They Say it Got Smart: A 2008 Review of the PS3
Ars Technica didn’t give the PS3 much love when it first launched. Parts of the system plain didn’t work, the online play was all over the place, and the software support was limited, at best. Multiplatform games played noticeably worse than their Xbox 360 counterparts. So many had a bad taste in their mouths from all the claims that the PS3 was going to completely blow away the competition, and that the only real high-definition graphics were 1080p. Sony walked into this generation with a set of claims that their launch hardware and library simply couldn’t back up, and the company took a bad beating for it.
To Sony’s credit, though, they learned. They slowly, but surely, addressed every beef gamers had with the system: the software lineup improved; developers learned how to work with the system; the price went down; Blu-ray won the format war; and the firmware updates kept adding value to the system.
The Good:
- The best Blu-ray player on the market
- Rock solid hardware with a minimal defect rate
- Excellent media functions across the board
- Dual Shock 3 is a great controller, with many options
- Online store has no upper limit on size of games
- Storage is a snap to upgrade
- Excellent convergence with the PlayStation Portable
- An ever-increasing library of exclusives
- Home could make great strides in online gaming
The Bad:
- Home has seen too many delays
- Online play still doesn’t measure up to Xbox
- Backwards compatibility seems to be going the way of the dodo
- Focus on media could take away from gaming aspects of the system
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