First thing's first: send in questions for the podcast - mailbag AT trigames DOT net. We may be recording tomorrow at 3 or 4, though if that fails, it's our usual schedule of 11:30am on Sunday.

Now, on to the topic. I purchased a Playstation 3 off of eBay - a 20GB model - for $350 before shipping, which came with Need for Speed Carbon (which I promptly sold), Talladega Nights on Blu-Ray, and Resistance: Fall of Man along with a Dual Shock 2, a Dual Shock adapter dongle and a memory card adapter dongle. Though $350 may seem a bit much for a used unit without a SIXAXIS controller, I mainly got it because it was - at the time - the cheapest way to ensure backwards compatibility. After the 80GB and the rumored 40GB take over, there would be no way I'd get pure Emotion Engine Ecstasy.

But there was another thing looming: the new family TV. My folks decided 23" tube TVs with composite inputs as its highest-tech feature was way old news, and splurged for a 52" Bravia XBR4. So sitting in our living room right now is the reason I'm now happy that I own a Playstation 3.

Thanks to monoprice.com, I got an HDMI cable for $7. (Well, I got 3 cables for about $20 after shipping so I wouldn't have to pay a lot of shipping for a single cable, but whatever.) Since my Xbox 360 doesn't have HDMI, and I wanted to keep it in my rooms to play my videogames in private anyway (nope, I don't play my PS3 much at all...), the Playstation 3 will become the new media center for the house. It's time to enter the world of Blu-Ray... but first, DVDs. Plenty of "last-gen" discs in that old shelf there, and they will not go to waste. Thanks to the firmware update a few months ago, Playstation 3's allowed users to upscale DVDs to 1080p - something that was keeping me from considering the console for upscaling purposes at first. I just tried out Season 5 of 24, and it looks fantastic. Not Blu-Ray quality, but good enough that you have to squint to tell. The Matrix: Reloaded? Not so much... it showed a little bit of blur. I guess the transfer wasn't that good. But Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Darth Vader Guys looks very, very pretty.

Switch back to my non-HD cable box, and... well... let's just say that Playstation 3 > my cable box.