Confession

I'm not catholic. I'm not much of anything, really. For whatever reason, I need to get his off my chest.

Shortly before my daughter was born (okay, the day before), I bought a PS3. I'd been sitting on a bunch of money I'd received for Thor'smas and my birthday. I had considered a bunch of gadgets for my cash. A new phone. Those $250 MLG Headphones. Some NAS for the home network.

And then I watched HDDVD go down like a $5 hooker and thought, well, fuck.

So I started researching Blu-ray. If the format is going to win, probably ought to have it.

"But what about digital downloads?"

I'll tell you. First, there is no Fios anywhere near me, so downloading movies takes too fucking long. I think that's probably fairly typical of the rest of the country. Not enough bandwidth. Then there's the problem of ownership. I don't want to have go rent my favorite movie every time I want to watch it. Raiders of the Lost Ark should be in my collection, not something I get to keep for 24hrs. All the people in the movie industry who don't understand this are missing the goddamn point.

We want to own our media, not be told by some fuckhole who makes more money than we do and greenlights shit like Step Up 2: The Streets what we can or can't do with it.

At that point, my decision was simple. I couldn't find any Blu-ray players out there cheaper than the 40gb PS3 (though admittedly, I didn't look that hard). And besides, for the same money, I might as well have another gaming console than a goddamn dvd player. A + B = $399 and change.

I'm an Xbox guy. This is tantamount to high treason, punishable by death. See, I'm the guy who five years ago at Wizard World Texas, I purposefully wore and Xbox t-shirt and strolled through the PS2 booth, which garnered me many glares from the booth girls. I personally never owned a Playstation, either of the 1 or 2 variety. I borrowed a PS1 once and played the hell outta Gran Tourismo. That's been about the extent of it.

I fought all this down when I went to buy the thing. I stepped into Gamestop (after checking every other retailer in town for the things). The choad behind the counter with his squinty eyes and bushy beard said, "Can I help you?"

I pointed at the PS3 box. "I need one of those."

"It doesn't play any PS2 games."

"Yeah, I really don't care. I just want it to play movies."

It was the last one in the store. They bagged it up. I paid cash, took it home. The next day, my daughter was born 5.5 weeks premature, so the PS3 sat in its box the entire time she was in the NICU. When we finally did get it home and I set about unboxing it, I was sort of shocked by the lack of appropriate cables. The goddamn thing doesn't even come with component hookups. All this harping about the greatness of Blu-ray and they don't even give you the cables necessary to see the signal in HD. Wtf, man.

I hooked it up with an HDMI cable (stolen from the cable box as it doesn't do 1080p anyway).

I have to admit, the interface is slick. It's pleasant looking. Easy to navigate. After some finagling, it found my laptop(s) and recognized them as media servers, though it to date has always fucked up midstream. In fact, there have been no shortage of fuckups on the PS3's part. Half the time, it displays the main menu in yellow or orange, not black, even though i've done nothing to make it do so. It drops connection to the PlayStation network all the time (and, goddammit, someone has my 'tag, so I had to come up with something else, which sucks balls).

And then there's the downloading. God help me if I needed something for a party. I hopped in the Playstation Store and set it downloading Uncharted and Turok. Took it a week. A. Whole. Fucking. Week. My download speed isn't bad, mind you. I get like 9mb down. Shouldn't take a fucking week to download a gig game demo. I thought maybe this was an anomaly, so I tried to download a 183mb movie trailer (30 Days of Night). Yeah, it finished the next fucking day.

What in the holy hell?

When I finally did get some games downloaded (the two demos and PAIN), i wasn't impressed. Turok sucks balls. It doesn't look all that hot and doesn't play that great. The environments I saw in the demo reminded me of shit on the last gen consoles. Delete. Uncharted I liked. It reminded me of that Indiana Jones game for the 180. PAIN is also kinda fun, if dumb. I wasn't impressed by the jaggies. All over the place in all three of the games.

And then there's the controller. I'm keeping in mind that I'm an Xbox guy, but the controller feels like crap in my hands. It's too light. The sticks' responsiveness feels squishy, both physically and onscreen.

Also, since the PS3 has no IR port and its remote is Bluetooth, I can't program the thing to work with my Harmony remote.

So on the whole, other than the interface and its potential as a media server, I can't say I'm happy with my purchase. I looked at games for the thing over the weekend, and other than Uncharted, there's nothing I want. Certainly there's no reason for me to choose the PS3 version ahead of the 360.

My conclusion is that if MS releases a Blu-ray add-on for the 360, my PS3 is going up for sale. Eff you, Sony. Right in your blu cornhole. I shoulda bought a Wii. Or those badass headphones.