So I landed a PS3 today, on launch. Not going to go into how, already wrote that article for another publication. What I am going to go into is what my impressions of the system are after only spending a handful of moments setting it up, messing around online with it, and playing one game for a very short period. (I should also go ahead and note that right now I am extremely tired and need to get up for work in a short handful of hours. It isn’t that tomorrow is going to be fun with no sleep, it is that trying to write something that some people might look at and go “Huh, not only does this guy have writing talent but he is also amazingly funny.” I know, I like to jump into those delusions and just hold on until no one will point out how much of the point I am missing anymore. Kind of like the really drunk guy screaming “Ahhhh!” Outside of my window I think that I will just with hope and keep on running.)

(Also, someone told me that if I mentioned poop more often on the site I would get more laughs. Poop.)

Ok, let’s start with lugging the box up four flights of stairs to my apartment. It weighs as much as a small child and I was twice as worried about dropping it. (You can always make more small children. If I dropped this it would be end of my “social” life as a gamer.) The box is the size of a computer tower and claims that with both the power of blue ray and the font used to label everything that when you opened said computer-tower-child-weighted box Spider-Man is going to come out and do your housework for you. He didn’t, but that font gave me hope.

Inside the box are possibly two of the largest instruction manuals I have ever seen. One instructed me not to shower with the unit or use it as a grill. (Regardless of how much heat it produced) The other was all about navigating the menus of the system. (A little later you will understand why that one is the larger of the two.) I work on computers for a living (until fired) and new computers come with one piece of poster sized paper that tells you that the purple slot that is round takes the purple plug that is round. Everything else is just assumed that you are going to mess up or not touch. For some reason the PS3 doesn’t seem to want you to take that chance. Anything that you can ever do with this system is outline in BOLD spider-man typed text. BOLD! (Poop)

I am going to skip talking about how there are no “buttons” on it and how it loves to make sure everyone who ever touches it leaves clear finger prints burned into its flesh. (that is right, every time you go to open it or eject a disc you leave a massive trail of finger prints. No CSI degree or anything needed for this stuff.) This is not a machine that Bucko should ever be allowed near; his OCD would destroy both him and it.

Ok, if you have ever played a PSP you know exactly what kind of interface it has. If you haven’t, let me get you up to speed, think of the best looking thing that you have ever seen in your life. Now, make that object non-functional, slow, and cumbersome. (like a blonde that is so top-heavy she can’t tie her shoes.) Good, you have some idea of what this is like. Menus upon menus litter the entire navigation process. (We aren’t even in a game. Remember that when you started up a PS2 you had three choices if no game was present) Surf over to one menu choice to have five more appear under it. Go down to them and have three appear to the side, finally select one of those and you are presented with more choices. Look, I don’t care how interactive everything is, I just want to know where I can go to change the time back to “EST” after I messed it up during the set up.

Shopping online is a joke. By joke I mean ugly and useless. Want to browse around and see what there is to download? Well you aren’t. All content is streamed from the servers to you, content is only displayed three images at a time. Those three images take 10-20 seconds to download a piece. SONY seemed to have seen this coming and just threw up short descriptions of everything under the pictures. (when I was choosing my gamer icon I stopped after two pages and picked the one that was least annoying. It had taken three minutes to load that much)

Want to download a flash type game? Choose from two! (both of which have flash based games that you can play on the web browser if you have the will to watch it load.) Both of them are something you have never heard of and cost 8 dollars. That is the cost of next gen baby. Breathe it in. Enjoy it.

Resistance: Fall of Man is interesting. Multiplayer looks like a kickback 4 years in time to a free downloadable multiplayer PC game. Single player looks much better, not Gears of War better but good. The entire time I was pretty much sitting there thinking, I bet this would look better in HD. Thinking this of course cause me to really strain my eyes to try and see what I was looking at, this of course caused me to die. The tilty function is not used. Strange, here I thought for sure they were going to do something fun here.

The Sixaxis controller feels kind of like when you bring a glass to your mouth to get a drink, but there is nothing in there. Then entire time you where thinking “This should weigh more. “ (the only time you will say that when you are holding anything having to do with the PS3. Make a note, if you haven’t, they are heavy.) And when you find out the thing is empty you kind of go “oh, that is why.” That is exactly how Resistance made me feel when I was playing without my hands rumbling. It sounds stupid, but there it is. I want the rumbly.

So, what do I think about the PS3?

Considering how bad the 360’s launch was, and how the only good game to come out of that was… Well, anyway at least this plays PS2 games. It is really fun to have and Resistance is something I can play against my friends if they come over. By the time that any game that I want to play on this system comes out I will have saved up enough for an HDTV.

I am the only person I know who has been able to step into the next generation of gaming, Sony said so. That makes me feel pretty awesome. Not, “Woo, I have been drinking all night and this random hotness who is still going to be hot in the morning is taking me home!” More like when her twin sister shows up and you start taping that shit going down awesome, then you show it to all your friends and win the lotto kind of awesome.

But the real reason it is sweet it because it came with the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. I am going to watch the shit out of that, in HD!