First Impressions of Playstation3

17 Feb 2007

Yesterday was one hell of a frustrating day mentally. Since Dawn has been playing so much World of Warcraft: Burning Crusades, I kind of wanted to set up a gaming system in the office to be able to play games too without being sequestered to the Xbox 360 in the other room.

Since moving the 65″ TV to the office was out of the question, and bringing the 360 to the office to play Rainbow Six Vegas on the smaller TV was also not going to happen, I had all but decided to buy yet another computer, set it up with a widescreen monitor, and join in the PC gaming community with her.

I went all over Boise yesterday looking for something decent I could use to play games on, I just couldn’t see spending more than $700-$800 as I don’t play games nearly enough to blow a couple grand on a high end gaming machine.

After getting totally frustrated, I had just about decided to upgrade one of my machines here and do this totally machine/OS swap this weekend when an idea hit me.

Now the genesis of this idea is funny, it started as “Well, I just really want to play games, and PCs get out of date so fast, maybe I should just buy another Xbox 360 for the office.”

Then I started thinking about things like multiple Xbox Live accounts, scattering save games across hard drives, etc. Then I also remembered looking at the HD-DVD release schedule at movies that I wanted that were not coming to HD-DVD. Then I was totaling up another premium, another HD-DVD, another Wireless Adapter….I was already at $700 there alone.

I decided to go take a serious look at the Playstation 3 since it would give me another gaming platform, a Blu-Ray player and was in my budget for this little toy.

I made a call to Best Buy, they were sold out but told me they were pretty sure Fred Meyer had them, so a short call and I was on my way to Freddies.

I got there and sure enough, the PS3 and a small selection of games. I debated pretty hard over the 20GB or 60GB models. The price difference is $100 and for that you get the obvious disk space, built in 802.11b/g wireless and Memory Stick/SD/CompactFlash card readers.

After spending $99 for the wireless adapter for the Xbox 360, I figured that alone was worth the difference and went with the 60GB. I picked up NBA2K7 and Dark Kingdom to start me off gaming wise, Fred Meyer doesn’t sell Blu-Ray movies so I will have to pick one of those up later.

First Impressions
I already had an HDMI and optical cable handy to connect it up when I got home so I took this beautiful shiny black monster out of the box and got started connecting. The connection was easy enough, but getting sound working wasn’t quite as simple. The Playstation3 doesn’t output sound anywhere but the HDMI cable by default. Since I removed the speakers from my HP 37″ LCD TV, I had to use optical direct to the receiver to get surround sound. That required digging into the menu system a bit to figure out how to enable the optical port for sound.

Once I had that going, getting it on our wireless network was a snap. It autodetected it, I entered a WEP and we were set. I put in the NBA game and I was off.

You have to wire the controller at first, it doesn’t come charged and the battery isn’t removable or swappable, so be prepared to remember to charge it or do some playing tethered when it gets low.

The game itself was beautiful, it was also noticeably faster than it’s Xbox 360 counterpart. It just seemed to react a little faster. Sadly the gaming on the PS3 is limited by the title so I was stuck in 720p playing this game, but it still had all the next-gen goodness and was a lot of fun to play.

Next I moved on to Dark Kingdom and set up a character and got in the battle. It almost reminds me more of a Gauntlet with amazing graphics instead of an RPG, which the box claimed was the “First true Next-gen RPG,” but it’s still fun. I will definitely be keeping my eye out for the next round of games and any current ones that look tasty.

Of course this is me in no way abandoning the 360 or choosing the PS3 over it. I still think the current games on the 360 are better and the online service is far better, but with wanting a console for the office, and a blu-ray player for the home, it seemed like it was better to have the option (with a Wii nowhere to be found still) than to duplicate a system and not expand our options.

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