I have been very keen to get some positive return on investment out of my PS3. I paid a good chunk for this hunk of black plastic and circuit boards, about $50 more than retail, plus the additional cost of shipping. I paid this on order to get one in the launch window and not have to stand in line or risk getting mugged on my way out to the parking lost. When the PS2 came out, there was a store stock shortage as well, but I was in the Navy and spending time underway, so waiting for one to be available in the stores was not a big deal. It took about 6 months for that inventory shortage to clear up, and I still had to buy a bundle to get my hands on a PS2. But I actually saved money on that purchase. And I got a ton of use out of my PS2. I took it with me on a 6-month deployment, racking up a good amount of game time, especially in Madden 201 (getting through about 10 seasons of rewarding franchise play), Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and Tekken Tag Tournament.

To get a PS3, I had to go the eBay route. $50 is not small change, but it was also better than the price gouging that some others took. I bided my time until the Thanksgiving holiday, when units were not moving very fast on eBay, and the bottom was just starting to drop out of the extravagant overages that some sellers had been able to get away with. Hawking sales between 2 and 3 AM landed me a unit that went for the aforementioned $50 over retail, and I had to pay for the shipping. No biggie.

Of course, since going through that effort, I have only 12 games to play on my PS3, 4 of which are actually PS2 titles, and one of which I have finished (Resistance: Fall of Man) and only keep around for multiplayer. Of the remaining 7, only three of those were purchased outside the launch window: Battlefield - Bad Company, Ninja Gaiden: Sigma, and Far Cry 2. So the reality is that, in the two years since I purchased the PS3 on eBay, I have really only bought 3 new games since introducing the unit into the 'WERKZ. I have hardly spent any time in the campaign modes of most of my PS3 games. The two notable exceptions are Need for Speed: Carbon and Fight Night: Round 3, two EA games that actually have highly addictive campaigns.

The good thing is that I am pretty comfortable in my belief that the PS3 will be the flagship console for Sony for another 3 years. They have sunk so much into bringing this hardware to a competitive place in the market that they are not about to abandon it for the next unit in the evolutionary console cycle. And, truth be told, the next Microsoft hardware set is likely to just render hardware that is relatively on par with the PS3, rather than drastically surpassing it.

The primary issue that continues to hamper the PS3 is the lack of community that surrounds almost every aspect of the 360. This is not entirely the fault of Sony, at least I do not think so. 2 years since taking ownership of the console, I think the number of people on my friends list is around 7, 3 of whom I actually know or work with. In sharp contrast, in the 3 years that I have owned my 360, I have had to typically go in and prune my Friends List in order to let new people on. I am not sure that I know how or why this phenomenon exists, I just know that whenever I want to hit Xbox Live, or the web, or the Xbox Live website, I am greeted with a host of options to communicate and share ideas, thoughts, and differences of opinion with other 360 gamers. When I want to do this with PS3 owners, it seems to be a little more difficult.

I have not seen a large population of clans who have a strong PSN presence. Admittedly, I am not even a member of the PS Forums, a deficiency that I will remedy this weekend in order to gather further impressions on the contrast between the communities that surround these two platforms. Still, at the end of the day, it is the impact that the community has on the in-game experience that is the key factor in determining how much ROI I am getting out of the PS3.

What hampers the PS3 more than anything is the lack of strong voice implementations in the library of games that I have. I have tried to get into Need for Speed: Carbon online. But hardly anyone ever has a mike. When they do have a mic, comms have been spotty at best. When you cannot talk to the people you are racing with, it makes it hard for the game to be immersive. You cannot compliment them or receive compliments on cars' customization, which is one of the big immersion tickets that NFS: Carbon features. There is less of an allure to pimping out your ride if you cannot hear anyone say anything about it.

I have also tried to pour myself into Resistance: Fall of Man. In R:FoM, you have to click the left analog stick in order to talk, a completely idiotic mechanic that I have railed against in many writings. The surface result is that most gamers will not make the effort, because pressing down on the same control surface they are using for forward/backward movement and strafing is not something most highly competitive gamers want to sacrifice. The deeper result is that playing a round of R:FoM is very akin to playing a shooter on the PC, most of which do not come with integrated voice support, so most people play online with no voice comms. So even when you are enjoying the online experience, you cannot communicate any thoughts to anyone you are playing with.

When I am presented with the deeply community-based experiences available in Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Forza Motorsport 2, Project Gotham Racing 3 and 4, and GRiD on the 360, it gets hard to justify spending time on the PSN at the opportunity cost of being on XBL.

I had thought that the title that was going to rescue my PS3 was going to be Battlefield: Bad Company. There are a lot of things that BBC does well, and improves upon, but at the end of the day, it is just a revamped Battlefield: 2 Modern Combat. It took me a few rounds to see through the veneer of the newer, brighter color palette in use, but the GUI is largely unchanged. You start each multiplayer spawn session by selecting your **** and then your spawn point, depending on which ones are under your control and where your squad-mates are. You have a host of vehicles to drive, including combat choppers, several open wheeled-ground vehicles as well as closed-wheel (Humvees), APCs, and Tanks. There is not shortage of ways to get around.

That is, to get around on the map in-game. Getting around in the GUI is still a convoluted effort that is frustrating for such a simple thing as gaming online. It is difficult to tell whether or not this is driven by EA DICE, a developer that I am not a fan of where it comes to design choices, or something driven by the PS3's innate GUI tendencies. Inviting a friend to a game is nowhere near as simplified as it is in the 360 environment, which is always integrated into the 360's Dashboard. You are taken to an empty list of people you can invite, then you need to go into your XMB interface for your PS3 (the equivalent of the 360's Dashboard), and then check-mark the people in your PS3 friend's list to invite, then click the OK button. But there is no confirmation like you get on the 360 that the invite has gone out. You are then brought back to the BBC in-game invite list, which should now be populated with the names you checked off in the XMB. But you have no indication that they are accepting the invite or what they are doing at all. It is also unclear as to whether or not you are supposed to wait in the pop-up menu or if you can go back to the game-lobby configuration screen to set up the game you want to start. It just should not be that hard and it should be more intuitive.

In-game, as I played another session this morning, the lack of voice persistently detracts from the game experience. I checked into a game of Conquest, which is a standard attack and defend gaming profile. There are a series of gold crates that one team has to defend, 2 at a time, while the offensive team attempts to penetrate the defensive line, arm charges on the crates, and wait for the charge to detonate. Alternatively, the offensive team can destroy the crates by pumping rounds of various types of conventional ammunition into the crates until they are destroyed. Game play is pretty neat and is, at the basic level, very enjoyable. But the team I was on got progressively worse as each round dragged on. While on defense, it seemed like only a couple of us detached from our on-going efforts to get back to our crates when we received notification that charges had been planted on them. Most of the team was camped out in sniper positions waiting for the enemy to penetrate our lines. At one point, I sat and watched a guy pump an RPG round into one of our crates and destroyed it when a charge was planted, instead of leaving his comfy protected spot and moving down to the crate to disarm the charge and take out the enemy camped around the crate.

While embarked in an armored vehicle with another guy, I was on one of the anti-personnel mounts. I spotted a tank moving in on our flank, but because voice chat is broken in BBC the exact same way it is broken in the 360 version of Battlefield 2, I was not able to call out the enemy tank moving in on our right. The tank driver had the mount trained in the opposite direction, focused in on peppering enemy ground troops with the main battery. Needless to say, my anti-personnel rounds did little to concern the enemy tank and we were promptly dispatched. Similar events occur routinely when in a helo and other vehicles. I will say that some of my frustration is alleviated by not wearing my headset. Giving up on voice entirely means that at least my ears are not sweating inside the ear-cups listening to nothing, and so at least I am more comfortable while I am wishing I was in a 360 game with decent voice comms. I will not lay all of this blame on the PS3, as EA DICE games, and EA games in general, have proven to be buggy with regards to voice comms in just about every console experience I have encountered in this generation.

I intend to persevere with my effort to wrench some decent ROI out of the PS3. I will say that my experience with it as a Blu-Ray player has been excellent. I have recently used it to watch Dreamgirls, The Brothers Grimm (both from NetFlix), and Live Free or Die Hard (from my personal Blu-Ray collection), and am chomping at the bit to finally get around to watching Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. But of course, I did not buy the PS3 to use explicitly as a Blu-Ray player. This is a feature that was foisted on me and other consumers by Sony. I will say that at this point I have garnered more ROI out of the PS3s as a Blu-Ray player then as a gaming platform. While I am not pleased with that fact, at least it is some consolation. Oh, well, the journey continues. Until next time, take care and game on.
- Vr/Gull.>>