Played Playstation 3 - initial thoughts

Toys R Us in Times Square (NYC) had a setup of 6 PS3's playing NBA Live 07 and some demo games. I played a game of NBA Live then watched my brother try a 4x4 racing demo.

NBA looks great and appears to run at or near 60fps. The detail is amazing and it is notably sharper resolution than my 360, although this is probably largely due to my lack of an HDTV rather than a huge gap in the hardware. Sounded good but frankly sound is making less strides compared to visuals in any of the new formats. One thing I noted was that the stadium had many background polygons and crowd shapes that moved well - I haven't seen the 360 version to compare.

The controller was a regular PS2 looking controller, and it supposedly had some motion tech in it to juke, dodge, lean, etc while playing NBA but I didn't pay attention enough to really see if it worked well - the controllers were tethered to the display with a tough cord anyway, so it didn't come to mind to start swinging them around. I was winning my game and wasn't thinking at all about the motion sensors - did they do anything? Controller was very lightweight, less beefy than the 360 controllers. Ultimately, I was unimpressed as I have never taken to the PS controller - since PS1 I found it to be oddly-shaped and not ideally proportioned for my hands. Then again, I used to own an Atari Jaguar so maybe ergonomics doesn't stop me from buying a system.

The 4x4 game had amazing lighting and texture effects, and the car explosions were great ala Burnout. The canyons and scenery were very big in scale. However, the frame rate looked around 20 fps, more like the old Sega Rally on Saturn rather than the 30fps PGR 2 and 3. Very choppy.

From that brief experience, PS3 looks great but I can't say I would prefer it over the 360 [based on what I saw]. I think it's very impressive, but not enough to stop me from buying a 360 now (well, 3 weeks ago) rather than waiting for a PS3 later. Still being a price sensitive consumer, once price is added in as a factor I am less impressed. Would I have bought one at the same or nearly the same price as the Xbox 360? Maybe. Will it be available for a long, long time? Unlikely.