Back at it
Well it’s been a long awesome Winter break and unfortunately I neglected the blog for a couple weeks so it’s time to start back up. Hope everyone had a great holiday, I certainly did. I got to spend a lot of time with friends and family and basically, just relax. Over the break my gaming repertoire was increased and now my Xbox 360 is sitting next to a Playstation 3. I’ve been wanting a PS3 for a while so to finally have one is pretty sweet. Because I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about my gaming habits I figured I’d blog a bit about my experiences setting up and using the PS3. I’ve read and seen a lot about the process and a lot of the time it seems that people thought it was difficult. I disagree. There are some problems but overall getting the PS3 up and running was smooth sailing.
There is, of course, the usual stuff – power connector, ethernet adapter, video hookups. In this case there is a bit of a problem. For some reason (despite including a Blu-Ray player and also being advertised as an HD games and media machine) the PS3 only comes with composite cables. The 360 at least comes with component cables which, looking back on it, is pretty nice. One thing the PS3 does have that the 360 premium bundle didn’t at the time I bought one is an HDMI port. So the day after Christmas I picked up an HDMI cable and now my PS3 is running in true HD. It looks great. If for this reason alone, that is to say if the PS3 wasn’t a Blu-Ray player, it would be my default machine for watching movies and the like. I can tell even on normal DVDs that the quality is much improved. The Blu-Ray player is nice, I only have one movie (Spiderman 3 – it came with the PS3) so I can’t really give my full opinion yet. It’s definitely better looking than your standard DVD but it’s not an unbelievable boost in quality from what I can tell so far. I only watched about 15 minutes of Spiderman though so I could be wrong. I need to sit down and watch the whole thing sometime. I also signed up for Blu-Ray’s five free movies deal they’re offering with the purchase of a new Blu-Ray player. All you have to do is clip the UPC barcode off of your player’s box, select the 5 movies you want from the ones they offer, and mail the form with receipt and UPC into them. I’m sure the turnaround for the free discs is slow but hey, you can’t argue with free.
As part of the intial setup for the PS3 you’re asked to setup an initial user for the PS3 itself (much like setting up a user in your computer’s operating system when you first install it) plus it checks to see if you have an internet connection and, if so, lets you sign up for Sony’s Playstation Network. PSN is their online offering that’s similar to the Xbox 360’s Live. You can play online, download games and movies, and manage a friends list. Oh by the way, it’s also free. I went ahead and signed up for it right away and again, the process was smooth. When signing up you’re basically accessing a web page from the PS3 so it’s identical to filling out a form online. You can connect a keyboard and mouse to the PS3’s USB ports and fill it out or just use the controller. The PS3 uses a nice auto-complete feature for entering text which guesses what you’re trying to type. So, for instance, if I enter "Pla" there’s a list to the right of the on-screen keyboard with suggestions of which word I’m actually trying to enter. One of them might be "Playstation," so I go click on that and it’s entered for me. This system is faster than the 360’s data entry so I was pretty pleased. Next you charge up the controller with the included charging cable (again this trumps the 360’s controller which takes batteries, or is charged automatically with a separate $20 charging cable.
On to the games. I only have one so far but it’s pretty great. Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is probably the platformer of the year for good reason. The other games in the Ratchet series have always been good so the fact that Tools of Destruction delivers is no surprise. I’ve also tried some demos for other games (Heavenly Sword, Resistance, Uncharted) and I think Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune will be my next purchase. It’s a really great game that hasn’t been getting much hype. I also need to pick up an online game, probably Warhawk (which comes with a headset for online play). So those are probably my next purchase. Overall the experience has been nice, and it almost reminds me of an Apple product in ways that things sort of just work. When I first booted my PS3 it had already detected my network media share so I was able to listen to tunes while I was getting everything going. That plus it’s a beast of a machine with a large capacity default hard drive and very few of these proprietary costs like you get with the 360. Especially considering that Xbox Live was down for about a week and a half around Christmas for some unexplained reason, the service (and the console, practically) was unusable for this amount of time because a service that I pay for was faulty – all of that made the PS3 look like a good addition to my rig.
Now Playing:
Jedi Mind Tricks – Deer Hunter
Assassin’s Creed, Ratchet and Clank Future, Super Stardust HD, Hellgate London
