Four days with a PS3
OK, so a couple of days ago I indulged myself into buying a PlayStation 3. I was kinda depressed and my mind went like “fuck it, just treat yourself to a nice gadget”, so I went ahead and spent 399 CHF on a 120 Gb console right after finishing work that day. I also got the first Uncharted because it was the only game I planned to play available on discount and I was not about to shelve 100 francs for Uncharted 2, YET.
Now for a little background check before I delve further into the story. I’ve been a casual gamer for almost ten years now (not counting the early Nintendo years), mainly focused on PC gaming but more recently I switched to an X360 as my main gaming rig. I also have access to a Wii which, completely unselfishly I might add, I got for my girlfriend as a present last Christmas; however I don’t really play on it that much (the usual Sports stuff and Super Mario Galaxy from time to time).
Getting a PS3 was mainly the result of not knowing what I’m going to play next. I’m not a multiplayer person (the fact that I utterly suck at any type of competitive gaming has nothing to do with it). My Xbox Live account is Silver, QED. I draw pleasure from gaming mostly from the single-player experience. And even then, I don’t have the intrinsic wish to complete the game in any way imaginable like earning Achievement points for capturing every stupid fuckin’ flag/ skull/ pigeon the developer spread throughout the map or finishing the game on all difficulty settings ten times over for the sake of killing 10,000 grunts using only a sling-shot. As such, the time I spend with a single game tends to be kind of short. Usually 10 – 15 hours. This translates into going through every good game available rather quickly (okay I haven’t played EVERY good game available for the 360 – I still owe Batman AA, Bioshock 2, Halo 3: ODST, Call of Duty: MW and MW2 among others, a chance). The problem is that they’re all kind of expensive and it’s not really worth dropping an average 80 francs for one of those now, when I can get TWO platinum titles for PS3 – like Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, inFamous etc – for the same amount of money. Hence my recent purchase history.
Okay so now that I got it, what do I think of it? Let’s start with the bad parts. FIRST, the user experience is clearly inferior to the 360 (and by user experience I mean dashboard). The New Xbox Experience, has this way of making you feel right at home when you turn on your console. Your totally awesome/ definitely an accurate virtual representation of you / not some make believe fantasy avatar is waving, the Spotlight channel is in focus, the UK editorial team is smiling at you from the “sentuamessage” screen, you immediately see what’s going on in the wider Xbox community, etc. It is a unique way of say of saying “welcome back dork, you’re home now.” The PS3 dashboard is a different animal altogether; it’s like this serious thing, with lots of tabs ostentatiously bragging about PS3’s features. It’s actually quite the opposite of the 360, basically condemning you to a life of solitary technical prowess with a lonely death awaiting you at the end, but hey it’s all worth it when you get to master the Cell-chip’s godly power to feed your gaming beast (woooooow, sweeeet phrase). You have to dig a little through the menus to find anything relating to a community, and after a couple of days of playing with it, I still can’t find PS3’s equivalent of “sentuamessage” and “OXM Report”. This is kind of ironic giving that the PS’ community features are free of charge, not pay-us-fifty-quid-a-year-X360 like, so you can actually take advantage of a lot more stuff. Too bad it’s buried under mountains of focus group data that was sent to the shredder by some techie who thought he (no political correctness here, definitely a he) knows best. And no, PS HOME does not count as a FUN community feature; it’s a pathetic piece of shit.
Okay, no second, that was my main disappointment. There still are some stuff that me-no-digg, but they pale in significance with this one. Let’s go over to the good stuff, now. Firstly and obviously - the graphics. I didn’t get to play the real heavyweights like GoW3 (God of, you-know, WAR) and Uncharted 2, but I got a glimpse into what this console can do through the Killzone 2 demo. Wooow, definitely blown away and definitely better that the 360. I mean, GoW2 (GEARS of, you-know, war) looks sooooo last decade compared to what I’m seeing here.
Secondly, when it comes to value for money, PS is again a definitive winner compared to the 360, that is if you’re not planning to mod the latter and stop paying for games. The fact that it comes with a wireless adapter and rechargeable controller is a big money saver for some. For me, not that much - I use the Ethernet adapter anyway, since I don’t go about moving the console around the house and the boost in network speed is more than welcomed when using the console as a streaming media player. Even the rechargeable controller comes with a much too short USB cable for powering it back up, which could mean that I won’t be able to play and recharge at the same time, so I might need to spend some money on a controller dock. Bummer! However, the big turn-on, money wise, is the free PlayStation Network. The fact that you no longer feel like a second-class citizen for not having a “Gold” account and get access to all the deathmatches you can humanly play, is more than worth the price difference between the 360 and PS3. Of course, for me that’s not that important since, like I said, I don’t play multiplayer. However, if the need suddenly arises to get blown to bits by a 14-year-old, I won’t feel THAT big of a loser since at least I’m not paying for it.
Thirdly, the PS3 is a great media player. In combination with PS Media Server installed on the PC, it can run a whole bunch of video file types and it can attach subtitles (although for the latter you have to re-encode the video file which puts some strain on the PC’ CPU). Sure, you can more or less do the same on the 360, but the fact that the PS supports wider set of files by default means that less re-encoding stress is passed to the PC, which should improve the overall performance of my IT ecosystem. There are a couple of other nice things about the PS3 but I’ve covered the big stuff.
The conclusion. From a technical standpoint the PS3 is a beautiful device. It will probably become my main console since just a few good Xbox exclusives are coming out in the following year and the multi-platforms are worth buying for the PS3 at least for the sake of PSN. However, I doubt I will ever “love” Sony’s console. On the other hand I “love” my 360 (and by “love” I mean as much affection for an inanimate object as humanly possible without being categorized as disturbed). Why? For that warm and gushy feeling I get when I turn it on and see that it welcomes back the nerd in me with open arms.
Post-Scriptum: I didn’t mention the blue-ray player and browser features because they add almost no value to my experience, except for not switching disks and youtube.com/tv.
