He's just a big kid

Currently waiting for Best Buy to open to buy a PS3.

I guess I'm a little embarrassed to say this is a luxury purchase for me, nothing to do with the kids and one with no solid educational, environmental, or social worth. Its just a new toy for a big kid. A tech treat just in time for Father's Day.

As some may know I value top notch quality and strive for a rich existence. This includes my AV entertainment and to some degree the new world (for me) of video gaming.

So when I bought my Sony Bravia 1080p LCD last spring I was hoping it wouldn't be too long a wait to experience the very best in home video quality - high definition movies. Luckily since then, the HD DVD vs Blu-ray war has been settled. So what's brought me to this latest purchase decision ?

As it turns out, the Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) is not only (arguably) the best video game console on the market, but its also a very good Blu-ray disc (BD) player. I've actually been asking a lot of Sony experts and sure enough the BD technology in the PS3 is exactly the same as Sony's standalone BD players. Furthermore, the PS3 is priced very close to entry level, single purpose BD players on the market today. But why today ?

Today is the world release of an exclusive PS3 game called MetalGearSolid 4 (which definitely looks cool). The clever clogs have bundled this game with the hard to find 80gb version of the PS3. Hold on, it now gets a bit complicated...the dirty secret is that to be backwardly compatible with PS2 games (which my son has many) you need the 80gb version not the cheaper 40gb version. Plus this version will upconvert the video quality of those games to 1080p. One extra small bonus is the bundle comes with new version of the controller.

So now there's about 10 of of us in line and rumour has it there's somewhere between 5 and 30 in stock.

Stay tuned.