Not from me. A mate (let’s call him Barnetus Comedius or Tonsorius Farsicus) bought a Playstation 3 for about HK$7000.
Right, here’s the initial impressions of the PS3…
It’s pretty easy to setup with some neat touches, i.e. when you start for the first time it shows you the PS1 starting logo. The first choice you have is the system language so everything is very easy.
The menu structure is just like the PSP so fairly easy to use. You can stick in a USB keyboard and mouse and it just works, so much better than faffing around with a controller to enter a wep key or any user details! Built in wireless networking is great, just config it up, dead easy. I had to download the firmware upgrade which took about half an hour before I could connect to anything though.
Luckily I’d read on the internets that you have to start up the first time with the composite cables, then go to display settings and choose HDMI. Otherwise it doesn’t output through HDMI. Oh, the sound is separate, so you can either have the sound coming from the HDMI cable or from an optical output or from the normal red/white composite crap.
Once I got Shaky’s monster cable hooked up - which fits fine in both the PS3 and my TV - it autodetects the best resolution supported by your screen. Mine came out as 720p and looked fine. Which is really weird as the XBox360 would only work at 1080i, at 720p the screen was blank. I can’t imagine component vs HDMI would make that much difference? If it does then that’s a bit annoying from MS - making me think my tv was crap all this time 
I can’t setup a Playstation Network account yet unfortunately… The only country/language combination you can choose is Japan/Japanese so there’s not much point as I couldn’t read anything 
I tried a blu-ray disk first, the original Terminator. I think the resolution was too high! The opening scenes in 2029 with the machines crushing skulls and stuff was just too obviously a model. I tried House of Flying Daggers next, that looks amazing. The only problem I have is the sound. Blu-Ray outputs uncompresed PCM. I need to do some internet research on that as my amp has no clue what it is. Admitedly the amp is about 7 years old and it still outputs the sound but just as Dolby Pro Logic…
I’d heard 188 Wanchai Road was selling the games so had a jaunt down there after work. They have all 4 or 5 current games but they look to be totally in Japanese. The boxes have ‘For Sale in Japan’ only written on them, all the instructions are in Japanese, and the shop dudes were sure they were all in Japanese, etc. I figured of the ones available Ridge Racer would be the easiest to play in a different language. How hard can it be to figure out how to drive a car? It turns out that it’s all in English. I have no idea how/why… I guess blu-ray offers such high capacities that they can include multi-language support which will base the game on the settings of the console - if they do then that’s a great idea as they only need one version of the game for a worldwide audience. So, really happy with that but gutted I didn’t get Resistance: Fall of Man if that’s English as well!
Ridge Racer has better graphics than Project Gotham Racing 3. Fact. The only problem is that you’re racing through made up places, not central London and all. It’s no Gran Turismo but it looks good and plays pretty well. No twisty sixaxis controller action though. Generally happy with. It’s pretty good as a launch title, shows of some graphics capabilities, never seems to slow down but it is a bit easy.
There’s lots of stuff on the internets from people - who’ve never played the console - figuring that, hmm, if you get 50Gb on a bluray disk and the max transfer speed is x, then it will take 20 minutes to install a game. Eh? I didn’t notice any performance problems with loading a game. You don’t have to install anything (although that is an option in the menu for RidgeRacer) and it plays just fine off the bluray disk. Between tracks it loads in the next one but it takes maybe 4 or 5 seconds max.
At first you have the controller wired up to the console to charge but the cable is comedy short. It’s like 3-4 feet so it’s really tough to play while it’s plugged in.
What else… In the box you get a network cable, composite cables and power supply. No remote control! That’s stupid.
Er, 4 USB sockets on the front - wack in a keyboard, mouse, charging a controller, etc. Oh, slots to take compact flash cards, etc but haven’t tried those.
Oh, it’s almost completely silent. It’s really amazing how quiet it is. So you can watch movies without the console grinding away in the background. My Xbox360 sounds like a generator in the background when you hit a quiet point in games, you can barely tell if the PS3 is on or not.
I didn’t get a chance to try connecting to my PSP yet. They are going to allow you to do things like download PS1 games onto the PS3 and send them to the PSP to play through an emulator. Not sure why but it’s pretty cool…
Apparently it plays SACD’s as well, so will probably pick up one today to check out - along with Resistance: Fall of Man if it’s in English as well…
Resistance: Fall of Man. Japanese version comes entirely in English if you have the system language set that way. Graphically it’s not as good as GOW on the 360. It actually reminds me a bit of COD2 on the 360. One things that does stand out is the speed. The frame rate never drops and it’s incredibly smooth - GOW for me would often slow right down when a lot was going on. The weapons are pretty cool though, much more imaginative than GOW or COD. I’ve only just started playing but the 2nd gun you find is like the one from the Fifth Element - the one that Gary Oldman was selling to the aliens. You shoot a tag at someone and if you hit them you can aim the gun anywhere and the bullets find their way to the target. Did I mention how incredibly smooth it plays? That’s something that really stands out…
It’s nails though. Unlike COD or GOW you actually have a health meter. When that reaches zero your’re dead. Think about how many times you get shot in the other games and take cover until you recover - you can’t do that here. I haven’t been able to find any health packs or anything like that so there must be some way of recovering health but the instructions are all in Japanese so I find myself dying an awful lot!
SACD - the console recognises the disk no problem but when I hit play (circle button) I get a message saying it can’t play through the current audio connection (optical). Huh? Surely I don’t need to use composite because that would be crap and my amp doesn’t have HDMI inputs. That sucks. I wonder if this is some stupid copy protection rubbish - I bought the sacd but I can’t play it on my own hardware. Or it could be because my amp is waay too old. The Japanese manual no doubt holds the secret…
The memory card slots work as expected but I don’t know when I’ll ever use them. You stick in a CF card, little Sony thing MemoryStick Pro or whatever. You can’t view raw pictures though, so I couldn’t see any of my photos. Video that I’d encoded for the PSP showed up fine from the MemoryStick but video you’ve encoded for the PSP looks awful on a 720p diplay.
Tried connecting to the PSP but need firmware 3.0 on the PSP which isn’t out yet.
For information on region encoding, language support in games, etc, check out play-asia.com
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