Hats off to Sony, as they’re finally starting to get this stuff right.  Recently, PlayStation.com has enabled viewing your Playstation 3 trophies online. Sony’s European PlayStation site has already implemented this further, allowing player cards to be generated for use in forums or otherwise.  North American players can also use this site as well. Playfire.com is already leveraging the data, and I can assume it’ll only get better from here.

Now maybe someone will actually care that I got the platinum trophy for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and the play trophy for LittleBigPlanet…

[Update 7/14/09] It appears that Sony’s North American site is supporting the Portable IDs as well now, but they’re still leveraging the data from Sony’s European Playstation site based on the generated HTML.  Not sure why, but at least it’s a little more convenient now.

Okay, so it wasn’t as simple as someone ignoring the post showcase showdown message of “Help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered,” (Figure 1) and just like that I have cats. I had wanted a household pet for sometime.

Last year, we had to put our family dog of 13 or so years (Figure 2) down to prevent further suffering as she was losing her sight and suffered from cancer and debilitating arthritis. Being in my mid-twenties, I hadn’t lived at home for years, but that didn’t make the loss any easier.

As any pet owner knows, a pet is a member of the family, and our dog Jessie was no different. When my grandfather died, my dad stayed back a few days extra to help my grandmother out.  A few weeks before my grandfather died, my uncle’s Collie had given birth to a litter of puppies.  As one family member left our lives, another entered as my dad returned with a pint-sized version of Lassie that we named Jessie.

Jessie was the most recent casualty among our history of family pets. There were cats, hamsters, and the occasional jar of bugs…though those didn’t seem to last as long.  It had been almost ten years since I had owned any cats, but I had decided that if I was to get any pets at this point in my life, it was going to be a cat.

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I’ve never been good at shooters, at least on a console. Back in college, I could hold my own in a frag fest in the dorms, but that was on a PC, with a mouse and keyboard, and I was rarely the top scorer.  That being said, I never would have thought that my first platinum trophy on PlayStation 3 would come via a shooter.  For those not aware, a platinum trophy is attained when all other trophies for a game have been achieved. This holds true mostly for retail games only, as games available on the PlayStation Network for download are usually too small in scope to warrant one.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is not only a great game and a great buy, but it might be the best game available for the PlayStation 3. Developer Naughty Dog has come a long way from Crash Bandicoot.  The reason why I usually find myself failing at shooters is that I don’t find myself immersed in the story, characters, or game play. These qualities aren’t typically the strong suit of shooters, and thus I’m typically not the target audience.  Uncharted is more of an adventure game in my opinion, with the mechanics of a third person shooter used as a mechanism to tell the story.

Another reason I find shooters difficult is that they require precise control and reaction time, rather than skillful decision making.  Uncharted employs a cover system, much like that seen in the Gears of War series, forcing a hybrid of these traits from the player in order for the player to be successful. The game also features likable characters, an entertaining story, and stunning graphics.  The game play is seamless and immersive, containing platforming elements and a linear environment that never quite seems so.  The game doesn’t even display a static HUD on the screen, which is almost enough to make you forget you’re playing a game.  These are the reasons I not only gave the game a try, but completed it many times over.

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