I just bought myself i Playstation 3 (PS3), the latest model with 160 Gb harddive. I’ve read alot about the PS3, both Sonys over enthusiastic “it’s-also-a-blueray”-commercial and blogs and news sites complaints over prices and bugs, and I thought I’d share my thoughts off the machine now a few days after the purchase.
First off all, the largest dissapointment for me is the lack of backward compatibility. I have very large library of PS1 and PS2 games that I albeit rarely play but without a machine up that can play them will move that “rarely” to “never”. This is the greatest drawback of this machine to me, and most previous models could at least play the old games but had many bugs (or so I’ve heard).
After this dissapointmet, that I acctually learned off in the shop just before buying it, everything else have been a pleasent suprise. The included hand controller was wireless, but unlike the Wii remotes this one came with a cord that you could use to charge the thing. Very easy and nice unlike Nintendos constant changing of batteries.
The Playstation Network (PSN) worked very well, the PS3 directly identified my wireless network and asked the proper questions (encryption, password etc) and I was on my way out to download games from PSN. The PSN is very nice and have much more content than for example Wii (can’t say anything about X-box LIVE since I dont own an X-box), many games both full “normal” games, PSN exclusive games and demos for most of them! I’ve bought many consoles in my days and mostly I’ve gotten used to this kind of anti-climax of coming home with a new expensive console and the one or two games you bought with it. You want to try out it’s potential but you only have two games to try, well with PSN that problem is solved! I downloaded some four five demos the first day and tried what different kinds of excitement the machine had to offer!
Downloading very large games from the PSN isn’t that bad, granted I have a very high speed Internet access but still. First off all you can choose to download in the background while you play some other game, when the download is complete a notification will come up and you can switch to the new game. Furthermore you can queue up alot of downloads and then turn off the console, the PS3 will then ask if it should first finish the downloads and then power off, perfect!
I said earlier that there only was one dissapointment, well there acctually are two. After all these pleasent features I came to play the “Bad Company” demo, a first-person shooter, and I kept being reminded of how slugish it is to aim in a FPS with an analog joystick controler. I really missed a mouse or even better, a Wii remote to aim with! This made me think of how blessed the Wii is to have such versatile standard controllers.
All in all I like my PS3 very much, allthough the price still is a bit steep, though it really includes more than I first thought it would.
