The New York Times reviewed the PS3 today, offering a dim mainstream view of the new system.
Seth Schiesel of the New York Times is not overly impressed with the PS3 after playing for a week. “The PS3, which was introduced in North America on Friday with a hefty $599 price tag for the top version, certainly delivers gorgeous graphics,” he said. “But they are not discernibly prettier than the Xbox 360’s. More important, the whole PlayStation 3 system is surprisingly clunky to use and simply does not provide many basic functions that users have come to expect, especially online.”
Most of the article compares the PS3 to the Xbox 360 and finds it lacking: “The PS3’s whole online experience feels tacked-on and unpolished. On the Xbox 360 each user has a single unified friends list, so you can track your friends and communicate with them easily, no matter what game you are in. On the PlayStation 3 most games have their own separate friends list and some have no friends function at all. There is a master list as well, but in order to communicate with anyone on it, you have to quit the game you are playing.”
The review has little good to say about the PS3 without qualifications, citing the Resistance: Fall of Man multiplayer as good fun and describing the arcade title Blast Factor as “suitably frantic”.
“Sony seems to have lost its way, first in digital music players, in which it ceded the ergonomic high ground to Apple’s iPod, and now in home-game consoles. For now Sony’s technologists seem to have won out over the people who study fun.”
Source: New York Times
