Game Over

I surrender. I broke down and got a PlayStation 3 40gb.

A year ago I was enjoying my Wii and laughing at the $699 PlayStation 3 ridiculousness as sales were dismal and Sony was reportedly still taking huge losses on hardware. Blu-Ray and HD DVD were fighting it out in the early rounds of the next generation format wars, with major studios on both sides of the issue and few consumers willing to bite.

Flash forward to yesterday. I'm salivating for a new gaming rig, but also want to upgrade our home theater to a high-def input. I also am wincing at spending $1,500 on a new desktop...maybe $1,000 if I really hold back on the latest stuff. Think about it: $200 for mobo/cpu, $100 for ram, $150 for a hard drive, $300 for a Blu-Ray drive, $150 for Vista or other software that will legally play the DRM-protected movies, $200 for a GPU that is a) pretty close to top-end, b) compliant with Vista, c) compliant with Blu-Ray, $150 for a power supply that can provide all that juice...the list goes on and on and on... Aaaaarg!

So then you look at the new new 40GB PS3 at $399:

* Blu-Ray
* SIX free Blu-Ray movies. SIX!!! (This includes Spider-Man 3 plus five other titles in offer.)
* USB keyboard and mouse support out of the box (hmmm, just like a computer)
* Next-gen gaming hardware with great graphics
* A solid and growing list of movie and game titles
* Full Linux compatibility (Sony encourages this, huh??!), which means...
* You can run WINE, which means...
* With a bit of patching you can run your favorite PC games without needing Windows

So yeah as you can probably tell I'm going to geek this sucker out and try to get Command and Conquer 3 running on the PS3. If I don't have to waste too much time and it works well...I'll consider it the best $399 I've ever spent.