| Playstation
3 Hits Tokyo
and our man Mish'al was there...
Already
selling for three times the retail price, the PS3 made its
way to Japan and sold out immediately. Now I do confess that
I haven’t spent much time with the machine in the comfort
of my own home, but these are the first impressions I have
on it. Though comic fans would probably notice the Spider-Man
font Sony uses to label the PLAYSTATION 3 and add that to
the plus side, unfortunately, I’m not so impressed.
I kid
you not, for something that costs such a pretty penny the
machine still sold like hotcakes, and I feel for the thousands
across Japan who waited in line one day in advance to get
one. Sony kept a strict rule of only one per customer. Local
wanderers got paid about 3000 yen ($30) to stand in line
so that one guy could get two units and sell the second
on eBay.
Most
shocking, Sony still decided to only sell 100,000 units
to its biggest market. Would that be a marketing ploy to
ensure that it would definitely have a (SOLD OUT OPENING
DAY) title in its portfolio? The big chain stores got a
hefty load of units in stock, and more local stores probably
no more than ten or twenty per location.
Foreseeably
the US market will be less willing to part with over $600
for a game console (and Blu-Ray machine) at this early stage.
Yet for its release, the US will apparently get 400,000
units. And Japan will remain sold out until March. For me,
that's a good thing because chances are that I will be requiring
a US version to play Region 1 DVDs eventually anyway.
So as
with the PSP, having the PS3 now will bring nothing much
to the table but bragging rights. But it's hard to boast
cool graphics when honestly the consumer will only get a
handful of games in the next year that will actually utilize
the fancy PS3 hardware.
The
PSP has been all but forgotten in my household because like
the PS long waiting times for games to load isn’t
my thing in a handheld, let alone this monstrous game platform.
The PS3 will require its engine to sift through 80 gigs
of information to load up. The PSP did make some nice mods,
but not enough to keep me hooked. It's understandable, perhaps,
to put regional coding for movies, but doing it for games
is just annoying.
Nintendo's
Wii will most likely have this problem as well, but at least
their device is not this expensive. I know I won’t
be buying two versions for the Japanese games, and a whole
new one for US games. (Full disclosure: Mish'al appears
in the initial Wii promo video)
Once
I took a look at the user menu of the PS3, I saw the layout
of the PSP, and I really thought that was cool. It has some
uniformity to it, but the machine is big and bulky, promising
to be full of cool features that we will not use for a long
while. The controller is classic Playstation; that hasn’t
changed in design. With all the changes, it's good to give
us a nice familiarity to the gaming experience.
The
music playing function has a nice thumbnail function to
easily mark album covers for sifting through the menu; the
movie-playing menu works similarly. The system is also equipped
with memory stick slots besides the 20 or 60GB of embedded
hard drive, and its ability to hook up to the Internet does
in fact make for a promising future.
You
can install a second OS, look at photos, watch DVDs and
update the system to be able to chat with people in Japan
(since it is the only place where this machine is available).
With Blu-Ray, you get what seems to be a nice feature. But
anyone remember the last time you decided to watch a movie
on your PSP with that UMD format?
Again,
this is all about bragging rights, and who has got the biggest
hardware to show off. As far as gaming is concerned, I am
still satisfied with the PS2, and both God of War
and Burnout Revenge.
Back
to that gaming: the graphics are nice, but playability has
to be a huge factor in it. Wii has a very good chance of
seriously damaging Playstation's market share if its games
and playability can keep up with the innovations and great
games it has created for the DS portable system. The 360
is already doing quite well in the US market. So Sony really
has an uphill battle with the PS3, and people know it because
of the blemishes the company has had to deal with this year,
from recalling exploding batteries to pushing back the release
date of the PS3 itself.
The
games I played (and watched others play with a much better
success rate than I) looked pretty remarkable and sweet.
The controller looks the same but has a wireless feature
that some games will be able to utilize, but most likely
not as much as the Wii will focus on this feature.
I mentioned
before that the menu resembles the PSP and is slick looking
as Sony has been adapting a universal icon look and feel
to all its electronic devices including Sony flatscreen
TVs. Yet overall, I do not see anyone surfing the web, buying
a whole new Blu-Ray movie collection or chatting it up with
buddies on this machine. It is after all supposed to be
a game machine, and they are trying to make it an all in
one. If someone has lived this long without a computer,
instant messenger or even a Radio Shack in town, it might
be a nice start. But most of the adopters already have these
things.
So that’s
my two cents on the PS3. Hopefully it will save you some
bucks. You can wait for a year or so when this puppy will,
as the PSP has, refined itself into a much more worthwhile
device for the money we have to shell out for it.
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