15 out of 15 people found this review helpful.
Complete Entertainment Package For the Living Room
Date of Review: Oct 28, 2008
The Bottom Line: A true all-in-one living room entertainment package that delivers.
Sony's shiny new living room center piece, the PS3. Is it worth the price of admission?
Little relevant background of myself (you may have already read from my Wii review): Born in the early 80s, I've been a gamer for over 20 years. My brother and I got a Nintendo around 1986/87. Since then, we've collected nearly every console on the market from Atari 2600 to Turbo Grafix to all the Playstations, and nearly every handheld in between. After growing up playing games, both of us have jobs in games. I work for a game developer as an artist.
I actually came to the PS3 from a different prospective than for games. I already had an Xbox 360 and a Wii. The PS3 hadn't appealed to me yet, and for that reason I had held off on purchasing one.
Well, the day finally came when HD-DVD was toppled and Blu-Ray was the victor. What does this have to do with a game console? Quite simply, the PS3 is one of the best Blu-Ray players on the market, if not the best. It's profile 2 capability means it can utilize every feature of a Blu-Ray disc with ease. I had an under performing Blu-Ray player (Sony BDP-S300) and I was tired of the unreadable discs. I upgraded to a PS3.
I couldn't be more happy with it's Blu-Ray playback features and performance. But that's not all the PS3 is good at, I'm sure you know. :)
The PS3 had a rough start with quality games, with only few trickling in here and there. Now, that is changing. Games like Little Big Planet, Wipeout, and Killzone 2 are at the top of my must have list on any gaming platform. The line-up is growing fast, and I'm ready!
The capabilities of the PS3 are still up in the air. The console gets a lot of backlash from developers saying the processor is too "off the wall" to code for. Coming from a game development background, I believe this is true. However, I believe the power is just untapped. There are develop reports of memory bottlenecks in the design, however, and this will be an obstacle developers will have to face. One thing is for sure; The quality in games has only gotten much better since the launch of the console.
The PS3 also supports streaming movies, music, and pictures. This is a great feature for people wanting to show their picture albums to family members on their big HDTV. View your pictures on a HUGE 1080p screen! The music streaming is very well done too. I sync it with my Windows Vista machine with ease. It has a very cool scene of Earth in space rendering in the background as one of the music visualization options. A sight to behold. The video streaming was less slick. Videos that streamed flawlessly on the 360 (on the same wireless network) chugged on the PS3. I don't know why, but it seems to be less efficient in how it streams.
PS3 also supports a growing online game store with some fun, quirky games like Pixel Junk Eden. A very artistic stylized game that is very unique. The store also sells full feature games such as Wipeout HD and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. The online play for games is decent and free. While not quite as robust as Microsoft's Xbox Live, PSN is free to use and functional.
Summary: The PS3 is a fine piece of machinery that sets out to compete directly with the Xbox 360. It succeeds as a competitive alternative with it's ability to control all your living room entertainment from games, movies, music, and even an online browser. It doesn't have as big of game inventory as it's biggest competitor, but it's catching up. Where it lacks in games, it makes up in the only console that plays the next generation of disc based media, Blu-Ray. So is it worth the price of admission? The answer is YES, if you are looking to get into Blu-Ray. Otherwise, the Xbox 360 provides just as good of a gaming experience for $200 less (Xbox 360 Arcade).
