Sunday, March 25, 2007

Further PS3 Thoughts

After an hour-less sleep due to DST kicking in - and a dawn trip to Manchester airport to collect an Australian aunt, I've had more chance to muck about with the PS3 and have to say that Motorstorm is very nice.

It's remarkably better than the impression I got when we saw the game at the Metreon, I presume that was an early demo of the game produced for the US launch, back in November - with a few more months polish it's looking a ton better. I'm not sure it's a system seller but it's certainly the best indication of the console's performance abilities.

I've had a couple of stints online with it and that seemed to work great (apart from once when the game clean crashed) but unless you're playing with mates or chatting to each other, you might as well be playing with AI bots as far as I'm concerned (and that's most online games, not just this one).

It's going to be interesting watching the PS3 sales in relation to the 360 - and Wii, once more units are back on the shelf - it's clear there's some catching up to do and whilst the online side hasn't quite got the consistency and well-oiled engine of Xbox Live on 360, it's got much of the feature-set, it just seems a little un-cordinated as opposed to the online side of the 360 which is very prominent and consistent (as well as easy to get to) in most titles.

I've tried to get excited about High Def video but there's such a small difference compared to the video from my Pioneer player (which upscales, very well) that it's not worth the difference right now - I'm quite pleased actually since I wouldn't fancy replacing my dvd library :-)

The thing I really don't like about the PS3 and Blue-Ray is that the boxes themselves aren't the same size as DVD's - which is a pain for storage places and boxes etc. They're smaller, but slightly different, with an odd transparent edge at the top.

The PS2 game compatibility is nice, but since there are no PS2 controller ports, it means I can't play guitar hero on the PS3, so I still need to keep the PS2 in the house, I'd hoped I could replace it and give it to my youngest...

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