My 13 year old son recently told me that he would like a Playstation to go along with the WII we have had for several years. I was excited to finally get a videogame system with blue-ray and excellent graphics and a massive library of games. Now that we have it, I can say that our disappointment is immense.
First of all, the games, my son apparently wanted a PS3 because he knew it could play PS2 games - the Slim doesn't. That's right - every PS3 ever made up until this one was fully PS2 compatible - but this one is not. I guess Sony decided they didn't want people to be able to play any of the 1000s of time-tested well-loved games available for their best-selling PS2 platform.
The games that are left seem to mostly be shoot/explode/kill type games. We did not see a single title at our local store with the creativity of game play matching Mario or Pikmin. There were dozens of games that I would be horrified for my son to play. The store keeper told me that the demographic for the PS3 is 18-45 year-old males, and apparently, 18-45 year-old males like to play games where they pretend to run around and kill things violently. Blah.
Second, the cable. It's a relatively small thing I suppose, but we had to go out and buy a $50 dollar cable to hook the thing up to our HD television. I hear that if you're a smart shopper you can find an HDMI cable online for closer to $20, but still, if you buy an HD videogame system, you should be able to connect it to your HD television.
A third thing is the controller. You only get one, and it's an awkwardly designed, confusing mess of buttons. I have been told that all those buttons give you more control, but my son and I found it completely illogical and confusing. Advanced gamers must learn that the orange circle means cancel and the grey 'X' means go, but in the games we tried we kept having to look down to match the menu choices to the joystick. I am sure my son may figure it out, but to me, it felt like my hands didn't quite work.
I didn't like the PS3 Slim, and my son lost interest in it almost instantly and was fine with me returning it. Not a good value at all. Get more detail about
PlayStation 3 120 GB.
