Bear in mind this is the first game from that franchise that I played.

Top games of the year in approximate order of goodness were:

1. GTA 4 (Playstation 3)
2. Fallout 3 (PC)
3. Dead Space (Xbox 360)
4. Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360)

All of these games were fairly close to each other in quality and excellent overall.  GTA 4 however was a highly polished, high production value game and was clearly a notch better.

Biggest dissapointment of the year award goes to Resistance 2 (Playstation 3).

The way this winner was decided was simple – what gave me the most enjoyment for the longest time.  Runner-ups were just as good this time around.

Mass Effect

Runner-Ups

• Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
• Call of Duty 4
• Half-Life 2 Episode 2

PS3 Game of the Year

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Xbox 360 Game of the Year
 

Mass Effect

Runner-Ups

Halo 3

2007 Best Audio

Bioshock – for licensed music, voice acting and dialogue writing

2007 Biggest Disappointments

Crysis

Runner-Ups

• Bioshock
• Heavenly Sword
• Assassin’s Creed
• Stalker

2007 Platform of the Year

Xbox 360

The three most useful new features:

• DVD upscaling
• PS1/PS2 game upscaling
• Media Streaming (DLNA support)

DVD upscaling is simply amazing.  This is the best implementation that I’ve ever seen.  People still claim Toshiba is doing it slightly better – but I don’t have that.  What I do have is HQV benchmark and that one when run on PS3 gives me the best score I’ve ever seen.  Only one frame sequence failed to deinterlace properly!  And apart from not doing all the noise filtering that it could do, I have no complaints whatsoever.  It only does 1% overscan on top and 0% on all other sides!  The picture looks great.  I turned off my DVD player and am using my PS3 for DVD playback all the time.

Game upscaling is also great, though I have not been able to establish quantitatively how good it is, other than it is considerably better.

Media streaming… it took a while to even get it to work.  Photos and music were not too tough but video took me more than a week.  It took much longer to get it to play back my lossless audio, but it can do even that now.  The only remaining problem is video – the quality isn’t all that good but more importantly, other than 1.5x fast forward, you can’t do anything else without it restarting.  So it’s not really useful for video at all.  Hopefully this will be improved in the near future.

Of course, the big – very big, billion-dollar news – happened on Thursday. Micro$oft will be pruning that $ tree of theirs and grant all of us owners a godly extension of warranty – to 3 full years, worldwide. They also apologized for the mistake in their hardware.

So I know I will eventually end up with a permanently fixed Xbox360. I just doubt it will be my next one.

Latest firmware – 1.6, rolled out for European launch – brings the long-awaited background downloading. Bluetooth mouse and keyboard are finally supported natively. Web browser is finally fast and user friendly. Sony Store is faster and has more content. Various other issues with XMB menus have been fixed or improved. Owners of PSP and 20GB version can now use remote play – something I never expected to see (and the reason I wanted the 60GB version). I was very happy when I was finally able to remove the Bluetooth dongle and register my mouse and keyboard with the PS3. The process was very simple – just as it should be. And the integration seems good – you can use mouse to navigate the menus, or in the browser. You can use keyboard too. I don’t think either worked before, but I might be wrong. The browser itself is much faster and more compliant than before, and menus are now properly labeled so you don’t need to guess which key does what. But you can also use mouse if you wish, and it will even let you navigate menus without clicking.

Controller button menu has been reshuffled so its new layout means less work and time to activate most frequent commands. I hear you can now resume BluRay playback where you stopped, if you leave the player, and you can also set up the console to automatically launch the disc that’s in it upon power on (be it game or movie).

Folding@Home is a very neat addition that looks and works impressively for a 1.0 version (it may not be new outside PS3 world, but it’s still a new architecture). Background downloading worked pretty well, too. Unfortunately it will not continue with downloads if you’re within the Folding@Home – presumably because there’s a network connection active – but it’s much better than before.

And of course, if you have North American or Japanese version, PS 1/2 game compatibility has been improved since launch and is now excellent.

Of course, not all is well. The machine still only plays a very limited set of video formats, making it pretty useless for that purpose. It is also still unable to access content shared folders on the network. It doesn’t upscale DVDs. It doesn’t let you import music in losless format. Linux is still just a gimmick (unless you want to use Cell). There are still no AAA games other than Resistance. There’s still no option set up your own background (come on, even PSP can do it). The list of exclusives is shrinking by the week (they just lost the exclusivity of the Devil May Cry franchise). It’s not quiet. And it uses a lot of power to operate, even if it’s just sitting idle.

The potential is still there; whether PS3 will ever became a real media center – or even a must-have gaming machine – still remains to be seen. But at least I’m starting to feel at least a little bit pleased as I move around the XMB.

Grand Turismo HD is truly a sight to behold.  There are a few pieces that look unpolished (some parts of graphics look amazing, some look only average) but this is still only a demo of a game that’s not yet close to being released.  I’ve seen only one track, but there’s plenty of cars to choose from.  Well, at 600+MB it is not a small download, so it’s understandable there wouldn’t be many tracks (or perhaps even more than just one, given how detailed the picture is).

Motostorm also looked good but it wasn’t as much fun to me, because I seem to suck at it rather badly.  I hope I can improve since this is the only game I can imagine buying for this console in the next few months.

After a few days of ownership, I can say the following:

PS3 – the good

1. BluRay disk for gaming storage provides plenty of capacity for the future
2. BluRay movie playback provides ability to watch new content in high definition
3. There’s linux for it, giving some hope for future functionality expansion
4. Controller is light, battery life seems ok.
5. Games can look and sound good, as you can witness if you play Resistance: Fall of Man.  No frame rate problems.
6. You can connect PSP to your PS3 and have it stream videos and even download and play PS1 games.
7. It’s shiny black.  You might like how it looks – but just maybe.
8. User replaceable standard 2.5″ SATA hard drive lets you upgrade to higher capacity – if you could only find what to put on it.
PS3 – the bad

1. You better have bought it for the BluRay… because you won’t get much value of its other features (not yet, and for some maybe never).
2. PS2 compatibility, depending on your situation, is pretty bad because of major graphical glitches (pixel flipping).
3. There’s linux… but it can’t do much.  A used PC that you could pick up somewhere for $100 would do more, and better.  Normally, you’d expect this to improve, but for political reasons, it may never get any better.  Right now, it only plays videos in a window (not enough power to do it full screen).  Switching between linux and game os is very clumsy.  Boot time is too long to be considered for a real media center (which isn’t entirely PS3′s fault though).
4. Controller sure does not feel like it’s worth $60.  Trigger buttons are terrible, at least as utilized in Resistance.
5. PS3 can’t play almost any media that you’d want it to.  Who needs yet another box that can play mp3′s?  Or who has mpeg4 or h.264 videos in some weird container formats that nobody is really using?  Who wants yet another thing that you can plug in your memory cards to watch slideshows from?
6. PS3 can’t play media from the network either!
7. To reiterate 5 and 6, PS3 is useless as a media player.
8. Controller issues – requiring pairing every time system is updated.
9. More controller issues – very clumsy implementation of controller if switching OSes, rebooting or especially playing PS2 games.
10. Even more controller issues – getting stuck during the game, possibly due to  connectivity losses during gameplay – which is absolutely not allowed for a gaming console.
11. No IR means no universal remote control can control your PS3, which is a showstopper for any serious home theatre use – and it’s supposed to be a BluRay player, isn’t it?
12. Downloading from Sony Store can fail, and you won’t be able to resume it!  A big problem for people with limited traffic accounts – which is just about the entire population of Canada!  Not being able to do anything while (typicall very large) download is in progress may be acceptable in some cases, but not being able to resume transfer in today’s day and age is completely unacceptable.
13. It may seem quiet at first… but it will ramp up after at most half an hour.  And at that point it will be just as loud as Xbox360 in dashboard.  The BluRay drive is quiet, though, so it will never be as loud as Xbox360 during the game.  But quiet, it isn’t.  Very disappointing, mostly because it seemed like it will do great regarding this one issue.
14. Announced accessories such as Bluetooth remote and PS2 savegame adapter seem to only exist on paper.
15. PS2 savegame adapter is one way only – if you could even find one, if it even exists.

To sum it up, PS3 suffers from a major lack of polish.  Many issues are so severe that they render the feature they’re tied to essentially useless.  I would not recommend it to anyone, except people who want a BluRay player and are hardcore gamers at the same time.  Until then, if you want next generation gaming, just get a Xbox360 - if you can stand the horrible noise, that is.

This evening, just before closing, a PlayStation 3 was on display, available for purchase, at Superstore Metrotown.  Just one, but it was 60G and it was available.  On top of it, the guy added two Wiimotes to the behind-counter staging area just before closing (and positioned PS3 which was behind counter, all the way up so everyone can see it).