Remember the good ol' days when you put a game in and it just played. Blow in that cartridge, slam it into your SNES, hit power and your playing. Things have come a long way since those days: graphics, sound, story, overall design, etc. Games are now bigger and better than ever and the consoles powering them have to be more flexible to accommodate these pixel-pushing, resource hogs. Updates and patches are as common as brushing your teeth these days. Most of these are small and only take a few minutes at the most to download. They are never really an issue with me because I fire up my consoles and play something on them every couple of days. What about the gamers whoare very passive? The ones who play maybe once a week or even less? I think they might see things in a different light.

Recently SOCOM: Confrontation came out. My launch, 60GB PS3 crapped out on me four days before it came out (great timing) so I could not play it. Me and a buddy of mine used to be crazy SOCOM II players, strats, gamebattles, clans, practices, all night "tryout" rooms, the whole deal. We used to rack up hundreds of hours on our profiles and know every intricacy of every map, it was awesome. As time goes on, we have less and less time to play but I thought since my PS3 is broken and his isn't, we should play some dam SOCOM. After I picked up the game and headed over to his place, we pop it in, waiting diligently for our first game. Wait, online is not hooked up, hasn't been for weeks, so we hook it up. FIRMWARE UPDATE, uh ok, this seems standard, about 20 minutes for this and we should be good to go. INSTALLING GAME, oh, I forgot about this. Okay, install the game to reduce load times and make the game run smoother, yadda, yadda, yadda. Another 20 minutes pass and it's game time... not quiet. GAME UPDATE, this is a juicy 400MB+ update that takes over 30 minutes to download, jeez. So after the firmware update, game install, and updating the game, we have enough time to play a couple games.

Now I'm all for keeping the PS3 up to date with the most current firmware and installing games to the HDD to make them run smoother and having updates come out to make online games run better but come on. From popping the game in to actually playing it took over an hour, that's fuckin' crazy. There doesn't seem to be an answer or work around to to this issue yet but something has got to change here. The days of popping in a game and just playing it right away seem to be slipping away and, in the words of my good friend, ". . .[that's] fuckin' bullshit". I totally agree.

First it started with a few lock-ups, system freezes. Then some games didn't want to work. I would come home to find the PS3 having a red blinking light where the warm, welcoming green light was. "Power surge or something" I thought, couldn't be my PS3. My launch day, 60GB, backwards compatible beauty, no way. Today I wanted to get in some time on the Home Beta. I turned it on, was checkin' out what new videos I downloaded from the store, then it happened. The PS3 turned off and started blinking red right before my eyes. In disbelief, I reset it, only to have it turn on for a second - flash yellow - and back to blinking red. Again and again, the same thing.

Well I did have an extended warranty, so I called Best Buy to get things sorted. I got the "Uhhhh.... well.... you see.... I'm not sure...." guy on the phone who after 5 minutes of uncertain conversing he took my number and said the manager would call me back. An hour goes by and I get worried, back on the phone. This time I get a different guy who says, "Uhhh yeah, the manager left." So I decide to bring it in. A young lad takes my finger smudged, scratched up PS3 and says, "So yeah, we're going to have to send it away. If it takes longer than 60 days, you get a new one." I describe to him that there are no more 60GB PS3's so he explained to me that I would get a PS3 closest to 60GB specs. He said that ordering the Motorstorm Bundle or the Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle, both apparently have backward compatibility, was an option. So I sit here now, typing away, counting the days until SOCOM: Confrontation comes out, only to have no PS3 to play it on. LAME!

So I ran all over town trying to find this game and I finally got my claws on it. Gran Turismo 5: Prologue is a small $40.00 "taste of things to come". A little something from the guys at Polyphony Digital to hold over all the crazy Gran Turismo fans. The GT franchise has always been the leading edge in the simulation racing genre and there's no exception here. There are only a handful of tracks and about 60 cars to choose from, a nice chunk of game but by GT standards it's a drop in the bucket. New to the series is the in-car cockpit view that looks amazing, every gauge and trinket in every car moves around like it would in real life. Even the detail on the stitching of the drivers gloves and hand movements to shift or e-brake are modeled/animated very well.

Another addition is the 16 player online races, the structure to get into these races are clunky and it does take a while to get into an actual race. The lag in the races can get pretty serious and because of the lack of damage in this installment (still) people like to bumber-car their way to 1st. Even though online is a bit sketchy right now, Polyphony is aware of all the problems and they are finally going to incorporate damage sometime soon. It's nice to see a franchise like this take baby steps to accommodate the fan outcry for features that have been long overdue. Even if these steps are messy and wind up in "Connection Lost" screens and jerks driving backwards on tracks.

Overall I'm having a really good time with the game, it sucks that there are no license tests in this one though, I always really enjoyed those. Aside from that I have tried my one last attempt at playing Xbox Originals on my Xbox 360. I got the backwards compatibility disc in the mail a few days ago, I popped it in and followed the on screen instructions. After my console restarted I tried Halo and Dreamfall, nothing. As well as my retail disc of Doom 3 and still nothing. I have come to the conclusion that it is my 120GB HDD because I did play Doom 3 just fine on my smaller HDD, I should have thought something was up when I bought it off ebay for only $115.00. Now all I need is a memory unit so I can swap HDD's and play some Xbox Originals on my shitty 13GB free HDD that came with my 360. w00t!