Every Gamer's Dream: Sony's PlayStation 3

If you love Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Devil May Cry, and many more hit titles that are re-appearing on PS3, you are going to have to get this system. However that $599 price tag doesn't sit too well with your wallet. Is the PS3 really worth that amount? Yes, sadly it is and people including me are going to pay it.

Both versions of the PS3 have dumped the "batarang" controller and have picked up new wireless Bluetooth controllers that look a lot like the traditional DualShock controllers that we love. The new controllers have copied off of Nintendo's Wii and have the six degree motion-sensing capabilities. It is basically the old controller layout, with the difference being the analog joysticks have enlarged tilting angles, and bigger L2 and R2 shoulder buttons. The big difference in the old and the new will be the sensitivity of the joysticks. Instead of the 8-bit sensitivity that the older ones have, the new ones will have 10-bit motion sensitivity. But wait!  There's more!  Because the controller is Bluetooth wireless it will have a range of a whopping 30 feet! You could go to the bathroom and still play your favorite game! Okay now I am being sarcastic, but I had to throw that in there. Any way, back on track, the downside to the Bluetooth controller is that the battery life will only be 100 hours instead of the 300 hours for the 2.4GHz RF controllers used by other systems. To combat that Sony has a USB port on the front of the controller so you can plug in your controller to the system and play your game wile you charge it via the USB cable. The use of Bluetooth keyboards, mice, and other products on the market that use Bluetooth, is promised to work on the PS3 but its not official if it will or not. If you don't like your controller, you can use your PSP as the controller with an extra screen, it's up to you.

Now for the big question, what games are going to come out for the PS3? Is it going to be lacking in games like the 360, or will the Play Station still hold the title for having the most wall space in GameStop? Well, considering that you can still read old disks, yes, but the PS3 has a lot of new games and sequels in the lineup. Final Fantasy 13, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Resident Evil 5, Vision Gran Turismo, Unreal Tournament 2007,  Devil May Cry 4, Portal Half Life 2, Ultimate Alliance, Motor Storm, and  scads of others. Because of the systems massive memory space (256MBs of Rambus XDR memory and 256MBs of GDDR3 memory) it will allow game developers to have high-resolution textures and anti-aliasing for crisp detailed graphics. The PS3 will have programmable shader capabilities that greatly increase graphics efficiency, and allow game developers to create advanced effects and all that really neat stuff. So now games can be even more realistic. Sony has paired with our friends at Nvidia by snagging a RSX "reality Synthesizer" (oooo. pretty) graphics-processing unit. This thing, for our technical junkies out there, has a massive 550 MHz, 300-million-transsistor graphics chip based on advanced GeForce graphics technology. In other words it's a kick-butt graphics engine, and I can't wait to see what it can do. The Cell processor is nothing to laugh at either, it is powerful enough to support a new class of game play physics impossible to run on older game systems. Meaning it can simulate cloth, fluid, as well as large scale rigid-body interactions with hundreds of thousands of objects colliding on screen. If you're not drooling right now then you either don't know what I am talking about, or you're not a graphics junkie gamer.  To sum it all up, the PS3 is worth the $599 so just fork it over and suffer the consequences when rent comes up.

I don't know about you, but I will have the money for this system, but I won't buy it when it first comes out.  I will wait a few months so that they can work the kinks out, and in the mean time finish some PS2 games so I can play all the PS3 games! I think that this system is going to be one of the better of the three, but that has yet to be seen.