I was not a day one PlayStation 3 owner, far from it. Despite being a massive PS1 / PS2 / PSP fan, the disastrous, meme-able press conference and high price killed my interest in the console at launch.
It wasn’t until mid-2007 when I was living in Japan that I finally picked up a console, basically for one game. I was playing a lot of Virtua Fighter 5 at the arcade and PS3 was the only way to play at home at that time (a 360 port would come along a few months later).
Over the next few months I played a ton of VF5, but also enjoyed Resistance, Uncharted, Motorstorm, and Ridge Racer 7. This would be my PS3 story for the duration of its lifespan: play some exclusives, but anything multiplatform I’d pick up on 360 or PC.
As a result, I missed a lot of the good, bad, and ugly of the PS3. Now that time has passed and stakes are lower, I’ve found myself more interested in the console and its quirks. I know I could use an emulator and get better visuals and performance, or play the many modern ports of these games, but I wanted to raw dog that pure PS Triple experience. I hooked a PS3 up to a small, shitty 1080p monitor and I’ve honestly been having a blast revisiting both exclusives and ports that I’ve picked up dirt cheap over the years.
The PlayStation 3 is a beautiful nightmare. The XMB is maybe my favorite console OS ever, but downloading, installing, and checking trophies is absurdly tedious. It’s fun and kinda silly that the PS+ account I use on PS5 also carries over to PS3, which allows for trophy uploading and cloud saves to occur overnight so I don’t have to deal with doing it manually.
This PS3 focus is a temporary change for my blog and Bluesky account, and one that I absolutely did not think through. I could have waited for the 20th anniversary next year, but nothing matters and who knows if we’ll even be alive then, so why not just do it now? I’m not sure how long this project will hold my interest, but right now I’m strangely excited to dig deeper into the fascinating, sluggish world of piss filters and Cell Processing.
Leave a comment