Category: PS3

PS3 update

For no good reason, I thought I’d write a post on what I’ve been doing with my PS3 so far. I haven’t played MGS4 yet. I’m waiting until I have a good block of time to get started on it. (Maybe after I finish Final Fantasy 8.) I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with Pain, which is a downloadable game that came free with the PS3/MGS4 bundle. It’s a lot of fun. Basically, you shoot a guy out of a slingshot and try to cause as much damage as possible, both to the guy and his surroundings. Very cathartic.

I felt like I needed to go out and actually buy at least one game for the PS3, so I went to Best Buy and bought Orange Box today. The main reason for buying it was to get Portal, which is a nifty little puzzle game with a twisted sense of humor. And an end-credit song by Jonathan Coulton. I’ve already started playing it. Supposedly, it can be finished in just a few hours, so I may be about half-way done. (Or maybe not. I’m usually slower than average with these kind of games.) I’m not sure if I’ll bother with any of the other games in Orange Box. I’m not that interested in online multi-player stuff like Team Fortress 2, and I’m not sure Half-Life will be my cup of tea. I guess I’ll try it out at some point and see if I like it.

random TV-related stuff

I picked up this antenna at Radio Shack today, in the hopes of picking up some over-the-aid HDTV. It didn’t work out; it only allowed me to pick up one station, NJN. I guess I’ll be taking it back to Radio Shack tomorrow.

I also started playing around today with the idea of streaming audio & video from my PC to my PS3, using Nero MediaHome. It, surprisingly, works pretty well. There’s a how-to here. You need Nero Ultra Edition 7, which I conveniently already have.

new TV

I bought a new TV yesterday. It was kind of inevitable that I’d trade in the old CRT for an HDTV of some sort at some point, but I guess the PS3 was the tipping point. It just didn’t make sense to have both a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD player in the apartment, and not have a decent HDTV. I got a 32″ LG from Best Buy. It’s this model. It works great with the PS3, but that’s the only device I have hooked up via HDMI at this point. I only had one HDMI cable in the apartment, and I didn’t want to pay Best Buy’s price for HDMI cables. Instead, I ordered some from MonoPrice. When they arrive, I’ll be able to hook up the HD-DVD also.
Alas, there’s not much I can do with the cable box / Tivo combination. That’s composite at best. I can get a new HD cable box from Cablevision, but that’s probably not going to do me much good unless I trade up to an HD DVR, which I’m really not ready to do yet.
The Wii can’t do HDMI, but I can trade up from composite to component, which my friend tells me is worthwhile. I should have ordered a Wii component cable set from Monoprice when I ordered the HDMI cables from them, but I didn’t think of it until after I’d placed the order. Looking around, it does seem that Wii component cables are nearly as overpriced as HDMI cables — $6 from Monoprice, $30 elsewhere.
I’m also thinking about getting an antenna, so I can pick up over-the-air HDTV. Antennas are cheap enough, though I’m not sure how well they’ll work here in Somerville. We’re basically too far from both New York and Philly to pick up regular TV or radio stations from either market without some grief, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a few stations with a good antenna.

PS3 observations

I’ve had my PS3 for a few days now, and I thought I’d share a few random observations. First, if you hook up a PS3, and then start to get an incessant buzz coming from your TV, you’ve probably got a ground loop problem. This thread at the Sony forums describes the problem quite clearly. I solved the problem easily by using a cheap three-prong to two-prong adapter from Home Depot. Still, it was kind of annoying working through it and figuring out what was going on.
I do like the PS3 in general, and I think that now is the time to buy one if you’ve been holding off. When it launched, I wasn’t too excited about it. It seemed overpriced for what it could do, and there were a few questions about stuff like backward-compatibility that hadn’t been answered yet. The 80 GB MGS4 bundle I bought hits the sweet spot in terms of functionality and value. It’s got WiFi and wired Ethernet. It’s got a reasonably large hard drive. It’s got a reasonable level of backward compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games. And it’s maturing in terms of the software that’s out there for it. The downloadable stuff on the Playstation Network is pretty good. There are a few great games out for it — GTA4, MGS4, and a few others. And, like it or not, Blu-Ray has won the battle with HD-DVD.
I’m just starting to experiment with all the stuff the PS3 can do. I’ve watched a couple of regular DVDs on it, and it works fine as an upscaling DVD player. I’ve watched a few downloaded 720p movie trailers on it, and those look good too. I haven’t actually watched any Blu-Ray discs yet, but a friend gave me a copy of Ratatouille, so I’ll be checking that out soon. And I subscribed to Qore, which is kind of fun.

video game stuff

While waiting for my new PS3 to arrive, I decided to dust off the PSP and play around with that a bit. I discovered that my battery could only hold a charge for about 10 minutes, which makes it pretty useless. I ordered a new battery from Best Buy, along with a new 2GB memory stick. My old memory stick was 128MB, and cost more, I think, than the new 2GB one. So, I now have enough room to copy some reasonably long videos down to my PSP, though there’s really not anything I’m interested in watching on it right now.

I also spent some time today playing Final Fantasy VIII on my PS2, which I haven’t touched in a long while. I did make some progress — I got past Norg, for whatever that’s worth. Despite the fact that I started this game in 2003 or thereabouts, I’m still determined to finish it at some point!

MGS 4

So I broke down and ordered the PlayStation 3 80GB Limited Edition Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack from Wal-Mart this morning. It looks like it’s sold out now, so I guess it’s good that I ordered it in the morning instead of waiting until I got home from work. I probably won’t get it for a couple of weeks, but that’s fine. I’m still really not that excited about the PS3, or MGS4 in particular, but it ought be fun to play around with. MGS has always been kind of a weird franchise, and I do enjoy the distinctly Japanese oddness to be found in MGS. And of course I’l use the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, though I’ll always be a little bitter about Blu-Ray beating out HD-DVD.