MacDork :)

Well, I finally took the plunge last night; I bought a PS3.
I told myself I wasn’t going to get one until it either had more games I wanted, or it came down in price, but things all just came together yesterday at the same time, and I just had to go out and get one.

As an avid gamer, I’ve been collecting consoles for about 15 years.  My gaming fascination goes back even further than that, but it wasn’t really until after I finished college that I had the time to dedicate to having my own console.  As a child, my brothers & spent hours and quarters playing all of the old arcade classics: Space Invaders, Defender, Pac Man, Defender, Tempest, Karate Champ, Galaxians, Galaga, Zaxxon, Missile Command, Battle Zone…

When the 2600 came out, my friends & I played the crap out of it.  Intellivision?  Anyone remember that?  Those controllers were ridiculous.  After that, my father got stationed in Germany, and I lost touch w/ console gaming.  I missed out on the 8-bit era during high school, and 16-bit gaming was during my college days, where we weren’t allowed to have tvs.

When Nintendo brought the N64, however, I was ALL OVER gaming.  I had some disposable income, a lot more time, and access to gaming media.  My collecting started w/ catching up on what I’d missed.  My ex & I would cruise through the local Virginia Beach flea markets, and any time we saw a console or old cartridges, I’d pick up some games on the cheap.  I scored a 2600, an NES, SNES and an Odyssey that way.  I picked up an Atari Jaguar on eBay for next to nothing.  I bought a Genesis off of one of my sailors.  A Saturn found it’s way into my home somehow.  TurboGrafx?  Yep!  My collection was getting to be pretty big.

The next brand new console to launch was the N64.  I had to have one.  I got mine a day before launch (the local Military Post Exchange broke the street date).  I got a PlayStation on day 1.  Heady days, those were.  Life was great.  My job was tough, but those were some of the happiest days of my life.  When Dreamcast launched, I pre-ordered from EBGames (as I’d done w/ the PlayStation), and they got it and a few games to me the day before launch.  PS2?  Same deal.  I’m still somewhat loyal to EB because of these two purchases.

So the point, up to here, is that I’ve been a ravenous collector up to this point.  I won’t go into the several handheld systems I own, but there are quite a few of them.  Enter the Xbox.  On one hand was my desire to keep my collection growing;  on the other, my distaste for Microsoft.  I won’t go into specifics, but there just weren’t enough games on the Xbox that I wanted that weren’t just re-makes of Dreamcast games.  I chose not to get an Xbox until there were system exclusives that made it worth my purchase.  Ironically, I ended up with two Xboxes when Fable released; my ex & I both bought one on the very same day.  The Xbox marked the beginning of the decline of my gaming fervor.

Both the Wii & Xbox360 launches came & went w/o me buying on day one.  The same mature, rational decision-making process was applied:  there just weren’t enough games at launch to make me want one right away.  I eventually bought both, and love them.  They’re great systems, each w/ their own strengths.

So here we are, at the end of a long tale.  PS3 launched in November 2006.  There just wasn’t enough software on it for me to want it.  There was that giant $600 price tag looming in the back of my mind.  No unified online gaming service like Xbox Live.  I knew I’d be waiting.

But… what about high def movies?  How about Little Big Planet?  PlayStation Home?  Virtua Fighter?  Motorstorm?  Yeah, all of those things are appealing to me.  They just weren’t enough.  Here’s where things finally started to add up for me.  Gamefly sent me an email telling me they had Virtua Fighter on sale for $29 + free shipping.  That’s 1/2 price; I’m totally down for that, but how lame would it be to have the game w/o the console top play it on?  As I talked w/ John, I also mentioned that they’d finally resolved their controller rumble lawsuit and that it shouldn’t be too long before the Sixaxis controller would gain rumble.  Should I wait?  If I wait, will I wait too long and end up w/ one of the crappy EU units that doesn’t have the backwards compatibility hardware built in anymore?  That kind of settled it for me; knowing that I could always buy a new controller but not retro-fit a cpu into the console, I knew I’d have to buy sooner, rather than later.  Add one crappy day at work, the fact that it was payday and my desire to see some BluRay movies into the overwhelming desire to have my console collection “complete” again, and I end up running out at 8:30pm to the store to pick up my PS3.

Stay tuned for console setup and configuration (part 2 of 3) and Motorstorm impressions (part 3 of 3) in future posts.