Playstation 3 80Gb
ColinI had a PS1 and have a PS2. I've put off buying a PS3 for a while because they were so dear, the graphics seemed to be at the expense of game play, and because I missed the boat on backwards compatibility on the first model. Today I phoned a friend to ask about backwards compatibility and he told me it was all just software now. Ok, that's not going to get any better, so I finally went out and bought a PS3. The big display box features prominent billing for the new dual shock controllers. You won't notice, unless you turn the box round after you get handed one, that it says it no longer has any backwards compatibility with the PS2, not even software but rather absurdly, there is PS1 support. I think Sony have finally lost their minds, they seem to be on a campaign to progressively punish customers who weren't early adopters. Whatever saving they made for this compromise probably wasn't worth it, and if I'd read this before I purchased that might well have been the clinching point. Yes, I have a PS2, but I just took it out of place to make room for this beast. Now I need to find a home for both.
Next I began trying to set up a media server on my main Debian box, imladris. I first tried gmediaserver, but found that I could see all the files but the PS3 said "unsupported data" for all of them, then I tried mediatomb, and had the same problem, even after tweaking the config.xml file to add PS3 compatibility, and using the command line tool to import files. I finally found that by surfing to http://localhost:49152/ and adding the directory from that interface that it worked. Phew. This was a big reason for buying the PS3.
So I sat down to play Ratchett & Clank and was immediately told I hadn't enough disk space. Absurd. I have 60+ Gb free and need 419 Mb. I find there's a known bug that means I need to download a big file to get this to work. Doing that now.
First experience is a lot less positive than I hoped after such a long wait.
Edit
Another odd little thing, it took a very long time for 1+ Mb to download last night. Google suggests all sorts of things that make the wireless connection slow, but here's the thing, I'm using a wired connection, since my wifi doesn't quite reach the corner the PS3 is in. Odd.
I don't know anyone who has been incredibly impressed with the PS3. The majority of the praise for this generation of consoles has been aimed squarely at the Wii, but generally this generation has been a bit of a disappointment and somewhat quietened the death knells being rang for PC gaming.
I can't say I've had the slightest urge to splash out on any of these machines so far. Though I'm not a huge gamer.
Neither am I, as you know. The reasons I bought it are more complex. I wanted a media centre, and while the Wii can do that off of cards, and has wifi, it has no good media centre functionality. Don't ask me why not.
I wanted a good web browser, Opera on the Wii sucks. The PS3 is still on an SD display but looks much better, on an HD display it'll knock the socks off of the Wii.
I wanted a Blu-ray player. Nuff said.
I wanted a low power Linux box for the living room that wasn't too intrusive. The PS3 can do that.
I got all that for £300. Not bad. I would have liked to have been able to remove the PS2 and all the cables, but it was not to be.
Probably last and least, I wanted a PS3 for it being a console. Having said that I've enjoyed the two games I got. Soul Calibur IV and Ratchett and Plank.