Tag: gaming

After posting on the PS3 hardware and software it’s time to look at the games. Certainly the most important part of any console release is the quality of the games. The most touted games on release are Motorstorm and Resistance:Fall of Man. How do they shape up?

Motorstorm
Being the flagship PS3 title, Motorstorm has a lot to live up to. The game had so much pre-release hype and false starts (rendered E3 demo’s etc) and then a release in Japan minus the online component – how would it fair?

Motorstorm is in some ways the perfect release title. Loud music, high impact visuals and massive, at times bewildering arena’s to race in. You can’t fail to be impressed in that first half hour. For mates popping round and demo pods it’s a great game. After that half hour though is pretty disappointing. You realise that there isn’t much variety to the music and it soon repeats. You also realise you can’t change it to any of your own music. The graphics still impress but there’s a sameness about everything. Away from the wow stuff though and it’s just repetition. Offline is just select a bike, truck etc and race on one of the eight tracks. Yep – no longer arena’s. There isn’t that many routes and there’s usually the one route for your particular vehicle. The load times are also very long – some of the worst I’ve seen in recent years. It gets very annoying that selecting a vehicle takes such a long time, never mind the actual track loading.

Online is at times impressive (lag free 12 player racing) but I reckon at least a third of my online games have not started, crashed out or been buggy in such a way to ruin the race. One of the other shortfalls is the lack of interaction. For all you know your racing against AI with the PS3 generating random gamertags to display – it is totally lacking in speech and atmosphere. While it does support speech hardly anyone has a headset and the game will also switch off speech to protect lag. Unlike offline, most online games also have catch up disabled. Quite a lot of the games I’ve raced sees one person break away from the pack and he will ultimately win the race as the pack fight each other while he sails off into the distance. Like the real F1 most online races are decided within the first few corners.

Ultimately if you get a PS3 you should get Motorstorm as it does initially impress – just don’t expect that feeling to last.
Continue reading “PS3 – The Games”

The PS3 is potentially the most capable console ever released. However if the software isn’t up to driving it then it’s all a bit pointless. I’ll cover the main user interface and also the media playback and networking capabilities of the PS3 in this post. I’ve already covered my thoughts on the PS3 hardware which just leaves the games to cover in a future post.

Cross Media Bar
The Cross Media Bar (XMB) is Sony’s standard GUI in a lot of their products – PSP, high end Bravia’s and now the PS3. It’s very easy to use and provides quick access to stored content, games and online features. I prefer this to the 360 blade’s which while easy to use can take a lot of button presses to reach your content or fire up a quick game. While the XMB is great, whats not so great is that you can’t access it while in game or watching a movie. Pressing the PS home button allows you to return to the XMB, not access it.

From the XMB you can reach the following functions.

User
This menu control user access. You can create multiple users and also apply parental controls to the users to give finer control over kids accessing adult material. I’ve actually created three users with each user accessing a different store (each store has different content). Each user can also have a different network ID and friends list.

Photo’s
Photo Album view renders the pictures in 3d with hand written time stamps which is a really creative way of showing photo’s. You can also use standard method of viewing, rotating and zooming of images and you can also change the sort order of the photo’s.

The background to the GUI changes colour depending on the month and the time of day. While this is nice it would have been better to give users the chance to pick their own background. The PSP was initially the same until a firmware update allowed the user to pick their own backgrounds.

Music
You can playback MP3’s and AAC files. You get a nice visualizer while playing although sometimes there were some playback issues with files, especially if you crank the volume up. If I up the volume via the amp the quality is fine but if I up the volume via the PS3 the sound degrades. Annoyingly you cannot select any locally stored music to be played in game, a feature the 360 has had since day one. I also found it a bit unituitive when selecting tracks, albums and genres and unlike the 360 you cannot select music stored on pc’s or mac’s. You can only play cotnent stored locally or plugged in at the time via a USB drive.
Continue reading “PS3 – The Software”

Since it’s announcement in 2005 the PS3 has always had a rough ride. It’s too big, it’s too expensive, it’s too late. I’ll start of my thoughts on the PS3 by first looking at the hardware. I’ll then follow up with a post on the software and operating system and finally the games. Phew.

The first thing that strikes you is how shiny the PS3 is. Not just the little silver sections but the whole thing – piano black shiny that is a magnet for dust and fingerprints. Then you notice that there is no ugly power brick that sits out with the console. Everything is contained within the not inconsiderable PS3 case and while the case is bigger than the 360 it’s not overly so as first touted by the media. The design also hides it’s size well in my eyes and looks pretty good. If you add the 360 power brick to the 360 then it’s probably a bit bigger than the PS3. Still, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some people think it’s butt ugly. I guess it’s one of these love or hate designs.

Annoyingly even though Sony touted the PS3 as ‘true HD’ it doesn’t come with an HDMI cable which is a bit cheap after paying £425. With everything connected up you then plugin the sixaxis controller via the charge cable. For me this is another issue as the cable is really small at only 3ft. While a longer one can be purchased (Maplin sorted me out) it’s another little bit of cost cutting although the 360 didn’t come with any recharging capability – the plug and play kit was a separate purchase so it’s a small gripe really.

Once you switch on the PS3 it will auto detect video settings and then you are in the PS3 front end. One of the more lauded features of the PS3 is 1080p playback. However many launch games do not support 1080p and there are still precious few users who have access to a 1080p screen. If you’ve used a PSP then the interface will be instantly familiar although thats for another post. One of the problems with the 360 is the noise it makes and I was expecting the PS3 to be worse as it uses more power. Surprisingly it’s pretty quiet. After some play it does increase slightly but no where near the noise of the 360 which is down to fan and disk activity. It does generate slightly more heat but nothing thats too alarming if you’ve felt the back of a PC before. It’s quietness is a real strong point and is ideal for movie and music playback unlike the 360.

Another sleek feature is the touch sensitive power and eject buttons. While it’s a gimmick it works really well and adds to the overall finish of the hardware. Disks are loaded via a slot loading mechanism which works like a mac. Put the disk in half way and it’s pulled in by the PS3. The disk when loaded is fairly quiet, impressively quiet compared to the 360. The disks are one of the more contentious features of the PS3. The PS3 is a Blu-Ray player and all games will come on Blu-Ray disks too. This feature undoubtedly added to the delay and cost of the PS3 and only time will tell whether it was worth the wait.
Continue reading “PS3 – The Hardware”