It Begins…

I was at work on Thursday, discussing the merits of having a Playstation 3 with my mate Leon. He said himself that if it was him in my situation and he wanted to get something, and had to money to do so, he’d go out and buy it. He spoke from experience, having got a Smart car the previous week. And indeed the other fella I work with, Vijay, had got himself an iPhone after i revealed to him on the Wednesday that they had gone down in price by £100. So being in the presence of these two wasn’t really going to convince me to hold on and wait before buying a PS3.

Anyway, Leon put it into my head that I should get up early on Friday and go out and buy the PS3. Me being me, I thought that was a great idea. I went home, packed up the Xbox 360 – aka The Game Scratcher! – and filled a bag full of all the games and accessories, as well as a few PSP games that I’d got bored of, and set the alarm for 8am.

Getting into Gamestation in Nottingham for half nine, and probably being their first customer, I unloaded all Xbox branded crap on them for a trade-in. I had wanted them to tell me what it was worth as cash (always lower than a trade-in price) but the guy told me cash was out of the question as the tills were empty! Nevermind, as after the girl serving me had turned on my 360 to test it, and rung through every item I had with me, I was told that the grand total of it all was worth £198! I’d only been expecting around £150, so I was quite a bit chuffed.

I chose the PS3 + Gran Turismo 5 bundle. There were others, but they all wanted to foist a shitty Blu-Ray movie on you. If – or when – I get a Blu-Ray disc, I want it to be something I do actually want to watch and not some crappy film like Beowulf or Hitman. Besides, with the money saved from my 360 trade in, I have enough to cash to get some games and movies should I want to.

The PS3 is a big black beast of a machine. The 360 was heavy, but the PS3 is wide, heavy and shiny. It also doesn’t scratch games, which gives it a +1 in my book. Playing it on my old style telly, the graphics are noticeably worse than through a HD screen, but it is wholly expected, and I doubt it’ll bother me at all once GTA 4 comes out.

The PS3 is also quiet and unassuming. The 360 was noisy, like it wanted to make sure you knew it was there at all times! To compliment the PS3, I bought a 250GB harddrive from Dabs. Being able to up the hard disk to crazy levels is a genius move, one which should mean I’ll have room for anything and everything. What Sony don’t tell you though, is that it is damn near impossible to remove the Hard Drive from the ‘caddy’ once you locate it. After half a day of unsuccesfully trying to unscrew the tiniest of screws, i just thought fuck it. I don’t need a flamin’ caddy anyway. I stuck it in without it and, after a firmware update, it works fine!

I’m having to get used to games installing whenever you put a new one in, but it isn’t like I didn’t know the PS3 would be doing these things, and it is nice to know I have a machine that won’t ruin my games.

The next big event in this young consoles life will be a game that will probably reside in the machine for months. GTA!