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.
Only just saw your post today (fault caused our naked dsl to be down since the 14th of Dec until yesterday). I actually bought mine last year and had it sent from the US by my cousins (since i don’t seem to get a response from you these days i thought i’d pass on letting you know :P). But yeah, there really aren’t much games on it worth getting atm. I’ve only got Assassin’s Creed which i haven’t been playing much. Heck, i’ve been play older games ahead of it (eg. Valkyrie Profile 2). At least the one i got still has the hardware PS2 emulation…
Forgot to mention this, if you want to import games from the US (since the exchange rate is good and prices are often cheaper) then i recommend these two sites:
http://www.cduniverse.com
http://www.tronixweb.com
You may want to pick expedited shipping with cd universe as with priority they seem to always use FIMS rather than USPS and my last two orders took 4-5 weeks to arrive (though this near xmas time too). USPS Priority only takes about around a week to arrive. Going to see if i can request them to always use USPS in the future.