Playing the greatest adventure of all.

It’s late Sunday morning. The better half is at work on a training day, the dog has been fed and is now lazily mooching round the garden looking for sticks and bugs to eat. I’ve successfully handled the kids breakfast without incident and the youngest (Lily, who’s just over a year old) has been changed and dressed.

The eldest of the two children who are here today (there can be up to 4 some weekends!) is unbelievably sitting quietly and playing with her sibling. The madness that is the morning is over and the television is unusually free.

As I sit down in the armchair I quickly do a final scan of the room; it’s still calm, the jobs really are done and the TV really is available. Opportunities like this don’t come along often so I pick up the SIXAXIS pad and turn on our Playstation 3.


Half an hour later and I’m standing up, SIXAXIS in hand and Super Stardust HD on pause. I ‘save’ Lily from the precipice that is the edge of the sofa from which she is about to dive off head first. Had Epyx still been around, she’d be in their next game! The lights of her all singing all flashing walker catch her attention and off she toddles.

I un-pause the game and narrowly avoid the incoming enemy I had forgotten about in the meantime. Games like Stardust don’t allow you much time to readjust but somehow I’m still alive; and after a frantic few seconds re-acquainting myself with my environment I’m in my rhythm again.

Hundreds of rocks are exploding from my barrage of fire and the enemies, although increasing in number are not faring any better.

Somehow I manage to keep it going, half of my brain managing to direct my fire with delicate accuracy whilst all the time the other half uses part of my vision and aural capabilities to monitor Lily’s playtime.

Having failed to base jump from the sofa and then destroy the walker, Lily converts to Solid Snake mode and makes here way over to the chest of drawers. She thinks I don’t notice; failing to realise she lacks a cardboard box and that I have deliberately positioned myself where I can see both the television and the entirety of the room.

As she approaches the drawers I hit boost in an effort to find some clear space among the ever increasing field of debris and get ready to hit pause for the 6th time.

But she gets there quicker than I anticipated. Perhaps realising a guard lay in wait, her speed increases and before I know it she’s there and the drawer begins to open. There’s nothing dangerous in there of course but like most parents I worry about the possibility of trapped fingers and the household documents that are about to be shredded or hidden by this master infiltrator.

I leap to my right and my rescue attempt is successful but unfortunately my reactions are not so quick this time with the pause button. A split second is all some enemies need; and this one has used the split second respite from my onslaught to smash my ship into a million virtual particles of light whilst I save the Princess in my other ‘game’.

One spare ship remains. But as my third sight pauses to evaluate what turns out to be another non-danger event, that comfort zone erodes and The Last Starfighter enters battle.

The unexpected timing of his predecessors fates combined with my own style of play means that this last warrior has a rather ample stock of smart bombs. I’ve racked up a fair score by my own standards and whilst I’ll never challenge for the top spot on the global leaderboards; the top spot from my friends list is within reach.

The last fighter is good,very good. With the kind of determination and luck only a last fighter seems to possess, he’s laying waste to all in his path with a devastating efficiency. The bombs are not only still intact, they’ve been added to whilst the score is rapidly rising.

A swarm of homing type enemies surrounds the ship, confident in the number of their ranks. The circle they have formed quickly tightens; slowly strangling the limited space my fighter has to manoeuvre. But I’m ready for this, in fact I’d been waiting for it, and my finger hovers over the right trigger ready to unleash the most devastating item in my arsenal – the smart bomb.

I’m calm and in sync with the game despite my permanent observations elsewhere. I don’t panic, but instead let the enemy draw closer so I can ensure the imminent detonation takes down as many of the enemy as possible. Just a little closer and…

” Are you one, are you two, are you three, are you four?”

“Are you five, six, seven, or maybe more?”

“CBeebies wishes you a happy birthday with lots of birthday cards through your door.”

“Happy Birthday!”

It takes a moment for the reality to sink in and when it does I laugh out loud as I see Lily sitting next to me with the remote, a big grin etched on her face! I give her a kiss and laugh even more when I realise she’s switched the TV’s source input with the cable remote, something no one in the household even knows how to do (we all use the actual TV remote).

I flick the source back over but of course I know the outcome already; the Princess has destroyed him, his fearsome arsenal no match for the power of Cbeebies.

Ands that’s what it’s like when you get older. Some say your hand eye co-ordination goes but I retaliate with the fruit that is experience, experience born in real arcades and eventually nurtured at home. Ultimately it’s really all about time.

When you’re older you have less time to play, less time to practice and too many games to fill into too few slots. You ultimately become a digital whore; pimping yourself out to many whilst committing to none.

But I don’t envy those who look down on me from the height of the global scoreboards. My points may be less but in many ways they were harder to achieve and required a skill they have yet to need or learn.

Everyday I play and I fight and I strive to be the best Dad I can be. I’ve rescued the Princess more than them and I’ve unlocked far better achievements. Because every time my kids smile or laugh and every time I pick them back up I know I’m in the best adventure of them all.

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PS3 isn’t the best games machine, but it is a great piece of kit.

The current generation of consoles marked something of a departure for me. At any other time in my gaming life I have always brought all the new consoles at the point of (or very close to) their release dates. This time around however I’ve only just now completed the ‘set’ with our recent acquisition of an 80GB Playstation 3.

When the machine launched it was extremely expensive and given the lack of any real decent exclusive titles I decided to wait until there were some titles on the system I wanted to actually play.

Since then the PS3 has hardly set the world on fire with its games and thus I never really got round to making the purchase. A console should live and breathe in the quality of its games library and to date the PS3 has offered very little that isn’t already being done better on Microsoft’s winter heater.



Multi-format titles have on the whole been better on the 360 (The Orange Box debacle instantly springs to mind as does the more recent Ghostbusters ‘admission’ by Terminal Reality) and to date the exclusives generally have been more appealing (Halo series, Gears of War, PGR, GTA IV exclusive DLC).

Some developers such as Haze’s Free Radical have voiced complaints over the PS3 being difficult to code for, whilst heavy hitter Valve have gone one step further and simply refused full stop to code for the system. This decision alone means that PS3 owners may never get to experience the brilliance that is Left 4 Dead and potentially the up and coming (soon I hope!) Half Life 2: Episode 3.

I must admit that Uncharted: Drakes Fortune and Little Big Planet have both nearly persuaded me to part with my cash previously but unusually the sensible family man overruled the impulsive gamer’s heart.

It’s also worth noting that although I do not consider myself a ‘fan boy’, I do at times tend to think of Sony more negatively than the other two big hitters. This is mainly due to the impact Sony has had on Sega over the years; they are after all responsible for Sega’s exit from the hardware market, they killed the Dreamcast right? Well no, Sega unfortunately managed that all by themselves.

Sega failed to recognise the importance of 3D with the Saturn, produced a machine for the ‘hardcore’ (I prefer the term old skool mind you) and missed out on a whole new generation of ‘clubbing’ gamers.

They then produced the brilliant and pioneering Dreamcast, failed to market it so anyone really knew what it was and again produced old skool games. Now that’s great for someone like me but was hardly likely to entertain the newer (and by now much larger) gaming demographic.

Now you may well assume given so much negativity on my part and the minor bias towards all things blue and spiky that I’m simply writing here to bash Sony and its black monolith. But to my own surprise I’m actually writing to say how impressed with it I really am.

Whilst many will no doubt disagree, it’s not in this writer’s opinion the best out and out system for games, something I have covered enough above. It’s expensive (although at the time of writing there are numerous price cuts around due to the imminent arrival of the PS3 Slim) and very surprisingly the word Playstation is no longer synonymous to many with the phrase games console. Owning a Playstation isn’t the cool thing it was in the past.

Bizarrely we actually never really ‘paid’ for our PS3, it came ‘free’ with my partners new mobile phone contract (I’m holding off on renewing mine for the launch of the PSP Go!).

Our sole reason at the time for picking the PS3 as our freebie was that due to various circumstances we no longer had a DVD player in the main living room. Since the PS3 is both a DVD and Blu-ray player it seemed the obvious choice for us despite its gaming shortcomings.

What we never realised at the time was just how good the PS3 is at serving as our complete family entertainment centre. And it’s here that the PS3 really excels, it is because of this the PS3 sees use in our household every day and by several occupants.

We have our DVD and Blu-ray player for our films. We have a music centre which streams music from our PC effortlessly along with our photo and video collection. Then there’s Vidzone, essentially a free music video channel where you pick what plays. And of course there’s the games, finally Uncharted and Little Big Planet are getting my well deserved attention (Uncharted being the first game in ages that I’ve actually bothered to complete). Heck we can even surf the net with it during the television ad breaks.

Of course the 360 also has some media features of its own but they simply are not as well implemented.

The DVD player is DVD only and it’s intrusively noisy for a front room. The media streaming works to a point but it’s not as easy or as smooth as on the PS3. The music videos on Live are limited and have to be paid for. It can’t surf the internet and unless you own an Elite model the HDD is woefully small. And also, somehow, the 360 just doesn’t look like an entertainment centre. It looks like a games console; it looks out of place under my main TV.

My partner has never really touched a non-handheld games console before and yet with the PS3 she presents our photos to friends and family, pops music on in the morning to keep the kids quiet (our 1 year old daughter dives across her pen when the PS3 power button beeps because she loves to dance away to the videos) and even watches the odd film.

And so, it’s only now that I’ve come to realise that the old skool gamer in me has blinded me into ignoring this great machine.

No it’s not the best games console, the 360 is currently the choice here with its vast library and it’s excellent (though still annoyingly chargeable) Xbox Live. But it is a great all rounder, it serves the purpose Sony always said they wanted to serve, the central family hub of entertainment, the unseen box of tricks that quietly delivers all of your living room needs without you even realising it. And for that Sony should be applauded.

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