My initial impressions of the PS3

[_Belial]

Well thanks to vgopal i'm the proud owner of a shiny new PS3. Unfortunately had to spend the day driving up from London so only had a few hours with the beast so far, so here are my very "initial" impressions.

First things first, the thing looks so damn sexy, i know the shape is a bit annoying for people who slot their consoles into little media center units, but fortunately i don't have that problem and have a huge desk with lots of huge slots under the tv with plenty of room for it, and boy does it look good in there. It's a real heavy beast too, by far the heaviest console I own (this is now console number #49 or #50 in my collection I believe) so you'd hope there's some serious power under the hood wouldn't you!

So you get it out of the box and hunt for the rest of the package. The sixaxis, well it's a dualshock, but about half the weight, i mean this thing is really like, it actually weighs less than the wiimote, but thats due to it not having rumble i'm sure. One really nasty thing tho, which i hope i can get a decent 3rd party replacement is the R2/L2 buttons are really nasty, like some cheap tacky analogue control, they just feel like such an afterthought. They work so well on say the 360 controller just don't work at all on this one, back to the drawing board there sony!

Then you hunt for your HD cable, surely, you've got the all-signing, all-dancing 60Gb HDMI version of the PS3, they've put a HDMI or at least a component cable in there haven't they?? ... but nope, you're sickened to find a composite cable, i begin to weep as i realise i dont have any hdmi cables lying around the place either

Anyway, once i stop crying, i find a PC power cable, plug in a 5A fuse and power her up, gently gliding my finger over the power button and listen to her boot up (literally you just give it the slightest touch and it springs to life.. lovely). You notice instantly, the room is still silent, yep this is one real quiet console, much quieter than the xbox/360 and even the wii! And your then greeted with a message to plug in your wireless controller... with a wire! (ah the irony). Yep to synch your controllers you've no doubt heard you need to plug in a wire... nice one centurion!

Anyway, that done you're in the OS, pretty familiar to anyone with a PSP really, no real surprises here. Just get your network setup (wired or wireless), takes all of 60 seconds and you're online. Create your account (i created a US one atm, will create a jap one later as i hear they have different demo's) and you're free to skip happily to the store, well, unless your PS3 crashes like mine did when entering my address! Totally hung, wouldn't respond to anything but power off I did some digging around and see a few people have had crashes on the text input screen too, so hopefully a fix will appear someday!

Anyway once i'd finally created it (my id is rhwbanz btw) I proceeded to test the browser. Works quite well actually, you can use a USB keyboard if you want to enter url's and stuff so that will make life much easier, but definitley seemed rapid enough, loaded kelly brook images from a google search up quick enough anyway. But i never really intend to browse on there so i didnt play around much more than that

So onto the store, I really wanted to try motorstorm, so first things first, find the demo's page on the sony store (anyone know if it's possible to download them on a pc then connect a usb drive to ps3 and play that way?) and download.. great seems harmless enough, i'll go play in the os whilst that downloads shall I?/ erm, nope. Like the xbox 360 when released, there's no background download system at all, you're stuck with having to sit there watching a progress bar That's of course, until yoiur net connection drops, in which case you get an error... ah no problem, i'll just resume my download... won't I? Nope, Sony really having a laugh here, there's no resume function, so if your download stops 800MB in, then kick yourself in the nuts as it's back to 0bytes for you and a full download all over again, really poor! Again, like the 360, lets hope they sort that junk out!

Well when I finally got the demo downloaded and installed, it was time to play, so i load her up, and wait patiently as she starts, then wait some more, and then again, seeing the disk light for the hd flicker, but still takes a while to load! So even off HD it's slow to load, surely that can't be right, so i get to select a vehicle screen, press left/right to change vehicle, nope still takes a few seconds to "load" the next vehicle onto the screen.. appauling!

Anyway, i decided firstly to try the "bike" mode, racing around the side of a mountain on a bike sounded fun, and it was, but then i realise, hold on, isn't this pad motion sensitive? ooh found the option and gave it a go, could this be as fun as excitetruck on the wii? Oh dear. The bike was all over the place, the sensitivity is way too high for the controller on this, you really have no chance to win any races and no way to change the sensitivity either, i was gutted. what could have been a brilliant game was ruined by really bad controlls And not just that, you're forever falling off the edge of this mountain, and unlike exciutetruck where you just end up at the bottom of a ravine and drive your way up, you fall for a few secs, watch yourself explode then reset, really annoying when it happens for the 12th time.

Fortunately I managed to keep myself trying, and decided to try the truck portion of the game. Exactly same thing but driving in trucks instead of a bike. Immediately i'm impressed, the controls actually work very well for once, feeling just as good as excitetruck on the wii, not too sensitive at all working pretty much spot-on, it must be working as i was 2nd place (not 14th) on that race And you don't fall off the side of the cliff as much thanks to the controls actually working now. If they can fix the controls for the bike before the game is launched they're on to a winner as it's great fun (and a rockin' soundtrack which includes nirvana, bonus!).

Now graphically I don't really want to comment, for 2 very good reasons. Firstly, I don't have a HD cable to try, will pop to the shops and get a HDMI one tomorrow (assuming my lcd accepts a hdcp signal as i hear the ps3 outputs hdcp even for non-protected/movie content). And the 2nd reason is that after i'd quit the game and was fiddling in the os menu's again, i actually realised i was in 4:3 mode so my lcd was stretching the display to 16:9. Once i changed i immediately noticed the difference in the image quality in the OS, but at the moment i'm downloading resistance and it's 25% so i dont want to quit that download atm

The motorstorm graphics did look nice though, certainly nowhere near the quality of last years' E3 demo's, they were obviously fake cgi one's, but still damn nice, very fast and some lovely particle effects, but will reserve judgement until i see it in HD and can compare properly to the 360.

I've also got the full version of Dark Kingdom (untold legends for all the PSP fans) which i'm sure is a decent enough game, but it looks like an old PS2 game and when i've got zelda on the wii, why do i really want to play a run of the mill hack + slash game on the ps3? I had a quick go and was a very average afair, uninspiring graphics, half decent gameplay if you're into that kind of thing and some online modes which i've not tried out yet but could be fun co-op.


So there we have it, i've got resistance demo downloading atm so hoping that's nice, but overall, the PS3 gets a thumbs up, but certainly "could do better", if i'm honest, i'm not bowled over like i was expecting, i'm disappointed that stuff i was expecting like streaming divx/xvid etc isn't in there (you can play them, but not off your network) which means i still have to keep my xbox for that kind of thing.

I'll update once i get my hdmi cable, and have resistance + ridge racer on order and hopefully will arrive by weekend.

So my overall PS3 experience, at the moment stands on a 7.5/10, once some killer titles come out and i have HD output and they fix some bugs/features then that'll jump up, but atm, 360 has nothing to worry about.

[fonetech]

I think Sony are hell bent on making this console fail to be honest

Great review tho m8

[bulletproof]

mate,

where are you ordering the games from, my supplier has gone on his christmas break and wont be back till jan 07.

Thanks

Bp

[_Belial]

well this batch of games i'm getting from tronix they're not the cheapest around but do fedex delivery for $15 so i'll get em in a couple of days, came to about £30 per game so not bad at all.

If i'm not in a rush though i'll use vg+. Cheaper but shipping will take about 5-7 days, but again very reliable.

[bulletproof]

cheers mate, just ordered motorstorm (jap version) hopefully should be here on tuesday....

BP

[_Belial]

Yeah i'm really tempted to get the full version, but as it has no mutliplayer for jap (will be for US/EU) i'm not sure if i'll bother tbh. I'll wait for some reviews to appear first i guess

[bulletproof]

i will let you know mate as soon as it arrives and had a chance to play it for a bit

BP

[_Belial]

I've just downloaded the ridge racer 7 demo from the JP marketplace, yeah it's a standard arcade racer which won't appeal to everyone, but i've always been a fan of ridge racer. Have it on the 360, have it on PSP, have it on PS2 etc. etc.

Well now i can safely confirm that all that crap about ps3 ridge racer looking pants compared to xbox 360 ridge racer was just xbox fanboy propaganda. it looks just as nice if not better than 360 one with some real nice turbo effects and flames which werent on 360, cant wait to get my HDMI cable and play it in HD when my full version hopefully arrives this week.

I also got a chance to play resistance : fall of man last night/this morning. I was expecting great things from this, after all, it's pretty much the only a+ title on ps3 at the moment. I must say, initially, I was quite disappointed, perhaps because i'm still using SD cables on HD telly. The graphics certainly didnt make me think "Gears of war has a battle on it's hands", they looked like xbox1 game if i'm honest.

And it's tough, I mean really tough, gears of war was way too easy imho and too short, although can't tell how long the game will be from the demo of course but playing the first (Manchester) level i must have died about 20 times.

Anyway, it's a standard FPS affair, lots of weapons, lots of aliens and lots of jumping, crouching and firing Not exactly my fave genre of game it has to be said, but with so little else on the ps3, beggars can't be choosers Well after dying so many times on the 1st level i saw the option to skip to next level which was set in Nottingham.

Now this is more like it, i dont know whether they just didnt care about Manchester (how dare they!) or perhaps i just didnt notice all the little effects, but Nottingham looks much more like what i was expecting, a proper post-apocalyptic feel to it, very half-life 2 it has to be said.

Gameplay's pretty standard, there's a neat touch where if you grapple some enemies you have to shake the controller to get them off you too, which is nice. Certainly, for fans of the genre it'll be great, really will. But again will reserve judgement until I get some HD cables and full version due this week.

[{{909}}]

i didnt know the levels were set in UK towns, are they accurate to the real life ones? I could do with trying to work out where i found that obscure comic shop last time i was stumbling arround nottingham