There are a number of different reasons to want an external hard drive for your PS3. In my case I wanted to keep backups of my DVDs that my PS3 could play and a place to store my music collection where I could access it both on my PC and PlayStation 3 without setting up a server.

Following is a step by step guide on setting up the external hard drive for use with a PS3. In order to follow this you will need the following.

• An external USB hard drive
• FAT32Format.exe.
• A laptop/PC

Okay on with the instructions.

1. Get your external USB hard drive and plug it into your laptop or PC. Use the auto start to open the hard drive folder or navigate to My computer and double click on the external hard drive. Check the details window on the left of the windows pane. Where it says “File System” check what it says. If the file system is FAT32 you can skip to point 5, if it’s NTFS (or anything else) continue on to point 2.

2.Because you’re drive is not formatted with the FAT32 File system we’re now going to have to reformat it so the PlayStation 3 can recognise it. Backup any files on the hard drive that you want to keep, because formatting the hard drive will wipe the drive and all the information stored on it will be deleted for good.

3.Now that you have backed up your data you need to reformat the drive. Windows can only format FAT32 drives up to 32GB, as most external hard drives are larger than that you will need to use a special tool to reformat the drive to FAT32, for this we will be using FAT32Format.exe. This sounds harder than it is. Download FAT32Format.exe here

4.Extract the executable file from the .rar file. Now go to start, run and type cmd. This should open the command pane. The default should be something like c:\documents and settings\user> where user is your windows username. Find your way to where you extracted FAT32format.exe.

To go up a directory type cd.. To change to a directory type cd directory where directory is the name of the directory e.g. “cd my documents” will take you into you’re my documents folder.

When you have found the directory FAT32format.exe is stored type FAT32format X: where x is the partition letter. E.g. if your external drive is the E: drive type FAT32format E: your drive will now format, shouldn’t take too long, I formatted a 1 Terabyte hard drive in a few minutes using this method.

If you don’t know you external drives partition letter go into My computer the partition letter is the one next to the drive description. E.g. my external drive is called MyBook the partition letter next to it is I: so to format it I would write FAT32Format I:.

*whatever you do do not format the C: drive this is nearly always your system drive, formatting will wipe everything from that drive including windows, if you do this your computer won’t start up again*

5.Your external drive should now be formatted and ready for use. To test it plug it into your PlayStation 3 console. Navigate through the cross media bar to the video tab, look through the icons in the video bar and there should be one square one with the label external. If there is, then the PS3 can see your external hard drive.

6.Just one thing left to do, In order for the PS3 to use your hard drive like it’s own internal one it needs to have a certain file structure. This step is not entirely necessary but makes it easier to navigate. Plug the external hard drive into your PC and create the folders Photo, Video and Music. You do this because on the PS3 when you go into the video tab and click on the external hard drive it will try to look into a folder called “video” on the hard drive. If you do this you can just click on the hard drive and it will go straight in if you don’t you can still get to the file by pressing triangle over the hard drive and selecting display all.

7. Now your hard drive is ready, copy any video, music or photo files you want over to your hard drive and plug it into your PS3.

If you’re copying a lot of files over to your hard drive I would suggest using a tool to help speed it up. I copied 300 GB of files in half the time using the program Teracopy instead of the inbuilt windows copying utility this can be downloaded free here

Feel free to post questions, additions or criticisms to this guide

Despite being a huge fan of the survival horror genre and of Resident Evil in particular I haven’t being paying much attention to what’s going on with Resident Evil 5. A few new videos were released during E3 so I thought I’d finally get round to taking a look at them. The gameplay was what I was interested in the most which I have linked to below.

Resident Evil 5 gameplay

After watching the video the only thing I can say about it is I am shocked. They have taken everything that makes Resident Evil a great survival horror game and gotten rid of it. What they’ve added in to replace it isn’t very impressive either, Resident Evil seems to be changing from great atmospheric survival horror to a decent generic action game… which we have more than enough of already.

Resident Evil – The survival horror

The original Resident Evil may not have been pretty by today’s standards but it had style and a feel of its own. The fixed camera angles gave the game a more cinematic feeling and also allowed the designers of the game to only show what they wanted you to see. Nothing character related on the screen such as a life bar or ammo count really made it feel more like a film as well. The lack of ammo in the game made you think about whether you should really blow that zombie away or try to get around it and conserve your ammo for when you may need it. The game could actually be described as scary, well as scary as a game can get, whereas these days they’re just not. Slow staggering zombies are far scarier than parasitic villagers any day especially when they’re jumping out of cupboards at you.

The idea of the game was to survive, with limited ammo and supplies while solving puzzles, which made for a nicely paced game which was different from most other games on the market and still mostly is today.

Resident Evil 5 – the action game, slowly turning into an FPS

Gone are the fixed camera angles with that cool cinematic style that made Resident Evil feel like playing through a horror film. It’s now replaced by a sort of over the shoulder view which follows you around. The lack of ammo is also gone, the reason they run out in one of the videos is due to poor aim and having to kill pretty much everything. Now I’ll have to admit the change in the whole weapon/loads of ammo thing may be because in Resident Evil 4 and 5 the protagonists are actually entering the scenario expecting a fight rather than the situation suddenly spiralling out of control.

The next point I’m going to make is the major point that got me thinking about just how much the series has changed. As soon as the video started I noticed one thing that jumped right out at me. The new HUD. Why have they added a HUD? Resident Evil has never had or ever needed a HUD. The only games they’re really needed in are FPS’s due to the fact that in a big fire fight you’re going to need to know when to reload. The fact that they’ve added a HUD makes the game seem less realistic and scream “action game!”

Now I’m not saying Resident Evil 5 is going to be a bad game, because it still looks awesome. I’m just saying it’s no longer a survival horror game; it’s now an action game. When I play it I don’t think it will be like playing Resident Evil I think it will be like playing Army of Two. Now I’ve just got to hope Silent Hill 5 is better than Silent Hill 4 was…

1. Bet on Horses at Sandown didn’t win anything – June 2007

2. Started at University doing Computer Science then switched to IT, there is a difference. – October 2007

3. Sat through a Microsoft Presentation just to get a free T-shirt – November 2007

4. Tried to take a picture of myself in a thoughtful pose without laughing – December 2007

5. Attempted to make the worlds first Nacho pizza – January 2008

6. Spent most of the day at university dressed as a bunny and giving out little chocolate eggs – March 2008

7. Went to South Africa – March 2008

8. Climbed Tabletop mountain in Cape Town, South Africa – March 2008

9. Ate Kudo, Springbok, Crocodile and Ostrich for the first time (In South Africa) – March 2008

10. Swapped my left shoe for a bottle of Kwok. – March 2008

11. Found a game that mentioned Reading (Town), by the way it’s The Longest Journey – April 2008

12. Took my first exam in years – May 2008

13. Accidently turned up 6 hours late for my exam, still passed the module – June 2008

14. Went to sandown to bet on horses again, won £160 – June 2008

15. Got key to my new uni house – July 2008

16. Started a PS3 blog and then this one. – July 2008

17. Got 7 years bad luck – July 2008

18. Went to belgium for the first time in 8 years – August 2008

Apart from these things the rest of the year was pretty much lectures, assignments, very occasionally drinking, gaming and visiting the anime society

I’ll be posting on there a lot more than I’ll be posting on here so that’s the place to go if you want to see just how rambling my rants can be. Still, there’s gonna be some non PS3 related rants on here sooner or later.

At the moment the room is pretty much a door opening into a massive bed, but i’ll move some other stuff in there soon.

Not bad for a days work…