Sadly this. I still have one, but I don't use it.
The Original 60GB model:
I mean, yeah...Sony almost went bankrupt. Yeah...that thing was expensive. Yeah...almost no one knew how to tame that beast. Third party games were running like crap at first, Sony's first party studios took years to actually take advantage of it to the point it went from those bad first year games to masterpieces like MGS4 just 2 years later and then God Of War 3 or The Last Of Us. But let's leave aside those initial, tough years of development. That thing could do EVERYTHING.
It was compatible with PSOne and PS2 games. (basically Sony's entire catalog of games)
It allowed Wi-FI (yeah no cables to me was enough to be amazed at that point), it included 4(!!!) USB ports, an HDD of 60GB, multiple flash card readers (SD/MultiMedia Card, CompactFlash Type I/Type II, Microdrive, Memory Stick/PRO/Duo). Fully compatible with CD, DVD AND Blu-Ray. I remember literally putting a CD in there and the console asking me if i wanted to rip it to the HDD with the full tracklist, CD cover etc. This was the PS2's successor.
It was even compatible with other OS like Linux. The console literally had the Cell processor AND a PS2's Emotion Engine processor inside of it. All that with no brick included. Everything was inside the damn thing.
All that with a rather humble and simplistic OS look after you turned it on, totally costumizable.
Talking about that original PS3 console, everything looked so premium and amazing to me.
This was a 2006 console and it just blew me away.
A lot is said about the Sixaxis controller...and Sony's performance that generation in terms of consoles sold, and...you know...almost dooming Sony. All that is true...but am i the only one looking back to that piece of hardware and still amazed by the fact we actually got something like that in 2006?
It was kind of amazing.
And the reason that it was amazing is that it was futureproofed against a future that never existed.
You can see that in the hardware, where there was support for lots of memory card types because Sony didn't know which memory card would dominate. It turned out to be just USB storage plus SD and the PS3 would have been fine with none of those ports. The USB ports themselves were overkill, probably only a tiny fraction of PS3 owners ever had more than two things plugged in at the same time, but Sony were imagining people connecting tons of devices to the PS3 so they threw in four and did things like give it keyboard and mouse support on the XMB level and add printer support later.
You can see it with the XMB, a vision of the future, circa 2003 when the XMB first appeared, imagining a media universe divided neatly into music, pictures, videos and games, everything stored locally, all playback and additional features handled by the system itself. No such thing as an app. No way to perform multiple things at the same time, such as playing music in-game. There wasn't even in-game XMB until 2008.
You can see it in the amount of features the system has for media. Ripping CDs is the one that everyone brings up - it didn't just rip them, you could pick the format, pick the bitrate, and pick album art. You could group songs by genre and artist and year and add playlists, and the PS3 would look up the track listings so you didn't have to name them yourself. It does all this because Sony genuinely thought people would sit there listening to music on their PS3. The photo handler was beautiful - still one of the best-looking photo viewers ever created, with your photos mocked up to look like real photographs falling on to a scrolling timeline. It has a little photo physics simulator built in and it silently recognises faces and zooms in on them, because Sony genuinely thought people would sit there looking through years of photos on their PS3.
What's maybe even more amazing is that the actual PS3 that released was the result of someone in Sony looking at the original design and saying "that's too expensive, tone that down a bit". Look at what they originally wanted the back to look like:
Two HDMI ports. Another two USB ports. Three ethernet ports, because they wanted it to be a router as well. If Kutaragi hadn't gone unchecked it'd probably have cost about twice what it actually launched for.
The Wii was a considerably more capable machine than the GameCube. This is like saying the Switch is just a Wii U with more memory.
As someone who tried to get into the PS2 library in, like, 2017. These things barely work for meIn a "what's in the box" kinda way, sure.
But design wise, PS2 slim is still the GOAT.
The Panasonic Q wants a word...
Gunmetal fat PS3 probably my favorite looking console ever.
Yeah, I don't know how PS2 is going to be preserved. I gave it a try the other day and my PS2 still hangs in there. I think installing a hard drive 12 years ago and playing everything from there helped a lot.
Yeah, power sinks are a disqualifying flaw in hardware for me. I just spent two generations complaining about Nintendo's home hardware designs, but they're really good at this.
Exactly, at least there are more than enough manufactured PS2s out there for many years to come but the limited amount of working fat PS3 consoles will dry up rather quickly. Though PS3 itself (not sure if you were referring to 3 or 2) is safe thanks to the slim models.
I would agree if I didn't get three of them with the same problem :/ thank god they were cheap
No it's not.
Agreed. I picked up a PS2 quite late in the system's life. I wasn't a big fan of it (which was probably more to do with my familiarity with the GameCube and the Xbox than any failing on behalf of the PS2) but there were a handful of games that I really liked.
Here's my butt-ass naked phat PS3 playing Red Dead Redemption while clinging to life, staying just cool enough to keep the GPU from separating from the board and having to be stripped down and reflowed again. I loved this thing, but the shitty-ass solder, hot chips, and bad motherboard flex meant that something like the YLOD (and RROD for 360) was inevitable.
First models can have problems playing dual layer disc based games
