threevue

Well people, after a bit of a saga, my PS3 arrived today thanks to Amazon.co.uk. You see, initially I bought one from Play.com, though despite the fact I’ve been ordering from them for years with the same card, they suddenly decided that they had a problem with my card details. Rather than sort it out, I cancelled the order, and bought one from Amazon instead.

It’s probably just as well that I did too; for an extra £8 I got an HDMI cable (which I completely forgot about when I ordered from Play) and next-day delivery – although technically it turned out to be 48hr delivery on account of all the snow we’ve had. Not that I mind though; at least it arrived in time for Christmas.

Although I haven’t had a great deal of time with it yet, I have had enough time to set up the system, create a Playstation Store account and PSN ID (if anyone wants to hit me up, my PSN ID is blacktail9mm), play around with some of the systems features, download some demos and PSN games (can you say PixelJunk Shooter?) and get some game time in on Uncharted 2.

To hear my thoughts on the system so far, click the link below:

In the time I’ve spent with the console, I have to admit that I’m pretty impressed; the XMB is a far slicker and more grown-up affair than the Xbox’s NXE, and I’m impressed that even little things like typing messages seem much easier. I also like the way that the prices in the PSN store are all in real money so you know exactly how much you’re spending, and also that the PSN store accepts my debit card; on Xbox I have to resort to buying points cards to top up my account (which can be a real pain at times), just because I don’t have one of the two credit cards they support.

Whilst I was testing out some of the other features available on the PS3, I noticed that the BBC’s iPlayer (video on-demand) service is available, and tried this out briefly. Whilst the picture quality was a little underwhelming, and didn’t seem to be running at a super-high frame-rate, the player didn’t pause, jump, or re-buffer once, which means it’s definitely a feature I’ll be checking out in more depth later.

As far as games go, I have to admit that the time I’ve spent with Uncharted 2 has left me a little underwhelmed, though this is probably due to the insanely high expectations I had for the game. Also, in the interest of being fair, I’m only a couple of levels in, so there’s still plenty of time left for the game to blow me away.

All in all though, I’m pretty happy with my new purchase, and I’m looking forward to catching up on some of the exclusive games that I’ve missed so far, like MGS4, and InFamous, which I plan on checking out over the coming months.