Having made a spontaneous decision to order a PS2 the week after it launched back in December 2000, I wondered if my resolve would hold this time around with the PS3 looming large. With the European launch a little over three weeks away, and the opportunity to buy one in three installments being offered at work, the temptation is everywhere.
However, when I look at the list of launch games, it helps to steady the itchy credit card finger. Don’t get me wrong – there are games I’d love to play, such as Resistance: Fall of Man, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Tiger Woods 2007, and Blazing Angels. And that’s not even counting the PlayStation Network titles like Fl0w, Calling All Cars, and the fun-with-ducks title Super Rub a Dub.
As fun as all those would be, there’s a distinct lack of anything I’m absolutely burning to play. You know? Like the stay/rush home from school type games that I enjoyed as a kid.
I thought that maybe it’s the absence of Madden on the release list (not that I’ve been playing that much on the PS2 recently, anyway), or that there isn’t a quality racing game other than F1 Championship Edition, which looks and plays really well, except for the fact I’ve come to hate everything F1 stands for.
So I began to wonder what games there’d need to be to ensure that I had to have one on launch day. Madden, I suppose is a given. If you add to that an Ace Combat title, Grand Theft Auto, Haze (by Free Radical, the TimeSplitters people, which isn’t due out for a while), and an IndyCar racing game, then I’d have ordered them all already and would be lying awake at night in anticipation.
However, knowing that most of the above wont arrive until some point within the next year, it kind of takes the urgency out of the need to have a PS3 immediately. That and the likelihood of seeing an IndyCar game is very small indeed, sadly – a downside of gaming being mass market nowadays.
What I do have is an HD TV – ready and waiting for when the time is right. Until then, current gen will have to do me.
