Do you own a PS3?

[Harrison]

Does anyone here own a PS3 yet? And if so what do you think of it so far?

Also do you have it hooked up to an HD display and decent sound system?

I really do want a PS3, but I'm going to resist temptation and wait until later in the year when the price drops and some decent games are released.

[Demon Cleaner]

My resistance still stands, and I'm not excited much yet, but that can switch over in some seconds.

[Toasty667]

Too exepensive. A mate just got one and is annoyed at the fact there are no memory card slots to use his old save games. I have a pc and a ps2 so I'm happy atm.

[Harrison]

That is something I also thought strange. They developed the PS3 with backwards compatibility as a key feature, but then didn't bother including the PS1/2 card slot. Seems very odd to me. Especially if you compare it with the Wii. Nintendo did a great job with Gamecube compatibility by including all of the ports from the older system.

[AlexJ]

Two of my mates have got PS3's so I don't see much point in getting one myself.

I'm not too impressed with the graphics - although there's more detail in the background the main action doesn't seem much better (although it's on an SDTV) One of them's got a HD display coming so we'll see how it looks then.

The 3 games I've played are Motorstorm, Resistance and Ridge7. Oh and the GTHD demo/game. Motorstorm's OK with the ability to take several routes which cross over a nice touch compared to more linear racing games. The 'sixaxis' motion control is a gimmick though and I soon reverted to the analoguesticks. Resistance wasn't too impressive. FPS's aren't my favourite genre to be fair, but this didn't seem to offer anything over PC FPS games. Ridge Racer, good fun but essentially not too much new over the PS2 versions. Gran Turismo HD felt just like the PS2 version, albeit with slightly better looking background & spectators.

Having said that, it's still doing a good job keeping us away from the growing pile of assignments so it's good but the first generation of games aren't groundbreaking. Much better to come I feel.

[Harrison]

It will be interesting to see if your opinion changes at all once you play the PS3 with an HD display connected. Especially GT HD.

[Teho]

I have a PS3, got it at launch. And bought a 40" Full-HD LCD display the week after.

I'm pretty happy with it so far. I've only bought Motorstorm and Resistance for it, and gotten several of the downloadable games available. First off, I've never tried an Xbox 360 so I'm not even going to try and do any comparisons or anything like that.

First off, playing this on a 40" 1080p set looks Bloody Amazing, there's no denying that! I've also gotten some Blu-Ray movies and I just can't put into words how good the picture is while watching those on it.

But it is the games that's important isn't it. It's very true that the current lineup is pretty poor. Resistance and Motorstorm were the only two titles interesting me. Ridge Racer 7, Virtua Fighter and Genji being some other popular ones that I personally don't like much. Never was a Ridge Racer or Virtua Fighter fan, and Genji just.. wasn't for me.

Motorstorm is enjoyable for a while, but it does get old fast. Once you get over how good it looks, and how awesome some of the crashes can be (HUGE amount of parts coming loose from the vehicles and flying everywhere, axles, springs everything you can imagine can and will go flying), It all becomes pretty reptitive. There are only eight tracks, but each one is huge and have multiple routes. This being a key gameplay feature, it is important to pick the correct route for the vehicle you're currently driving. The muddy riverbeds are for example almost always the shortest route, but taking a bike or a rallycar into them is a very bad idea, better to take the longer but much straighter and flatter route with the rallycars, and the narrow, twisting, jump riddled mountain paths with the bikes. A huge truck on the other hand is not fast enough to follow the rallycars or manouverable enough to follow the bikes, but will plow through that mud (and most other vehicles) like it wasn't even there. There are eight or so different vehicle types to choose from, and knowing the characteristics of the one you're driving is equally as important as knowing the track you're on.

On top of that, the gimmick is that usually all or most of the different vehicle types are all racing at the same time. And the races are usually very chaotic with vehicles crashing all over the place, everyone fighting to get the best line for their vehicle while avoiding the ones that are bigger, and mowing down the ones that are smaller.

All in all it's pretty enjoyable, but for me it got old pretty fast.

Resistance on the other hand I find highly enjoyable. People say it's just your average FPS bringing nothing new, but I disagree. Either those people are wrong or I've not been playing the right games. Okay, it is a war FPS, and there's only so much you can do with a war FPS. So it does indeed not bring much new gameplay wise, except for a couple of nifty weapons perhaps (no surprise there I suppose, the game is by Insomniac who do the Jak and Daxter games). But it still isn't your average FPS in my opinion, it's a damn good one. It may be doing what's been done before, but it does it well. It tells a pretty cool story, set in England in an alternate 1950s setting where the second world war never happened. Instead, a race of strange creatures called Chimera appeared in Asia with superior technology and strenght, and started taking over the entire world. At the time the game is set, England has also fallen, and you're playing an american soldier (of course) fighting alongside british resistance members.

The game looks pretty good, the graphics have a lot of detail in them, and the areas you play in are very well designed. Be it war-torn suburbs with car wrecks and caved in buildings all over the place, or chimera bases with alien technology everywhere you look. And in full 5.1 surround it sounds the part too with bullets flying everywhere in my livingroom.

The multiplayer part is also great fun and you have a good variety of maps to play on, ranging from huge 30 and even a couple of 60-player maps to small 8-player ones. There's the standard gameplay modes like deathmatches and capture the flag, and a few others like Breach where two teams fight to invade the other's base and destroy their reactor, which can't be done without taking out a few other targets first.

Very enjoyable all in all I think, and I still play this quite a bit.

As for the downloadable games, they're all pretty cheap right now firstly, since there's a limited offer going that lasts till May 23. Gran Turismo HD is completely free, but there is only the one track and 10 cars. So it doesn't offer much but then again it doesn't cost anything either. It looks fantastic of course, that is not strange considering Gran Turismo always was about looks. It plays like every other Gran Turismo too, except there is also drift racing in it now. Which is damn hard, but very satisfying once you manage to pull off a couple of good ones.

Lemmings is also available. I don't know, is there some rule that says every single platform in existence must have a Lemmings game? It's still your ordinary 2D Lemmings game, as fun as always.

And there's PSP's Tekken Dark Resurrection of course. It's the same as the PSP game, only in 1920*1080 resolution. Looks great enough, and the gameplay hasn't changed. As if it ever will.

I do have some complaints with the system, but they're all with the networking and mediaplayer side of things. Firstly, the PS3 has wireless networking out of the box. Great. That's just to get an internet connection though. It refuses to network with your PC. That's right, there's no way to communicate with the PS3 across the network, or for it to communicate with the PC. If you want to transfer music, videos or images to it, you have to use some form of removable storage be it burning it to disc, USB storage or memory card. That's just horrendously stupid in my opinion, and something I'm sure will be corrected sometime in a future firmware upgrade. For now, there exist an alternate solution; Red Kawa File Server. This sets up a simple FTP on your local network that you can access through the PS3's web browser. You're still only able to transfer files one at a time (making it a nightmare to move whole albums) so it isn't a perfect solution but it works. Hope they fix this soon.

Also, it does not support a lot of formats (yet, I'm sure that too will be added eventually). Worst is, it does not play .AVIs. No DivX then. And it doesn't play Ogg Vorbis audio either which is also a damn shame. The format is superior to MP3, completely free for anyone to use, so why not support it.

Those are the only gripes I have with it though, that and that the game lineup is pretty weak so far. I don't think it was too expensive, considering I'll be using most of it's features. If you want one solely for playing games and nothing else, then I agree that it is expensive.

So all in all I'm pretty satisfied with it. The game lineup is going to improve soon with some great titles around the corner, so I think it was well worth the purchase.

[Demon Cleaner]

They developed the PS3 with backwards compatibility as a key feature, but then didn't bother including the PS1/2 card slot.

The PS2 is not compatible with PS1 memory cards either.

[AlexJ]

They developed the PS3 with backwards compatibility as a key feature, but then didn't bother including the PS1/2 card slot.

The PS2 is not compatible with PS1 memory cards either.

But you could use PS1 memory cards for PS1 games on the PS2.

[Harrison]

In fact you have to use PS1 memory cards for PS1 games on the PS2. You can store the saves from PS1 cards on the larger PS2 cards, but not access it from a PS1 game. Limitation of the older PS1 software not knowing what the PS2 card is.

Some great thoughts there Teho. Which HDTV did you purchase?

That does seem mad regarding the inability to network the PS3 up to a PC network to share files. It seems this is currently one area the 360 has the PS3 beat. With the 360 you can connect it up to a local network and it will automatically extend itself into a media player for any content it can access on the network.

I suppose you could always run Linux on the PS3 and use the networking and media centre abilities available for it.