A controversial console?
I am often asked, Why, out of all the consoles in the world, have you decided to make a magazine about the PlayStation 3? and it’s a pretty fair question.
The console clearly has a lot of flaws. If you look at a lot of online forums, people are quite dismissive of the PlayStation 3; they see it as a console that failed and underperformed, and I see posts about how many of the cross-platform games, the PlayStation 3 versions, are the worst. To be honest, they are mostly right, but that doesn’t really matter to me.
It is clear that the first half of the PlayStation 3’s journey was rough; the price was extortionate, and the library of exclusive games was not stacking up against its competitors. Whilst fans of the Xbox 360 were already getting stuck in with the console-defining Gears of War in 2006, the PlayStation 3 was only just launching. It was also quite common in the earlier days of the system to find that PlayStation 3 gamers had to wait longer for cross-platform games to come out for their machine due to the added complexity developers had to tackle when porting to the PlayStation 3’s unique architecture.
Sony appeared to drop the ball ever so slightly on gaming by focusing on the system’s multi-media capabilities. But the system’s focus as an all-in-one entertainment system is one of the key reasons why I like it. It was so overly ambitious, the early 60 GB model is probably still up there in the list of machines with the highest number of capabilities. It could play CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, SACDs (a Sony proprietary format) plus tons of digital file formats too. This was the era when digital videos on computers started to become more common and copying files to and from the machine was quite the novelty. Not forgetting that early model also played PlayStation 1 and 2 games natively with onboard hardware and allowed you to manage virtual memory cards - you could even copy save files from your old memory cards using an adapter. The Xbox 360 also had a lot of similar functionality but the PlayStation 3 just took it to that extreme.
I do think the PlayStation 3’s overall story from rough beginnings to completely rebranding itself with the launch of the PlayStation 3 slim is just fascinating and this is another of the reasons I am drawn to it and want to learn and write about it, and I think that this transformation paved the way for a lot of what came in the generation that followed.
The next big reason I like it is it was just the console that was there for me at my formative time. I played games quite a lot as a child, but it wasn’t until my late teens and early twenties that I really started to define myself as a gamer and I became obsessed. I think the cinematic storytelling that started to come out at this time just really struck me and I felt that gaming was offering me experiences that TV and film just couldn’t match. I started renting new PlayStation 3 titles weekly from Blockbuster and racked up hundreds of titles in my time with the console. This was also when I first started writing about games because I was finding the experiences so profound that I just had to get my thoughts down in digital ink.
All About the Games
Finally, what other reason is there to like a console than for its library of games? The PlayStation 3 has a large variety of games. They are also quite cheap and often in good condition. The smaller Blu-ray cases seem quite sturdy compared to the flappier DVD cases, and the discs are much more scratch-resistant than DVD-based ones.
The library is full of short and sweet titles that are cinematic and exciting and that allow for multiple playthroughs. Just a few short issues ago, I wrote about the Uncharted trilogy and needed to play through a bit of each game, but I became so enthralled with Uncharted 2 that I just played the entire thing. It’s short, action-packed and totally stands the test of time. Admittedly, I picked a particularly strong title as an example, but my point is the system has loads of such games that make it easy to keep coming back to.
Part of the reason I started this magazine was to document my journey exploring the rich catalogue of PlayStation 3 games and to replay lots of the old games that I loved when I was younger. If you have read this far, I am guessing you are a big fan of the system too, so please get in touch on social media or email and let us know what you love about the fascinating PlayStation 3.