to note though is how EA have sort of made a comeback over their competitors while they both stumble.

The NBA 2k series has generally been seen as better over the last few years. Same with the pro evo series for quite some time.

I’ve always prefered EA and it’s fully licenced games more. Possibly more a childhood routine than anything else. Regardless of whether or not both games were the best in their genres before, I certainly believe FIFA has been very good the last couple of years and that this year is the breakout year for the live franchise.

If your a fan of either sport, you can’t really go wrong with either game.

This is a question I found myself answering today. The last few days I’ve spent helping my bro set up a log for the first time. We dived in at the deep end and opted for a custom domain (from godaddy of course).

I weighed up the pros and cons of each of the popular, free blogging services that I thought were appropriate for a casual blogger. These were Blogger, Wordpress.com hosted blogs and Tumblr.

What I use personally is a custom install of wordpress on my bluehost web hosting account. I’ve had this account for a few years and while I personally love wordpress and bluehost, there’s no denying the fact that it’s probably a waste of money for me.

The reason why it’s a waste of money for me is that I simply don’t use really any of the features that I pay for. I have almost unlimited storage and transfer, tons of other great features including unlimited domain hosting and email accounts. However, if all I use my £60 a year hosting plan for is to run a wordpress blog, then why waste the cash?

Another thing that may interest you is the fact that despite all of the storage space and transfer, up until recently, I just linked to images from other sites, at one point I even uploaded everything to flickr first. When virtually all web video is best distributed via youtube from where it can be easily embedded into a blog post, it makes me wonder why I pay this money for essentially nothing.

I think when it comes down to it, the reason I do it is because I enjoy having that luxury where I have the ability to do these things, if and when I need to very easily, even if I don’t make use of it. It’s a nice feeling to have your own independent space online, as long as the price is reasonable, which I believe it is.

While I’m on the subject, I do very highly recommend bluehost if you’re like me. Their service is unmatched in my opinion.

Going back to the subject at hand, it took me quite a while to come to a decision as to which blogging tool would suit my brother best. In the end, I went with tumblr. There are several reasons behind this.

Firstly, simplicity has to be a factor. Tumblr is so easy to use and well designed. It’s a joy to blog using it. The templates they offer are absolutely stunning, especially compared to most of blogger’s ones. It’s a shame that blogger lets itself down on style, but also usability to an extent.

Wordpress is obviously a favourite of mine. It just offers unparalleled levels of customisation with its themes and widgets as well as plugins. Wordpress.com is a very good service. However it does have some drawbacks.

The first is that when you want to add a custom domain to your blog, you have to pay a fee. That fee still stands even if you already own a domain at another provider such as godaddy.com. Blogger and Tumblr both don’t make you pay and are very easy to set up custom domains with.

The final straw for wordpress.com was that there is no guarantee that the site will be ad-free. As a fan of stylish simplicity, this is definitely not something I would be ok with.

So there you have it. Tumblr wins as my recommended blogging tool for casual bloggers, but more than that, it provides a great tool no matter your experience. I love it so much that I even pointed my domain christill.com (which up until now redirected here) to tumblr and it works perfectly.

Even better, I have it set so that whenever I blog here, the entry in the RSS feed gets imported as a link and description into my Tumblr feed so people who find my stuff there can make their way here for full posts rather than just quick thoughts and videos.

Finally, posts that I actually make at christill.com will be sent to twitter as well. I basically now have a chain of blogs that range from full blog to micro-blogging, with some video stuff in the middle.