metal&gin | (a weblog by craig t mackenzie)

So I’m a little late to the party posting this one, the other bloggers in our little group have already posted about it here and here but that’s not going to stop me from having my say (and besides all the cool kids are late to the party)

Last saturday me, my partner and a friend of ours were invited to participate in something which only a select few in the world were lucky enough to experience. We got to play on Sony’s next generation games console, the Playstation 3. What was even nicer was that this was not some sort of public or press event, oh no, we got the opportunity to play PS3 in the comfort of our good friends andy & debs front room. Fueled with pizza and larger we were set for a night weekend of awesome fun.

In a word the Playstation 3 is phenomenal. It’s physical appearance is very smart, although the biggest of the 3 main next-gen consoles it is (in my opinion) by far the most aesthetically pleasing (with the Wii coming in a very close second) It’s top is curved and flows down to the front panel which is sparse and minimal with only a cut-out for the optical slot loading drive and two discrete touch sensitive buttons; power & eject. It’s majestically wrapped in a shell of super-polished black plastic (ala iPod) flanked with a burst of sun-bright chrome.

The machine is also exceptionally quiet when operating, you would find it difficult to detect the change in ambient noise between off and on, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for the XBox series. This is even more amazing when you consider that the Playstation 3’s cell processor contains 9 active processing cores.

The SIXAXIS controller as well, is very very light, it hasn’t changed much in the looks department, there’s now a PS Playstation button in the middle. Turning the console on from the controller is a very cool feature though. The GUI is Sony’s XMB or cross media bar, familiar to anyone with a PSP, and it works very well in a larger format. The GUI is fluid and responsive and looks simply amazing in 1080p HD over HDMI.

Onto the games; available to play on this pre-release console were some unfinished games complete with their bugs and hiccups, but I’m not going to dwell on that because we were playing a pre-release console after all. The games we enjoyed were as follows:

• Resistance: Fall of Man
• Motorstorm
• Ridge Racer 7

Resistance: Fall of Man
This game is truly amazing, the graphics are simply breathtaking, every thing on the screen is so realistic looking, every surface and object is fully textured with stunning high resolution detail. The graphics this game pumped out move expectations of gaming more into the realm of full CGI film. They simply have to be seen to be believed, at times in this game it’s easy to mistake what your eyes are showing you for real life.

The game-play! Oh my the game-play! Nearly everything you see is reactive, in most shooter games it’s easy to distinguish between foreground playable objects and background drops which offer minimal or no level of interaction at all, in Resistance everything reacts, shoot a window and it’ll smash into a million pieces, quite normal, but shoot it from further away and you’ll fracture and splinter the pane of glass into shards, but every shot is different, not two fractures are the same.

Signs hanging overhead swing if you shoot them, fall off if you shoot them in the right place (try the hinges) discarded vending machine which serve no purpose other than to make the environment subversive are fully reactive, shoot it on the side at just the right angle and you can force the door to swing open, there are a million other examples of this level of interaction, simply put it’s amazing. Monsters never disappear, if something dies in an area it will still be there next time you go back.

The story-line as well is very compelling, more and more games are being crafted to such high standards of story-telling, it’s no wonder the film industry is looking to games for inspiration!

Motorstorm
The most fun ever. This game is the type of game that is perfect if you’ve got a few people over, it’s just so much fun. The premise is a motocross style race at mental speeds across a fictitious canyon landscape (it might not be fictitious but that’s not important) Again the graphics this game pumps out are truly stunning, mud and dust files everywhere, other vehicles react realistically if you bash into them, it’s high-speed madness!

This was the only game we played which took advantage of the new SIXAXIS controller’s tilt-control functionality, and although this was fun and a bit of a novelty, in this game particularly I feel that tactile feedback by way of rumble would have been a lot more fun.

One of the most fun things to do in this game is crash, when (not if) you crash everything slows down, your vehicle spins out of control and the camera goes into matrix style bullet-time, if you’re unfortunate enough to become departed from your vehicle then your character will bump around with amazing rag-doll physics.

The game is like watching a skating DVD; it’s great to watch people doing it right, but it’s so much more fun to see them fail!

Ridge Racer 7
We didn’t really play this one all that much, it did look a lot nicer than previous versions of Ridge Racer (I’m really into Ridge Racer for PSP at the moment) but it didn’t really wow anyone, it just felt like ridge racer. There were some nice motion blur effects on tail lights and what have you and the backdrops were of much higher quality than I ever remember, but I was put off by the voice over, she was an annoying whore.

Basically sony was right when they said that next-generation gaming doesn’t start until they say so, they’ve got an amazing piece of hardware, and if the first batch of games are any indication they’ve got some standard setting games also. Sony have gotten a lot of bad press for the PS3, but when you play it you can see that it’s worth the wait, worth the bad press. With no question of doubt or hesitation I’m getting one as soon as they hit our shores in March 2007. You’d be a fool not to.