PS3 love

Way back in the day, I was a Sega per­son. Like every­one else at my col­lege, I had a Gen­e­sis (Jenny), but I fol­lowed Sega into the Sat­urn (good sys­tem, far too expen­sive, some mem­o­rable games), and the Dream­cast (out­stand­ing sys­tem, some fan­tas­tic games). Then Sega came to an end due to their own pric­ing, strange mar­ket­ing, and lack of third-party sup­port… oh, and the relent­less PS/PS2 jug­ger­naut. After­wards, I had to find some­thing else. On a week­end where my wife (girl­friend at the time) antic­i­pated us being snowed in and unable to escape from vis­it­ing her par­ents house, we picked up a PS2. It was Sony who killed Sega, but the whole “love the one who defeats you” vibe is strong here.

That PS2 was good to us, both for that snowed-in week­end and the cou­ple of years since. I’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned the num­ber of coop­er­a­tive mul­ti­player games that we enjoyed. The PS2 also had Kata­mari Damacy, one of the great­est games of all time. Also, any num­ber of fight­ing games (Vir­tua Fighter/Soul Cal­ibur), solid jrpgs (Dis­gaea), plat­form­ers (includ­ing the awe­some and fun Ratchet and Clank series), video board/card games (cheers to Culd­cept), and basi­cally any single-player game you could ever want… as long as you could live with­out Zelda/Mario and Halo. Which we eas­ily could.

(And as an aside, what’s the deal with Halo? The single-player game is com­pletely aver­age, and I’ve already played the Quake series and both the orig­i­nal and revised Coun­ter­strike, which are bet­ter than Halo mul­ti­player. This is the same phe­nom­e­non that pre­vents me from enjoy­ing any mod­ern group-based real­ity show: I watched the first four sea­sons of The Real World dur­ing their orig­i­nal broad­casts. Every­thing else is a per­mu­ta­tion or reac­tion to the orig­i­nal, with very lit­tle inno­va­tion. It just amazes me that in a world where Half-Life and its sequels exist that Halo can be that popular.)

So we got on the PS3 early, and it’s been even bet­ter to us than the PS2. Net­flix plus Blu-ray plus excel­lent scaleup of nor­mal dvds would have been enough to make it a good pur­chase. How­ever, we’ve picked up a few games (Ratchet and Clank, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, Ninja Gaiden) that really make the sys­tem sing. There’s also the PlaySta­tion store that has demos, down­load­able con­tent, and com­plete small games (Pix­eljunk Mon­sters, Super Puz­zle Fighter, Every­day Shooter) that are the per­fect cost-to-joy ratio. It makes me smile when I come home from work and my wife is try­ing to rain­bow a level on Pix­eljunk Monsters.

And we got on PS3 early, before Sony dropped two things we’ve come to love:

1. Backwards-compatibility! So we still drop in our PS2 Culd­cept and relax to old-school good fun. And I’m plan­ning on pick­ing up PS2 God of War 2 now that it’s a great­est hit.
2. Card read­ers. When I lost the cable con­nect­ing our cam­era to my com­puter, my early-rev PS3 had a card reader and USB capa­bil­ity that bailed us out. Not ideal, but got us by.

It’s an excel­lent media machine, with easy con­nec­tion to my com­puter for brows­ing pho­tos and watch­ing avi’s. Going through your photo album on a big HDTV with com­pany over was sur­pris­ingly sat­is­fy­ing. It’s my pre­ferred way to show pho­tos now. Also, Blu-ray won. The PS3 is the best blu-ray player in exis­tance, and will con­tinue to be so because of the fre­quent firmware updates.

Peo­ple com­plain about the lack of a huge cat­a­log of games, but hon­estly I’m a new dad, work a full time job, and have a WoW habit. I’m happy with a few excel­lent games.

PS3 gets a big thumbs up.

More Words!

• Coop­er­a­tive mul­ti­player overview
• Pix­eljunk Eden is joy
• His­toric­ity and WoW
• Game Rid­ing Shotgun
• The Off­sea­son