They say it got smart: a 2008 review of the PS3

The revolution will not be televised, it will be downloaded an update at a time

Back in the crazy days before the current generation of gaming consoles, the console you bought at retail was the console you had for the life of the hardware. My SNES acts exactly the same now as it did when it was first released, and outside of the addition of Xbox Live, the first Xbox system remained largely unchanged throughout the hardware's life cycle. Those days are long over, and now which version of Sony's PlayStation 3 that you bought is only one part of the equation: welcome to the firmware wars.

The PS3's Protean design

No console system has changed so dramatically in the time since its launch as the PlayStation 3. We rather notoriously gave the 60GB model a six when it was first released, and we stand by that rating—the system just felt undercooked. What player of high-definition media can't display content in 720p? Also, the lack of background downloading felt like a drag when we tried to use the online store. And the games were mostly terrible; there wasn't anything that looked as good as the titles on the then-mature Xbox 360, much less any evidence that the PS3 was as powerful as Sony had promised. Remember, this was the system that had been hyped from here to eternity, so it was easy to feel let down by Sony's anemic launch offerings. The PS3 never became hard to find, the price cuts began sooner than expected, and the system has been trailing both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii almost every month since it has been released.

It may sound a bit dire when you sum it up like that, but something has been happening with the PlayStation 3 since launch. The firmware has received update after update. The Blu-ray capability has become much stronger, and it may in fact be the most affordable and fully-featured high definition disc player on the market. The price has come down to a much more palatable $400 for the 40GB model, and the game selection continues to improve, with strong multiplatform support and a wide selection of exclusive games. Finally, the Sixaxis has been discontinued, and in its place now sits the Dual Shock 3: a controller with both motion-sensing capabilities and rumble.

Sony has done an amazing job of rallying behind its flagship system, and where there used to be arrogance there is a now a more realistic sense of what needs to be done, as well as a more open approach to dealing with the press and bloggers alike. Sony launched its own blog to speak directly to the consumers, for instance, and both the PlayStation blog in the US and ThreeSpeech in the UK do a great job of providing news; both sites also have many developers and publishers interacting directly with the comments. Even the commercials for the system have gotten better. This approach seems to be saying one thing to console gamers like us, who were unimpressed with the system at launch: "We're different now. We understand what went wrong. Come home to the PlayStation you know."

So today, in light of all that has changed since the system's launch, we're going to re-review the PlayStation 3 by taking a look at the system you'll get if you buy one today, not the system that launched in November of 2006. Trust us, it's no longer a six.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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