Game Tour
I needed a Playstation 3 rant at some point. Well my friends here it is! Let us open up with a video:
God I love modern technology. Welcome to my unofficial tour of the Playstation 3. I'm gonna give a quick snapshot of each of the features and hopefully educate more folks on the offerings of the system. It ain't your average game machine. I will also offer my various criticisms and praises throughout. Enjoy!
THE XMB
When you first boot up your PS3, you will see the Xross Media Bar with plenty options. They include: Users, Settings, Photo, Music, Video, Game, Network, and Friends.
THE BASIC STUFF
Users, Settings, and Friends are pretty self explanatory. You can create a profile, sign on to the network, video/audio/text message friends, and fix your settings. It's all really sleek and what not. Still, nothing to rave about. That's unless you find syncing your blue tooth headset sexy. To each man his own. One cool thing I should mention is the ability to set up options to stream content from your computer to the ps3. So if you cannot fit all your music on the massive hard drive (for whatever reason), you can always stream content (and this includes music, pictures, and videos)
PHOTO
You can upload any type of image file and sort the pictures by year, month, or all. There are very snazzy slide show modes. One neat one throws around Polaroid snapshots of your pictures and dates them. It all looks pretty amazing. And you can do this while listening to music... speaking of which...
MUSIC
Upload any CD or audio file and save it on the massive hard drive. Did I mention you can upgrade your hard drive with any working computer hard drive. Pimp. You can sort by album, artist, genre, or all. You can upload images for your album to create a nice unified look. There is also a decent visualizer. Still, there could be more visualizer options, and a playlist option would be nice. Fortunately Sony does do frequent updates, so this is a possibility in the future.
VIDEO
Play DVD's, Blu Ray DVD's, and Mpeg 4 vids from your comp. Unfortunately, there are not many formats supported yet, so conversion is the only way to get videos up. Still, upscaled DVD's look real nice on HDTV's, and Blu Rays not only benefit from the higher definition, but extra storage space, making the HD DVD look like yesterday's news.
NETWORK
And now we begin the truly impressive portion. The Network!
The Playstation Store
PSN or Playstation Network is where all the cool content comes in. With updates every Thursday you get to download free demos, game/movie/blu-ray trailers, and full on games. The interface is simple enough, but could benefit from the sleek XMB design. Downloads don't take too long, and there is always the option to download in the background if the file is too big.
The biggest issue is that PSN content is severely lacking. The competitors are bringing out music videos, movies, and other content. Granted, the PSN is just finding its space in the Online world. Still it doesn't justify lack of game demos. Still, there is some amazing stuff when it comes to games on PSN. For example:
Internet Browser
By hooking up a a USB/blue tooth mouse and keyboard, navigating the browser is a piece of pie. You can always use the controller, which works nicely as well. With a unique and visually pleasing tab system, the browser doesn't make any leaps and bounds, but it's simple enough. You can easily watch any youtube videos, though things that involve flash players, quicktime, or windows media player, not so much. Like I said, it's useful to check email and watch "Dick in a box", but that's about it.
Folding@Home
If you want to truly impress your friends, tell them your PS3's curing cancer. Due to PS3 awesome computational skillz, those University students decided to use it as the center for their research in figuring out ways to cure things like Alzheimer's and what not. It would take a n average computer much longer to compute, and with all the PS3's in the world working together, we are getting to solution faster. And to save the world, it's completely optional.
Remote Play
If you have a PSP, boy are in for some amazing news. You know that crappy PSP browser, that's let's you do about... nothing, because the flash memory is too small? Want to save the world on the go? Want access to your PS3 music library since you can't fit it all in that small 4gb card? Want to show off the PSN games you downloaded (can't play them, but whatev right)? Well, with an internet connection, a PSP, and a PS3 in remote play mode, you can do all this. You can access your PS3's web browser. You can play music, watch pictures, and play videos from your PS3. You can access PSN and download demos for later. You can Fold@Home. And all this, from anywhere in the world. That is amazing.
EDIT: One more update. Very recently it was discovered that Lair is playable via Remote Play. Now while this is not very good news for lair since you're missing out on six buttons, it does make for a very exciting possibility... I mean, you can take PS3 games to go!
GAMES
So you have seen the 07 games preview above. Undoubtedly amazing stuff. The PS3 has no games. Clearly folks are blind. But what makes this better is the 2008 lineup. It includes the highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, and Little Big Planet. In the games section you can play PS3 games, PS2 games, PS1 games, Ps1 games downloaded from the store, games downloaded from the store, and demos. PSN games downloaded stay on your hard drive, and you can always delete them and download them again (up to 5 times... meaning you can also share PSN games).
THE END
So that's the quick tour of the PS3. One thing people are looking forward to is the Firmware update 2.0. Speculation is that it will allow in game XMB access and many other cool things. Another big thing people are looking forward to is home. You create your virtual self that navigates a pretty nice 3D environment and chat, meet up with gamers, and show off your virtual achievements. You can invite people over to your apartment to listen to music, and watch videos. Developers could have their trailers shown off in public spaces, or hold interviews with select viewers. It's a cool concept, but no one really knows what it'll be like until it hits this October. So that's it for now.
Hopefully next time, I'll decide what's appropriate to reveal for my story. It's well on it's way. The first chapter was titled today, and it's a very exciting intro to the book. In other news, Persona 3 is a great PS2 title that you should definitely check out if you're a gamer. Until next time, this was ACE (A Creative Endeavor)
God I love modern technology. Welcome to my unofficial tour of the Playstation 3. I'm gonna give a quick snapshot of each of the features and hopefully educate more folks on the offerings of the system. It ain't your average game machine. I will also offer my various criticisms and praises throughout. Enjoy!
THE XMB
When you first boot up your PS3, you will see the Xross Media Bar with plenty options. They include: Users, Settings, Photo, Music, Video, Game, Network, and Friends.
THE BASIC STUFF
Users, Settings, and Friends are pretty self explanatory. You can create a profile, sign on to the network, video/audio/text message friends, and fix your settings. It's all really sleek and what not. Still, nothing to rave about. That's unless you find syncing your blue tooth headset sexy. To each man his own. One cool thing I should mention is the ability to set up options to stream content from your computer to the ps3. So if you cannot fit all your music on the massive hard drive (for whatever reason), you can always stream content (and this includes music, pictures, and videos)
PHOTO
You can upload any type of image file and sort the pictures by year, month, or all. There are very snazzy slide show modes. One neat one throws around Polaroid snapshots of your pictures and dates them. It all looks pretty amazing. And you can do this while listening to music... speaking of which...
MUSIC
Upload any CD or audio file and save it on the massive hard drive. Did I mention you can upgrade your hard drive with any working computer hard drive. Pimp. You can sort by album, artist, genre, or all. You can upload images for your album to create a nice unified look. There is also a decent visualizer. Still, there could be more visualizer options, and a playlist option would be nice. Fortunately Sony does do frequent updates, so this is a possibility in the future.
VIDEO
Play DVD's, Blu Ray DVD's, and Mpeg 4 vids from your comp. Unfortunately, there are not many formats supported yet, so conversion is the only way to get videos up. Still, upscaled DVD's look real nice on HDTV's, and Blu Rays not only benefit from the higher definition, but extra storage space, making the HD DVD look like yesterday's news.
NETWORK
And now we begin the truly impressive portion. The Network!
The Playstation Store
PSN or Playstation Network is where all the cool content comes in. With updates every Thursday you get to download free demos, game/movie/blu-ray trailers, and full on games. The interface is simple enough, but could benefit from the sleek XMB design. Downloads don't take too long, and there is always the option to download in the background if the file is too big.
The biggest issue is that PSN content is severely lacking. The competitors are bringing out music videos, movies, and other content. Granted, the PSN is just finding its space in the Online world. Still it doesn't justify lack of game demos. Still, there is some amazing stuff when it comes to games on PSN. For example:
Internet Browser
By hooking up a a USB/blue tooth mouse and keyboard, navigating the browser is a piece of pie. You can always use the controller, which works nicely as well. With a unique and visually pleasing tab system, the browser doesn't make any leaps and bounds, but it's simple enough. You can easily watch any youtube videos, though things that involve flash players, quicktime, or windows media player, not so much. Like I said, it's useful to check email and watch "Dick in a box", but that's about it.
Folding@Home
If you want to truly impress your friends, tell them your PS3's curing cancer. Due to PS3 awesome computational skillz, those University students decided to use it as the center for their research in figuring out ways to cure things like Alzheimer's and what not. It would take a n average computer much longer to compute, and with all the PS3's in the world working together, we are getting to solution faster. And to save the world, it's completely optional.
Remote Play
If you have a PSP, boy are in for some amazing news. You know that crappy PSP browser, that's let's you do about... nothing, because the flash memory is too small? Want to save the world on the go? Want access to your PS3 music library since you can't fit it all in that small 4gb card? Want to show off the PSN games you downloaded (can't play them, but whatev right)? Well, with an internet connection, a PSP, and a PS3 in remote play mode, you can do all this. You can access your PS3's web browser. You can play music, watch pictures, and play videos from your PS3. You can access PSN and download demos for later. You can Fold@Home. And all this, from anywhere in the world. That is amazing.
EDIT: One more update. Very recently it was discovered that Lair is playable via Remote Play. Now while this is not very good news for lair since you're missing out on six buttons, it does make for a very exciting possibility... I mean, you can take PS3 games to go!
GAMES
So you have seen the 07 games preview above. Undoubtedly amazing stuff. The PS3 has no games. Clearly folks are blind. But what makes this better is the 2008 lineup. It includes the highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, and Little Big Planet. In the games section you can play PS3 games, PS2 games, PS1 games, Ps1 games downloaded from the store, games downloaded from the store, and demos. PSN games downloaded stay on your hard drive, and you can always delete them and download them again (up to 5 times... meaning you can also share PSN games).
THE END
So that's the quick tour of the PS3. One thing people are looking forward to is the Firmware update 2.0. Speculation is that it will allow in game XMB access and many other cool things. Another big thing people are looking forward to is home. You create your virtual self that navigates a pretty nice 3D environment and chat, meet up with gamers, and show off your virtual achievements. You can invite people over to your apartment to listen to music, and watch videos. Developers could have their trailers shown off in public spaces, or hold interviews with select viewers. It's a cool concept, but no one really knows what it'll be like until it hits this October. So that's it for now.
Hopefully next time, I'll decide what's appropriate to reveal for my story. It's well on it's way. The first chapter was titled today, and it's a very exciting intro to the book. In other news, Persona 3 is a great PS2 title that you should definitely check out if you're a gamer. Until next time, this was ACE (A Creative Endeavor)
posted by Aceun at
1:30 AM
|
0 comments
