World Cup 2010 & Evo 2010 World Championships.

I’ve been keeping tabs of the former, but really taking a shine to the latter this year. Internet streaming brings all that Las Vegas Caesar’s Palace excitement home and it’s hard to ignore for a fan of fighting games. The Super Street Fighter IV semi-finals were excellent with many of the matches going the distance. There were upsets, epic comebacks and lots of crowd pleasing moments.

Although the stream quality isn’t top notch, the commentary makes up for it. There’s a lot of fighting game lingo being thrown around, but they do take the time to explain what it’s all about. Nice to know what “Resets” and “Option Selects” are all about.

Along with personal pride and egos, there’s also lots of national pride with 20+ countries being represented. And if I’m not mistaken, this is the first year where we’ve got some women’s action with a dedicated Super Street Fighter IV Women’s Invitational. It’s great to see so much diverse love for fighting games.

Out of all competitive gaming, I much prefer watching competitive fighting games. It’s visually stimulating and very easy to get into when paired with the commentary.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have more Evo 2010 to watch.

P.S – Congrats to Spain for winning their first World Cup!

I could almost convince myself to live with just Steam, PlayStation Network & Xbox Live! Arcade services; a purely digitally distributed world. But, when I look at games like Metal Gear Solid 4 and check out my current bandwidth cap of 60 GB per month, I am reminded of how much change is required before that becomes a reality.

51.58/60 GB of bandwidth is left. Much of it was taken up by gigabyte sized demos, large Steam purchases and high definition streaming video which I’m a big consumer of. I’ve tweeted about purchasing Siren: Blood Curse for $29.99 from PSN, but I have yet to download the multi-gigabyte game. Bandwidth issues have gotten so bad that I’m reluctant to even allow the newly released Team Fortress 2 update to download.

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If I was an American and was a fan of streaming movies from the net, I would be somewhat upset over the fact that Sony’s Columbia Pictures is blocking its movies from being streamed through the New Xbox Experience’s NetFlix functionality.

Is Sony just being petty? Not completely. Apparently, it’s a valid licensing issue involving just the streaming of movies via the Xbox 360. NetFlix is working with Columbia Pictures in resolving this issue so it’s not worth posting rants over. Just sit back, relax and think about what your Avatar is going to wear tomorrow.

The Past

Ever since DLNA support was added to the PLAYSTATION 3 in firmware 1.80, I have been streaming all sorts of media to my living room and HDTV in a configuration similar to this:

Early on, I transcoded my Top Gear and American Dad episodes from my PC via TVersity since a majority of my content was encoded in DivX/XviD format (incompatible with the PS3 at the time). While the solution worked, it had some inconvenient setbacks:

• Computer(s) must be on in order to view/access all media.
• Image quality suffered due to transcoding.
• TVersity service needed to be restarted in order to become visible to the PS3.

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