Yes, the PS3 blows.
He may have alluded to it, but Ben “Stasis7″ Kuchera’s review of the PS3 for Ars Technica is only a semblance of the shitstorm that ought surround Sony’s new console heavyweight. This is not to say that the review was bad, only that it was lacking for an article I expect at Ars. Then again, the lack is something that tends to creep into all sites when writers are taken on beyond the site’s core.
Readers of Ars may recall that my views on gaming are certainly different than Ben’s. We tend to favor different games, have different play styles in the games we do both like, and while we both have some retail experience in the industry, he was a gaming store manager for some time whereas my background is in software (and to a limited degree, gaming) development.
Perhaps, then, I should not be entirely surprised that Ben awarded the PS3 a rating of six, for his roots are far more embedded in Sony’s garden than my own. This is why I point out the utterly retarded integration of Blue Ray, because it is a design decision from a manager’s perspective, not that of a practical developer. Storage size be damned, for my sources indicate that read-times off Blue Ray disc is slower than that of today’s DVD technology, and the unecessary emphasis on a technology that is not today’s standard is one of the reasons a developer’s decisions, such as the addition of more RAM, were placed on the curb. After all, Sony can’t raise the price of their fat cow even more, just for a little more memory.
I am to understand that the lack of RAM in the system is one the culprits for the lack of high-end resolution in games such as Resistance: Fall of Man. This is aside from the resolution bugs the PS3 has, which do little to draw attention away from the backward-compatibility problems the PS3 is also facing. With larger load times than its competitors, what the hell is the PS3 good at, aside from inflating its value on eBay?
Even if the resolution issues were hammered out today, it looks to me like the PS3’s hardware is as much a limitation as it is a potential value. That’s not to say that the PS3 won’t grow into its own in the next half year or so, but a six the beast does not deserve, even from forum clown Stasis7.
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[...] such as Ben Kuchera, who seems to think that a firmware update or two can raise his already exaggerated review of the PS3 a couple notches. I don’t know how Maxator would rate the PS3 and Wii side-by-side [...]