Sleeping With The Enemy

I was supposed to meet up with Graham and some other people at Family Bowl last night. I was going to dominate the lanes and make everyone ashamed that they even dared to challenge my ten-pin skills.
Instead, Graham received a PS3 as an early Christmas present and the bowling plans kind of fell apart from there. I hung out at Graham's for a few hours to witness the spectacle. Of course, the entire time I was just cursing my own luck in not having procured my Wii. But I didn't want to rain on his parade entirely, so I mostly kept the anti-Sony rhetoric at a minimum. I played a single death match round of Resistance: Fall of Man, which everyone seems to agree is the killer app for the system launch. But it pretty much wins by default. Almost every other launch title is multi-platform, and the few that aren't are fairly lackluster. Genji looks pretty enough, and I really didn't see enough of it to form a solid opinion, but the reviews have not been favorable. Resistance has been getting great reviews, on the other hand. My brief play time was not unsatisfactory, and the single-player campaign looked interesting. But it's not the kind of game I go crazy over. It looks like a Call of Duty game, but with aliens. I'm just not into the shooters that much these days. The problem might be that I compare every shooter experience with the Goldeneye days of yore. And nothing will ever live up to that. The other problem is that I've played Gears of War, and that game just raises the bar for shooters above and beyond anything else. Sure, it's not really a first-person shooter. You spend most of the time hovering just over the character's shoulder. But it switches to first-person when aiming, so I find the differences between the two genres negligible.
One area I did notice Resistance excelling in was with the physics engine. It's very cool to see objects (especially the bodies of your fallen enemies) slide down slopes, or off ledges, realistically. Too many times when playing similar games you'll see a dead soldier or alien lying halfway off of a staircase, stiff as a board, an entire half of their body seemingly defying gravity. It's like the fastest-setting rigor mortis ever. Or even worse, as they slump against a wall part of their body will fuse through it like something out of the Philadelphia experiment. But Resistance seems to avoid these pratfalls for the most part. At one point Graham passed a fallen foe who was half crouching, half leaning against a wall. It looked eerily natural, as if he had been killed in the midst of reloading or seeking cover. Pretty cool stuff.
Other than this I wasn't too impressed by any of the games. Tony Hawk, Tiger Woods, and Madden all looked very good. But again, they aren't exclusive, and the graphical quality isn't very far removed from the XBox 360. It still boggles my mind that the system can come out a year after the competition with supposedly much more powerful hardware (and price to match), and not look significantly improved. The PS3 still has to prove itself as far as I'm concerned.
So, that was my experience with the PS3. My hands didn't boil when I touched the controller, it didn't explode when turned on, and it didn't shoot blinding rays into our eyes. So at least in that respect it's not as bad as I would have guessed.
Enjoy it, Graham.