I Get My Dirty Hands-On the PS3

By James Munn | November 2, 2006

I got to spend some quality time with the PS3 during Sony’s Playstation 3 Source event in New York City. I have to say I came off much more impressed about the system. Overall, the titles are more polished in their current state than anything that was released for the PS2 at launch. MotorStorm and Resistance: Fall of Man were definitely the highlights of the party. Call of Duty 3 was definitely true to the series, which fans of the series will be happy to hear I’m sure.

I’ve questioned Sony’s controller decision in the past but after using it for a few hours, the SIXAXIS is as great a controller as the Dual-Shock ever was. I didn’t have any trouble getting used to it at all. The R2 and L2 triggers are hinged at the top and bend down, meaning, they actually perform like triggers. The Xbox 360’s triggers push into the controller where the SIXAXIS triggers bend slightly farther back. It’s not bad, just slightly different. The controller was noticeably lighter than the 360 pad but I’m sure you knew that already.

Resistance: Fall of Man

My playthrough was actually only single player, but I was on-hand to see a 40 person match take place before the night was over. Sony apparently had reps at remote locations in the US and Japan to challenge us and it was nice to see it in action. I didn’t see any significant lag at all, almost led me to believe it wasn’t online. I soon knew it was, however, because there’s no AI in the world that jumps up and down on your corpse after they frag you.

Resistance looks top notch and I now feel ashamed to have been worried. Insomniac is an excellent developer and Resistance lives up to their standards. I’m not a huge FPS fan, preferring 3rd Person instead, but I’d play a lot of Resistance if it was in my living room. A Sony rep had to practically rip the controller out of my hands. It had solid Next-Gen visuals with refined controls and a tried-and-true FPS experience. All that with a launch title?

MotorStorm

MotorStorm gathered the, “oohs” and “aahs” from the crowd all night. Every few minutes, you’d hear a burst of laughter come from the MotorStorm corner of the room. The game seemed to carry the best visuals on the system. There was definitely some crazy mud effects to be seen. In certain spots, the tires actually tear grooves in the earth. It’s something I’ve never seen in a racing game before. Think of how the water responds in Baldur’s Gate or the Champions titles, but now it doesn’t spring back. I just hope you can turn off the slow motion crashes, they got a little annoying after awhile. The controls were a little floaty in an ATV Off-Road Fury sort of way, but not to that extreme. It’s a showpiece for the system, but I doubt there’s much depth there.

Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom

Untold Legends looked clean and crisp, however it’s going to suffer from the same hang-ups that UL2 did on the PSP, repetitive gameplay. It’ll keep the Hack n’ Slash fans happy, but probably no one else. It would’ve been nice to be able to try this out co-op, because that’s what this type of game is all about. I can imagine it’s pretty engrossing with multiplayer. I’ll have to wait and see.

Odds and Ends with the Games

Sonic is just as bad as the 360 version and Genji felt especially shallow to me. Gundam was….well…boring, but I’ve never liked, nor played any Gundam titles so it would be really unfair of me to judge. The rep who watched over the title approached me after I finished playing it and asked,

“What’d you think?” I glanced back at the TV and turned to her,

“That sure is a nice monitor.” and walked away.

The sports titles through the collection all looked outstanding, especially NHL 2K6, although it was one of the few I never got a chance to play. I also didn’t play Lair because it was truly nothing new. Everyone’s drooling over Lair but I just haven’t seen anything yet to cause me to be overly excited about it. I was treated to a walkthrough of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance by an Activision rep. It looks great but everything was a bit too shiny, what’s up with that?

The Opposite of Butta-Face

My main highlight of the day was actually sitting down and getting some quality time with the PS3’s interface. Thankfully, Sony had some PS3’s sitting on a desk hooked into gorgeous Sony monitors, Sony keyboards and (Microsoft) mice for us to freely bang on. Others at the event were actually unplugging the SIXAXIS controllers and plugging in their cameras to view their pictures live in the browser. It was then that I realized it’s time to upgrade my home PC, those images were pulled and rendered unbelievably fast.

The photo viewer rendering options on the PS3 are breathtaking, the kind of thing you fire up and just let run when you have guests over. I hate to say it, but it makes the photo viewer on the 360 Dashboard look like something from Fisher Price. It’s odd how Sony made something as boring as a photo slide show worth looking at, much less captivating.

I played with the PS3’s infamous “Remote Play” feature for a bit. I was able to create a WiFi, WPA-secured network within the PS3’s network settings, then connect my PSP. Of course, without the newest firmware release, I couldn’t remotely play anything. The connectivity is there, though, and all Sony has to do is roll out the firmware.

Another notable feature I found in the interface was the “Install other OS” option. I imagine this is where a PS3 owner can install that Yellow Dog Linux you should have heard about. Still, if that’s the plan for this option, why not just call it, “Install Yellow Dog Linux”. Are there other OS options in the works, possibly another verison of Linux?

Final Thoughts

The showing was successful one for Sony. I’m impressed with the game lineup compared to what we were subjected to at the PS2 launch. While Resistance and MotorStorm definitely caught my attention, the promises of Devil May Cry 4, MGS4 among others guarantee that I’ll be buying a PS3 down the road, the system is just way too hot to be able to deny.