PlayStation 3 first impressions: "Meh"

For the first time in my life, I am a PlayStation 3 owner. To be specific, I bought a charcoal black 120gig slim model. I will freely declare that during the seventh generation of consoles, I was firmly committed to Microsoft and the Xbox 360. The 360 hardware, games, accessories, operating system and foibles are all fully known to me. The PS3 on the other hand has always been a complete mystery. Until this week.

My first impression of the form factor is that the slim is a neat little box that thankfully does away with the terrible "Spider-man" font and the glossy "piano" finish that we Xbox owners scoffed at back in 2006. This version of the console looks robust and not overly fussy. There are a couple of USB ports and it even carries an optical/Toslink output which is always good to see. I am familiar with the mediocre but functional PlayStation 4 version of the operating system, but this older edition looks and feels decidedly underwhelming. When you compare this offering to that of the Xbox 360, there is only ever going to be one winner. But considering Microsoft's history in developing operating systems and user interfaces, maybe this should be expected.

Playing original PlayStation games via HDMI is one of the main reasons I wanted a PS3. I've only tried a couple of games but they seem to work well and look like they did 'back in the day' (rather than the mess the PlayStation 2 seems to make of them). The only draw back is that you can't use an original PlayStation controller, so I am continually using the analogue sticks and wondering why nothing is happening. The controllers that came with my system are basically wireless PlayStation 2 controllers: one has rumble and one doesn't (the absence of rumble was another reason we Xbox owners laughed at the PS3 launch).  Another piece of functionality I was pleased to see was the virtual memory card to load and save PlayStation saved games via a memory card adapter.  

I am keen to catch up on the first party titles that I missed out on when I left Sony for Microsoft between 2007 and 2020. Consequently, the first PS3 game I loaded was "Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction". Or rather I tried to load the game. It seems this game has some sort of issue that means it won't load unless you alter the space left on your hard drive by 700MB or so. You can download or delete anything you like; as long as you alter the available capacity. I only found this out after searching through some 15 year old forum posts. Not an auspicious start. Once this obstacle was overcome, the game started installing various components to my hard drive. I am accustomed to this happening on modern consoles but I think it only happened once or twice in all the years I used an Xbox 360 (I still use an Xbox 360, but you get what I mean).

Next I tried to load Gran Turismo 5 but had to wait over an hour for 27 updates to download and install. Then the game tried to install components to my hard drive to reduce load times. The timer for this operation soon jumped from 20 minutes to over an hour so cancelled and tried another Ratchet and Clank game: "A Crack in Time" instead.  Once the inevitable update for this had completed the game again installed some content to the hard drive; very alien to an Xbox user.

The games themselves are pretty good and remind me that a PlayStation is always more...playful, than an Xbox. There are hardly any platformers for the Xbox brand and its games library feels more serious and adult. There is no real equivalent to Spyro, Ratchet and Clank or Crash Banicoot for the Xbox; it's all COD, Halo and Gears of War. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just that I missed the type of games Sony and the PlayStation do best. 

Despite the PS3's benefits, I now know that in 2007 I made the right choice when I bought an Xbox 360. Yes, I had to buy a separate Blu-Ray player and the PS3 got rumble controllers eventually, but the 360 still feels streets ahead to me. My 360s have more memory, more I/O and a far superior operating system. But more importantly, back in 2007, I wasn't in the mood for cute music and jumping a furry animal up platforms to collect gold coins. All I wanted to do was shotgun /melee people and teabag them until they cried (this rarely happened).