Sony Playstation 3 Slim

I was a gamer not too long ago. I played a whole gamut of games from classic arcade games like Pac-man, Space Invaders to classic PC games like King’s Quest, Karateka, Prince of Persia, to the modern FPS, RPG, and RTS like Doom I/II, Duke Nukem, Quake I/II/III, Unreal, Command and Conquer I/II, Red Alert I/II, Warcraft I/II/III (and DOTA), Diablo I/II, Starcraft, I even played an MMORPG: Ragnarok (yesh!). But I guess work and studies plus an underpowered laptop put all that to rest.

With the series of holidays coming up, I wanted to have something to while away the time during the occasional respites from attending to Jeanne (and to a certain extent Michelle). Aside from watching movies, what’s better than being part of those movies, in an interactive way i.e. games, right?

To be able to play games, one option was assembling a gaming rig. Something that I’m not unfamiliar with. You buy a processor, motherboard, memory, hard disk, video card, monitor, etc. that hopefully works together in a reasonably stable way and then assemble all these into an ultimate gaming machine. Fun in its own way but also time and energy intensive. Been there, done that, ho-hum. Strike that out.

Since Michelle recently convinced me to get an oversized TV, another option is a gaming console. Since I’ve never tried consoles before, it was pretty much decided. There were three console choices: the PlayStation 3 Slim, the Microsoft XBox 360 Elite, and the Nintendo Wii. The XBox is Microsoft so it’s immediately out. Both the Nintendo Wii and PS3 Slim seem to be good and have a large choice of good games. I have a slight preference towards the PS3 because of its better technical specs but the deal clincher is the fact that the PS3 Slim is also a competent Blu-Ray player. So the PS3 Slim it was.

So, during lunch break, I went out and got myself a PS3 Slim from Trekker at ATC as well as a copy of Assassin’s Creed II from DataBlitz. The PS3 came packaged in a typical consumer electronics box: colorful but not much else. Trekker was even nice enough to put the box in a pink and white striped shopping bag like the ones you find in Divisoria :P Needless to say, all these came off soon as I got home.

It’s definitely slim. Much smaller than a typical desktop. Which is good since what I didn’t like about the previous PS3 was it’s size. It was already approaching that of a desktop or even a low-profile tower. But it’s not just space that it uses less of. It also uses less power (100W vs 200W) and less noise, a consequence of less heat and thus need for less fan.It also comes with a 120GB 2.5″ hard disk drive which is user-upgradeable.

In the rear it has an HDMI 1.3a, S/PDIF and standard PlayStation A/V connections  for output to your TV and sound system. There’s also a Gigabit Ethernet port and 802.11g Wi-Fi for connecting to your LAN/WLAN. On the front it has two USB 2.0 ports, a slot-loading Blu-Ray drive, an eject button, and a power button.

It came with only one DualShock 3 controller so if you’re planning on multiplayer fun in the living room, you’ll have to get at least one other controller (P2,250). As a media player,the PS3 can be controlled through your TV remote via HDMI-CEC but controls are pretty limited. If you plan to use the PS3 as a media player a lot, you might want to get the optional Blu-Ray disc remote (P1,200).

Setup and configuration was quick and easy. The manual and the OS was easy-to-use and intuitive. I did encounter a slight problem setting the display resolution. My TV is supposedly capable of 1080p but for some reason it keeps saying that the mode is not supported. It turned out that the culprit was the HDMI capable. I swapped in another one and they display finally came up in 1080p glory. Make sure to get a quality HDMI cable.

After slotting in the Assassin’s Creed II disk and waiting for the short installation routine, I was off playing… an awesome game I might add. Now that’s a good console experience!