Nick

A couple of months ago, I bought a Playstation 3. I was a little surprised actually. My general rule of thumb for buying a console is that it has to be less than $400 and there must be more than $400 worth of games (released or upcoming) that I want to get for it… otherwise I’d be in the apparantly ridiculous situation of spending more on the console than on games for the console. Usually this means that I won’t buy consoles until a couple of years after they are released. (The Gamecube and Wii are notable exceptions since they launched at less than $400.)

Anyhow, throwing my rule of thumb aside, I bought a Playstation 3 for $699 with a game (Heavenly Sword) included in that price (yay GameTraders!). I think that clincher for getting the Playstation 3 was seeing it running at Phil’s place. He had all these demos downloaded and seemed to spend a fair amount of time just playing them. I thought that was great because, being a jaded gamer, I tend to get bored with games after a few hours (if that) and I could just get the demos instead of shelling out for the full game. Also, HD output looked fantastic.

Thus far I’ve downloaded a dozen or so demos and I figure that has saved me a fair amount of money; most of the games aren’t worth shelling out money for IMHO. The exceptions possibly being skate. (which has an awesome control scheme) and Heavenly Sword (which I already have). I bought Flow (which was worth it) and LocoRoco Cocoreccho (which wasn’t). I enjoyed the Sega Rally, Stuntman, and GT4 HD demos, but I don’t enjoy driving games enough to buy them.