Overly Positive

Take my PS3, please?

Here at OP, there’s nothing better than responding to things from the geek community that are out there and adding to the discussion at hand. By lending a positive, warm voice to the masses of internet angst, I only hope to make a small bit of difference to both of my regular readers.

The OP Ping is my effort to respond or talk about some of the more interesting bits of news and items out there and give a shout-out to those folks worth reading, listening, or watching.

I love podcasts as driving material during my forays out of the house, and one of the staples for me is Sarcastic Gamer‘s Red Show, featuring discussion about the latest gaming news and releases. I like the SGC, mostly because you have a bunch of guys in Doc, Dave, and Lono who don’t sound stuffy, who report and discuss the stuff they do without being pretentious, and who are awfully self-deprecating for a show and website with the amount of success it has achieved in just over a year. It’s good stuff. Subscribe if you can.

Anyway, this week’s Podcast, entitled “Super Ninja Girl” (you’d have to listen to get it) was filled with the usual banter about releases like Mirror’s Edge and Call of Duty: World at War, but for about 5 minutes, it had a serious case of the Mondays. Tired of being called XBox 360 fanboys especially in light of an article written by Lono about the underperforming PS3 hype, there was a moment during the show where Doc and Lono let loose on all the abuse they’ve been taking over an apparent XBox 360 bias.

It was a jarring moment from the fun-loving, semi-serious, informative tone to the angry, rant-filled  stuff I’m normally used to reading on the Internet.

Hey, let some nobody blogger cheer you up, guys. I’d say that a lot of this stuff is honestly about expectations not being met, a persistent problem with games in general these days. Buying into the hype is always a guaranteed disappointment. Marketing spin is some of the worst to listen to, even worse when it comes from the mouth of a developer, and the PS3 is no different.

You gotta get excited by lowering your expectations. You’ve got to say “hey, Playstation Home is going to be pretty much a steaming pile of nothing that no one will touch with a 10 foot pole.” You’ve got to say “the Playstation 3 is going to lose even more exclusives to the ever-encroaching XBox 360 market”. You’ve got to be thinking that the PS3 is going to have not just “its year”, but “its worse year”. And then when it actually marginally does better, you can feel better about spending $599 on a system that won the format wars but not much else. See? It’s like not scoring the hot person you’re attracted to and settling for the average, hot-when-they-want-to-be one. You still score, right?

I mean, let’s not get all emo wrist-cutting here, guys. So Little Big Planet is going through some crazy censorship thing with levels having copyrighted content. And maybe Socom is suffering from some terribad netcode that would make a network admin weep at night. These things happen. Isn’t that what they say about the 360′s red rings? Buck up!

I own a PS3 and not a 360. Heck, I’ve got no choice but to look forward to Singstar ABBA this year. Why not make the most of it.