PS3 Day 3

I have had my PS3 for 3 days and I think that I would like to say a few words on my early usage experience. I have updated my PS3 firmware to the latest 3.01 and it seems to be working just fine (for now at least). I have also registered my product on the PlayStation Network and gotten my account set up. This has enabled me to download and install new applications.

Another note on my LG television, the PS3 is capable of communicating with the television over CEC. Even though Sony uses Bravia Sync and LG uses SimpLink, I guess that some of the basic commands are compatible. So, my LG television can tell the PS3 to turn itself off whenever I turn the television off. Of course, I have configured this to only work if my PS3 is not actively doing something like playing a game. Otherwise, a naughty nephew can really ruin your gaming day.

Life
It is a mash of various applications that don’t seem to do anything useful. The basic Life application gives me weather information from around the world by displaying it on a beautifully rendered globe of planet earth. When I jump from one major city to another, it also displays news headlines for the day, which I can read by clicking on the specific news story. The news is culled from Google News. I was quite miffed at first when I couldn’t find Kuala Lumpur on the map. I guess that it was not built into the default configuration but after a while, it appeared. I guess that the PS3 was trying to sync and download data from the Internet.

It also includes a nice photo viewer that shows interesting heritage sites from around the world, and most importantly, it includes a folding@home client, which allows a PS3 to contribute positively to society by battling cancer and other problems that we are trying to solve using distributed computing.

Store
Loading the Store was quite time consuming. Therefore, I had ignored it at first. However, after registering my product with Sony, I was given RM5.00 credit to play around with in the store. So, I visited the Store, only to find that the games sold online were fairly decent. The prices ranged from between RM20 to RM200. Personally, I would not mind shelling out around RM50 for a game, if the game is any good. Fat Princess is retailing for RM63, which is a pretty fair price for a good game. Toying around with the store was when I noticed the FREE game demos available for download.

Needless to say, I checked out quite a number of the free downloads. The size of the downloads range from just under 100MB to more than 1GB of data. Thankfully, the PS3 is able to download the games in the background while you continue to use it in the foreground. It will also queue the downloads so that only one game is downloaded at a time. This means that the PS3 will not hog up all the available network connections at home. I have currently scheduled it to download four games worth about 2GB of data. I will leave it running overnight and through to tomorrow. I hope that a couple of them will complete by tomorrow so that I can at least experience some of the wonders of a PS3.

I have Mirror’s Edge and Infamous and two mini-games scheduled. It is high time for me to upgrade my broadband speed!

Home
Unfortunately, Home is still not available for us in Malaysia. I checked some online forums and it seems that it was available for beta testing in Malaysia a few months ago. Hopefully, this means that Sony will open up the market for Home in the near future. I would be really interested in exploring Home and meeting some gamer buddies online, vis-a-vis, so to speak.