I was given a PS3 for my birthday last month by my awesome wife who loves me very much. This is in spite of my out of control gadget addiction. God bless her. Anyway, after the fall of HD-DVD I really wanted to get into Blu-ray for my movie collection. I mean, whats the point of 106" projection if your not gonna watch movies in HD!?! So, we figured if we were going to drop $400 on a BLu-ray player we should just get a PS3 for the same money. She also got me some movies (V for Vendetta which I love!) and a few games (Unreal 3 and Sol Caliber 4). Everything was great. Movies look amazing, the games were good. Even the interface, while minimal was kinda nice.
Then I heard about the SOCOM beta. Now, I've never played any of the SOCOM games before, being a die hard Xbox guy, but I figured "Beta test!! Why not?" So, the beta was ok. I fell in love with the game, when it worked. And this is the crux of the problem. Without a central online PAID service like Live you cannot get a quality game. Period! The SOCOM servers were always down, or flakey, or a patch would be released that broke, well, everything. But everyone figured, "Hey, it's a beta. They will fix it by retail release!" Sadly this was not the case. The game has been out for two weeks now and received around three patches and it still performs as bad as the beta. Now you could blam this on the developer. And I do to a certain extent. But Sony should have central servers and a solid API for interacting with them.
This condition persisted with the Resistence 2 beta. Days would go by where the servers would not respond at all. No matchmaking, no game list. Nothing at all. And these games were on-line only. That is just insane! In SOCOM you can't even change you load outs wothout signing into the server.
In contrast, games on the 360 just work. All the time. Even the betas I've been in. Halo 3 beta was perfect. And the network code was amazing! No lag, no stutter. It was smart enough to work around issues like this.
I just don't know why Sony wastes time on things like Home when it should be improving it's on-line gaming strategy.
Until then, I'll use my PS3 as a great Blu-ray player, and occaionaly check to see if SOCOM is working. It has the potential to be a really great game.
Now if MS could get an exclusive on a new Counter-Strike...