Via toledoblade

“I love this game. I love all the PS3 games and the remote controls and cables. I think I have died and gone to heaven. I am so glad I traded my $1,500 Rolex that my parents bought me when I graduated from Harvard Medical School. After all, a watch is just a silly watch, but a PS3 ...”
— Comment on Amazon.com

That’s probably a joke.

I hope that’s a joke.

No, it has to be: the writer goes on to explain that since his November acquisition of the Holy Grail of the holiday season, a Sony PlayStation 3, his girlfriend has left him and his parents are convinced he’s becoming mentally ill. His obsession is overboard but he doesn’t care because he has a PS3. I believed it until the part with the girlfriend.

He has a PS3 and a girlfriend?

Sounds unlikely.

You’d break it off if you had a PS3.

Not to propagate stereotypes or anything; some of the best gamers I know are women, and you’d be surprised at the number of serious-minded professionals who are not full-blown nerds but play video games regularly and have a life and maintain perspective. The thing is, I’ve been tooling around on the PS3 for a few weeks now and find it hard to believe any serious gamer — if they took the console out of the box and spent quality time with it, putting aside the hours they devoted to waiting in the rain to buy it — would declare their world utterly, irrevocably rocked by the PS3. Frankly, it’s been easy to get up and turn my back on it.

At $600, too easy.

Last month, a handful of days before Thanksgiving, Sony and Nintendo debuted the next-generation of video game consoles, the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii (pronounced “weee”). Perhaps you saw the young men lined up outside stores, staring ahead patiently for hours like cats waiting for their feeding. You probably heard about the hold-ups and the gunshots. You thought it was nuts. But seeing how the video game business is a $30 billion a year industry and the movies (the next most profitable entertainment business) are expected to take in about $9 billion in North American box office, this was no minor thing.

But, that’s the problem.

PS3 glows with self-satisfaction — it believes its own hype.

It’s as powerful as promised, but so far, it’s not lovable, and not the must-have all the frenzy suggests. I’ll get to the reasons in a minute, but in short: All the silicon in Silicon Valley does not in itself make for a good time. You can’t exactly write PS3 off yet. It’s in its early days. The launch games have been disappointing but better titles will be released. A game will come along that allows the console to live up to its hype, and the online service will eventually feel seamless (I’m assuming). But at the moment, this thing is unwelcoming and expensive and not exactly mind-blowing, and feels symptomatic of an industry that has ignored casual gamers for a decade and lost perspective. Yes, I had fun with the PS3 — not $600 worth.

And isn’t fun the point?

Oddly, it hasn’t been lately.

If you played video games years ago but got scared off, it was probably the growing complexity of the games, the overloaded controllers and combinations of buttons you had to master before you could do anything — like any art, a faction of the audience took on an insulated clubhouse mentality and headed out of the mainstream.

Generally though, when this happens (avant-garde jazz, experimental fiction, etc.) the faction remains a faction. With video games, a young male demographic took over and demanded depth, and while games became more sophisticated, something was lost. Games became intimidating, not fun, and the game industry became lost in its own navel. With the PS3, once you’ve gotten past the sticker shock, you realize the industry has created the silicon equivalent of belly-button lint:

An overpriced system offering the promise of a more sophisticated game experience that has not quite worked out what sophistication should look like.

Sound but no fury
The machine itself is as shiny and smooth and curvaceous as a new sports car (and nearly as heavy — reinforce that entertainment center). Pop the hood and you find a high-definition Blu-Ray DVD drive, a wireless Internet network, the graphics card of a high-end personal computer, and a processor chip so overwhelmingly powerful it will bench press your kids and kill your dog with its bare hands.

But Blu-Ray? Unless you’re in the market for a high-definition DVD player, who cares? And if you are, and you purchase a PS3 but the hi-def HD DVD format takes off instead — you’re essentially stuck with a high-end gaming unit attached to a Betamax. (And talk about stingy. Despite being one of the leading supporters of Blu-Ray, Sony doesn’t even include the hi-def cable to connect the PS3 to a hi-def TV.)

Games look amazing on it (though only a few are worth $60). Sound reaches every inch of the room. There are ridiculous oversights (that I’ll get to in a minute) you can ignore when the presentation is this dazzling.

So why did I keep thinking, “Is that it? This is next-generation?”

It’s been five years since the debut of the Sony PlayStation2 and the Microsoft Xbox — then, ...