Saturday, October 11, 2008

Mind-Boggling Realism

Now that I have a PlayStation 3, a 1080p High Definition Television, a 1.5m HDMI cable, some HD movies and six HD PS3 games, I have been playing games and watching movies outside in the lounge instead of my room. Pretty much to get the best picture and sound quality since my room is just a little CRT TV with faulty Component inlets. I am very satisfied with the PlayStation 3. While I still love my Wii for its unique games and the News and Weather Channels (yeaaaaaa I use them bastards :p), the PS3 has its unique awesome features as well.


One major gripe is the Friends Codes on the Wii system where players have to trade their unique 12-digit friend codes away from the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection before they can connect with eachother to play a game together or send Miis and messages to eachother. Theres a unique code for each online-enabled game as well as a unique Wii console code. Thats a hell of a lot of codes just to have fun together. The PS3 on the other hand just has one PSN (PlayStation Network) name where you can include the standard alphabets, digits and symbols for everything, games and the PS3.

Another cool feature is that you can tell when your friend is online and what they are playing. Nintendo puts so much empathsis on community, simplicity and fun when they restrict you so much to have fun with friends over the net! Any person you meet online during your travels through the PSN will be logged into a list of the most recent ten ppl and you can invite them to be your friend. So much easier. Sorry Nintendo, you lose once again for being a tight-mother.


Being able to customise the XMB (Cross-Media-Bar, which is the home page of the PS3) like the PSP's is a great feature. I have a
Street Fighter IV wallpaper and Metal Gear Solid 4 icons; it really makes cool that you can personalise it. A downer on the Wii is that you cannot download trailers, demos and personalisations mainly because of the space-restrictions the Wii has (512MB compared to 20-80GB on the PS3). I have been downloading PS3 and movie trailers left-right-and-centre just to see the game in its HD-optimised quality.

With the Wii having no capability for anything other than playing games, checking the weather and news, the PS3 can also play Blu-ray, DVDs, MP3s, WMV and DivX files for your liking from a disc, a USB stick, a flash card or even through the network! I have hooked up my PS3 to my computer and have it stream movie and anime files from my HDD to my PS3 with no lag at all! Its freakin' brilliant!
The PS3 was recently enabled with Force Feedback and Trophy (same as 360's Achievements) support. Its all good and all but the fact that only some games support these features and not all will be supporting these features in the future is very frustrating.

The most annoying game I have is Soulcalibur IV. The game is awesome but the extra features are lacking. Since the game was released long after the release of the DualShock 3, it doesn't support it at all! There is already a trophy system in place to unlock for extra in-game content and that system being used by the 360's Achievements, its unabled for the PS3's Trophy system... oh man. If Naughty Dog made Uncharted with a trophy system long before the PS3's Trophy update then when it was announced and releasing a patch for Uncharted to enable trophies, why couldn't Namco do that to begin with? Very frustrating.
Hehe also the PS3 is the first video game system to give me motion sickness! Probably because of its realism in HD that I got so sick that I had a headache even the following day. I was playing
Time Crisis 4 one night in the dark and I felt really really sick. Maybe because I was sitting too close to the TV and it was in the dark but man did I feel really off. I blame Namco for this for having the G-Con3 gun wired instead of being wireless-enabled. But that was the last time I played the game and gave it back to Ren soon after.

Anyway I'm happy with my PlayStation 3 but I wouldn't say its better or worse than the Nintendo Wii an vice-versa. Both have its strengths and weaknesses and I wouldn't trade both of them for anything else in its generation unless Sony brings out a PS3 slim :p


Anyway I'm happy with my PlayStation 3 but I wouldn't say its better or worse than the Nintendo Wii an vice-versa. Both have its strengths and weaknesses and I wouldn't trade both of them for anything else in its generation unless Sony brings out a PS3 slim :p

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