Playstation 3: First Impressions

I purchased a Playstation 3 on Saturday, because White Knight Chronicles finally pushed me over the crucial "there are enough games on it to warrant ownership" threshold.

The UI is essentially a blown up version of the same one used on the PSP, which is okay, I don't know the greater public opinion on the interface, but it works. There are a number of things about the console that just make it feel like Sony doesn't want you to actually play games on the damn thing.

After bringing the console and game home, I set about getting it all hooked up, probably took about 45 minutes to an hour to get it all plugged in, which is just a testament to the awkwardness of my home theater setup than any difficulty with the console. Once it's finally fired up, it autodetects the resolution of my TV, and settles on 1080i, while my screen technically supports that resolution, it's really only a 720p screen with some fancy software to convert a 1080i signal. So I have to go in and fix that.

Time to play my game, throw the disc in, go to the game menu, and select it. "You need to perform a system update to use this software". Oh, okay, half an hour later, the system restarts, and another status bar pops up while it saves system settings, or finalizes the installation or something, whatever.

Go back to the game menu, select my disc, and another status bar pops up, because this game has one of the mandatory installations. Twiddle my thumb for another half an hour, and finally, I can play my game. Now, a funny thing is that every time I launch the game software, the signal to my TV cuts out for a second, like the UI is completely turned off, and then the game is launched, and it interrupts the video feed or some such. Anyway, total time before I can play my game? Over two hours, it's been awhile since I purchased my Xbox 360, but I'm fairly certain that it was a more streamlined process than that.

Up next, I decided to download some demos off the Playstation Network. It seemed a little confusing to me at first, but I'm sure I'll get used to it, the worrisome thing, though, is that you download a demo, then you go to the game menu, and when you select it, you have to install the damn thing before you can play it. Why is this visible to user? Of course if I've downloaded it, it should be installed, because I want to play it, shouldn't that all just happen in the background, and just be an all inclusive status bar?

Anyway, other than that, I don't really have any opinions yet, other than I like the dualshock 3, since it's an upgrade of the original Playstation controller which I'm so familiar with.

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