Gamers lined up by the thousands early on Friday, aiming to be one of the first in the United States to buy Sony’s PlayStation 3, the multimedia and video game machine that is key to the future of the beleaguered electronics and media conglomerate. Apparantly the PS3 brings world peace or eternal youth, seeing how bonkers people went.
By the time it gets to Europe, I hope we’ll be much the wiser. I personally have Zune-esque apathy for the PS3.
I guess all the lucky owners are too busy playing their ps3 or still in the hospital after being mugged or trampled getting it.
I just caught a news clip – they are shooting each other over the damn thing. I don’t get it.
That’s because a large portion of the people buying the PS3/trying to acquire the PS3 are doing it to sell them on eBay.
That’s why initial demand is a bad indicator as to true demand. If you have been watching eBay, you’ll find ps3s have either been selling for 9999999999999999 gazillion dollars (false bids) or under retail. Only a few are going for mega-bucks (realistically). The scalpers are going to get burned this go-around, the demand really isn’t there. Only the truly ignorant are out purchasing them to own at this point, there are dozens of documented known issues, and anybody with common sense would wait.
It also explains the shootings/shoving/theft/attacks/etc. Sane people don’t go THAT nuts. These are people out trying to scalp for a buck or two. IE common thieves of opportunists with no clue. I wouldn’t expect any less than escaped rapists to be out purchasing these things.
Update on uk ebay….
**Listing restrictions for pre-sale Sony PlayStation 3 consoles and games***
16 November, 2006 | 02:18PM GMT
We wanted to let you know about some restrictions that will be placed on pre-sales of the Sony Playstation 3 console and games. To protect the whole eBay community, sellers will not be permitted to list PlayStation 3 consoles and games on ebay.ie until the authorised European pre-sales period begins in February 2007. Once the official pre-sales period has begun, ebay.ie will also be asking sellers to comply with the following requirements:
1. You may only offer one PlayStation 3 console.
2. If you are pre-selling a console, your listing must comply with our Pre-Sale Listings Policy. You must guarantee that the item will be available for dispatch within 30 days of the date it is listed on ebay.ie.
3. You must offer PayPal as the only payment option. The item must qualify for PayPal Buyer Protection.
4. You may only offer a PlayStation 3 console that you obtained within the EU. PlayStation 3 consoles obtained outside of the EU cannot be listed on ebay.ie.
5. Your listing must include a photo of your purchase or pre-order receipt. We recommend that you block out any personal information such as credit card numbers on the receipt to make sure that they aren’t visible on the photo.
Our top priority is to ensure that eBay remains a safe and reputable place to buy and sell. Please be aware that we may take action against your account if your listing doesn’t comply with these guidelines.
Regards,
The eBay.ie team
i stopped by the best buy across the street from work a few hours ago and played motorstorm for about 3 minutes. wow. it looked pretty good and i left with my heart racing. none the less, i’m in no rush to drop 600 bucks on one of these and will have no problem waiting till spring
There’s no reason to spend 600 dollars unless you don’t want to upgrade the drive yourself or use your own WiFi or card readers.
The 499 PS3 will do everything the 599 version for movies and games.
Also, the Motorstorm demo in stores right now is poor version. The really good newer demo version of Motorstorm is available for free from the PS3 online service. So if you were impressed with what you saw, just wait to you see the real thing.
These idiots deserve to be targeted for assault and battery. Especially when you can turn around and sell one of the stolen pieces of s**t for a couple of grand on ebay.
I don’t know who’s worse….Sony, or the schmucks waiting in line for 20 hours.
obsolete when it comes to europe =)
…staying home and playing FFXII and Guitar Hero 2 instead.
remind me what’s wrong with my PS2 again, someone?
remind me what’s wrong with my PS2 again, someone?
It’s, like, so yesterday.
Besides, you can’t run Yellow Dog Linux on it.
It’s, like, so yesterday.
You’re right, I’m going to remove this freaking hard drive from my PC. It’s, like, so yesterday.
Besides, it’s the slowest component in the computer.
Guess you bought an iPod just because “It’s cool and everyone out there already has one”
Sarcasm aside, I just can’t believe how people supposed to have a brain can behave like this. Guess they replaced it with a tilt sensor or something.
Edited 2006-11-18 05:13
Speaking of sarcasm…
Speaking of sarcasm…
I was talking about the article, you just can’t shoot someone just to get a PS3, no matter how much money you can make from it.
And I keep thinking that one should buy a PS3 just because the PS2 is so yesterday is dumb. And I want to see how well YDL performs with 256 Mb…
I have no plans of buying a PS3. I will be buying a Wii for my son instead.
However, I’ll bet the PS3 is a great console. And, I’ll also bet that people come up with all kinds of cool things to do with it besides play games. I could see it becoming that mythical all-in-one media center. So, I hate to see everyone just bashing it. If they can produce some good games to play on it, it’s going to be cool in the short term and who knows in the long term.
Personally, I’m buying a Wii for the following reasons:
o It’s cheaper
o It’s backward compatible with my son’s GC games
o I can download retro games
o And, Nintendo games are fun
Edited 2006-11-18 02:55
Yes, there are no fun games on the PS3.
For 499 you get:
HDMI connection – insane audio support that is a whole topic by itself for people with highend audio setups
1080p BluRay movies
1080p Games – There are already six to seven launch/launch window titles running at 1080p – some already running at 60fps
Backwards compatibility with 8000 or so PS2 and Playstation titles out there.
Free online play for all non-MMORPG titles
A whole range of online features – text messages, voice messages, video chat, friends lists, universal logins, etc. All free.
Dedicated online servers as part of the free online service. People are already playing 40 person Resistance matches with reports of no lag.
Tabbed webbrowser
Access to the Sony online store that has free demos and other items to download
A music and movie store
The tilt controller – very cool for driving and flying games and developers are using for all sorts of other ways in sports and combat and fighting games
Playstation(PS1) game downloads that will play on your PSPs and soon on your PS3 for people who want to buy old games they don’t own
Easy support for the installation of any PPC Linux distro. People already have Linux up and running and are downloading and running apps on the machine.
Linux has full access to networking and the BluRay drive so people are starting to work on turning the PS3 running Linux into the ultimate media machine for their homes.
The harddrive is replaceable with any store bought laptop drive. There is a door on the side of the PS3 where the drive pops out and a new one can be poped in. People already have 100-150 gig drives in their PS3. The PS3 interface will format/partition new drives for you and allow you to set up space for a Linux installation with just a few clicks.
USB keyboards and mice work with the system right out of the box. Any text field in the PS3 is setup to handle keyboard entry. People already have keyboard hooked up to their PS3s.
For people who have the Wifi enabled PS3 or have their own WiFi unit hooked up to their 20gig PS3, there is support for remotely playing content on your PSP of what is being displayed on your PS3. And there may be support for remote play for games too. Not sure if this is working yet. Obviously best for non-heavy action type games – rpg should work very well over WiFi on your PSP.
Full Cell sdk available with the Linux installations for support for homebrew development. RSX support is still in progress though.
The machine is supposed to be almost silent even under heavy operation.
Very advanced internal cooling system is working very well with no one having any overheating problems that many were claiming would happen.
There’s more, but the PS3 has turned out to be one insanely cool machine. No wonder people are practically killing each other to get their hands on one.
“reports of no lag”
yes, and there were “reports of no lag” on 56k modems when quakeworld first came out.
“reports of no lag” can, frankly, bite my shiny metal ass.
Compared to Quake before QW, yes. It effectively was no lag.
Futurama FTW.
sweet
maybe my next computer will be a PS3
even with the price of that thing, having keyboard and mouse support out of the box (PS2 also had that), and being able to, at least by the looks of it, boot just about any PPC linux distro, makes it a very interesting product.
and its nice to see that one can swap the drive of the machine almost effortlessly.
that last bit makes me think that all the smart engineers at sony are found in the playstation department.
yeah
If YDL or another distro runs perfectly on it, it’ll end up being my next pc. I want to upgrade eventually and thatll be a hell of an upgrade from my p3-600… evne if it just has half the ram.
The tilt controller – very cool for driving and flying games and developers are using for all sorts of other ways in sports and combat and fighting games
Yay, now I can drink-and-drive in driving games
How can it be a good media center without a tv capture card?
How about a DVD burner to save stuff?
There are better options out there (MythTV) for PC’s for this task.
You can plug USB capture card and operate it using mythTV on PPC Linux. I guess it was too much to put something like this in a game console, especially as people might want to choose between variants of DVB-t,DVB-S, HDTV, many analog TV capture cards, etc.
External DVD recorders are also not a problem to attach (not sure how many USB ports thing has though).
With hibernation support (sw-suspend2) it should be able to fast boot between Linux and GameOS. Sounds like a much better deal than 360 which is completely locked down. I just hope they will get out RSX drivers ASAP.
I love the video. Cell processor sux anyways
The PS2 launched with almost the same madness and frenzy, and now it’s no different. Do not belittle people who want and can pay outrageous amounts for a console, it’s there money and they can and should do what they want with it.
As for the console itself, guess what? It’s going to be a hit. Look at the response it’s gotten in Japan and now in America. So whats gonna stop that momentum.
As to it being too pricey, how much was the original PS2 when it launched? Did it go on to conquer the console market?
Here’s to Sony for a successful launch.
There are people who are willing to pay $400 or more for a video card for their PC. For them, the cost of the PS3 is not all that out of line. However, it is too pricey for the general population, which is Sony’s target audience.
The reason why I say it is too pricey for the general population is because it’s in the category of a game console. It may do other things like play HD-DVD’s, browse the Internet, run Linux (hence Apache) and whatever else. All of that is cool for me (I like that), and when I get ready to buy a “super box” that does everything, I might buy one. But, I’m looking to buy a game console, not a “super box”. I think you have to be either “shopping for a super box” or “one of those people willing to pay $400+ for a video card”. Most people, including me, are neither.
If anybody disputes the fact that the console is labeled “game console”, go to any reseller online and see where they have it in their menu. It will be in electronics->games->hardware (or close).
Granted it’s pricey for the general public, but for what it brings to the table it’s practically a steal. Forget about the format wars for a second and realize that it brings a Blu-ray drive with full 1080p capability for under a grand.
Then again, i don’t think first generation anythings are geared towards the “general public” so to speak.
It *is* an expensive console, but its a cheap powerful computer.
I use linux full time so its not really a problem, and would allow me access to the latest games.
I’m ready to see how this pans out.
I’m hoping that TV technology will reach the stage where cheap monitors are here and I’m ready to go.
By cyclops (1.79) on 2006-11-18 10:20:57 UTC
It *is* an expensive console, but its a cheap powerful computer.
I use linux full time so its not really a problem, and would allow me access to the latest games.
I’m ready to see how this pans out.
I’m hoping that TV technology will reach the stage where cheap monitors are here and I’m ready to go.
—————————–
You can get more powerful PC’s for much less than the ps3 (sans br, but it’s not a burner anyway).
Also, the cell cpu is not as good mhz wise as an intel or amd chip since it does not do out of order execution.
Have fun with a slow linux box.
since it does not do out of order execution.
Have fun with a slow linux box.
So 3.2 Ghz narrow inorder PPE will perform atleast as fast as ~1.5GHz wide OoO machine.
My PC at work is 1.6Ghz AthlonXP and i don’t have any problems with performance.
It may be an expensive games console, but if it’s as quiet as people are indicating then it could be a great media centre.
From what I’ve heard the large cooling fan in the PS3 is a lot quieter than the dual 60mm fans in the Xbox360. Quite impressive considering how powerful the PS3’s hardware is. Although I suppose the design isn’t that different to the cooling systems found in many laptops. I’m hoping that even when the CPU is used heavily it’ll remain quiet enough for AV use in a living room.
Even if Blue-ray doesn’t take off and Sony’s software isn’t much good, Linux has decent media players that support all the file formats you could want. Video recording using a Linux supported USB TV card might be a possibility, and there are large laptop hard drives available for storing 100s of hours of video, or it could always be networked to a desktop with more storage.
Of course you could do the same thing with a PC, but quiet media centre PCs are generally quite expensive, especially if you want unusual features like a HDMI port. The PS3’s limited RAM could be a problem for people planning to use it as a general purpose computer, but a stripped down Linux distribution should run perfectly.
If it lives up to it’s potential then I’ll probably get one, I might even use it to play games once in a while…
Of course you could do the same thing with a PC, but quiet media centre PCs are generally quite expensive, especially if you want unusual features like a HDMI port. The PS3’s limited RAM could be a problem for people planning to use it as a general purpose computer, but a stripped down Linux distribution should run perfectly.
You are absolutely right. However, do we know yet how crippled Linux distros coming out for this thing are going to be?
Why is everyone so excited about the PS3 doing things the PC does best? It won’t happen. One of the biggest problems is that the CPU is an in-order execution CPU and it does not do so well with general applications. While it may be very good at processing video files that are being fed to it in a nice orderly stream, it does not perform well as a general purpose computer. There was a good article that described this:
http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=1
Actually, it’s the other way around: PC is not a PS3. Are you aware that all the home computers before PC were mostly game consoles, programmable and simple? Like … fun? Do you know that the most popular office PC application in the pioneering days was Tetris – there was no PC without that one! I mean … no PC in any office. Do you know that most people buy their first, and next, and next… machine to entertain themselves? Do you know that you can read email on a 0.5 MHz computer, and that won’t be 3.5G/0.5M times slower? And you can play fun games on it to. Do you know that PS3’s power a supercomputer? Do you realize, that people don’t want to be locked down into weasel consumer schemes? Do you know that running Linux stands for: potentially running anything? Do you know that PS3 is a part of a new wave that has a potential to flush the PC off the scene? That’s why we’re excited. Power to Sony, Power to the people. Power!