Playstation 3: Start saving your money now. [UPDATE]

Just finished watching the marathon Sony E3 Press Conference. So what did we learn?

• The worldwide launch will be in November. Speaking of November, why is it always November for launching new consoles? At what point did the game industry decide this would be a good time for consoles to launch?
• The PS3 will come in two flavors. Expensive and Insanely Expensive. $499 for the basic package that includes a 20 GB hard drive. $599 for the suped up version which comes with a 60 GB drive. Other then that, they are the same system. Looks like they aren’t going to be the same system. The cheap version doesn’t have HDMI out (retarded) or a Memory Stick slot (weird). Oh well, now it’s really going to become an issue with price. Why the hell would I want to cripple my entertainment experience? [Thanks Carl for the update].
• The PS3 controller looks just like the Dual Shock we all use now. Only difference is that in this new version they blatantly stole the motion sensing idea from Nintendo. Who will pull it off better? Dunno but it’s gonna be fun to see. Also, it’ll be bluetooth out of the box and apparently weighs close to nothing.
• 1080p resolution and possibly upscaling,  though the PowerPoint slide was misleading in this idea.
• The online component looks to have shades of XBox Live ideas in there but the Sony version will be free for everyone. Color me interested.

Other then that there were many videos shown of potential games as well as some games that were being played on the actual Playstation 3 hardware.

EA had me really impressed with some of the technology they are going to be putting into there next gen games, especially footplanting. Basically the players will look more fluid when running around a field, court or wherever. Instead of moving in 45 degree angles like they do now, there is more fluid range of motion which adds to the realism of the players movement.

All in all I wasn’t really blown away with what was presented. There were a few moments where I was watching the stream intently, the Eye Toy presentation or the demo of a new face/body recognition application EA is using.

The price is going to be a big factor. That is an insane amount of money for game console. But then again, it’s not really a normal game console. It’s a blu-ray dvd player that plays games (or the other way around). So maybe it’s not all that insane for the price. I’ll have to look at the price of the PS2 when it was launched vs the price of a stand-alone DVD player at the time.

Also, I want to give a big thumbs down to Gamespot’s handling of thier streams. The 700K stream (which easily could be handled by my FiOS connection) sucked. It would constantly be buffering when there was a lot going on in the video. And once you see a streaming video in 700k and then switch to 300k you really get depressed.