PS3 firmware 3.0 hit consoles across the globe today, coinciding with the worldwide launch of the PS3 Slim. Oddly enough, they didn’t come together in a single package. Silly Sony, you’re oh so clumsy!
Anyway. The new firmware hit today to make everything spangly and new, like the new baby console. Has it done the job? You could find out for yourself, or read this while you wait seven years for your own update to download. Your call.
The first thing you’ll notice — after turning it on and being greeted with the new “PS3″ logo — is that yes, it’s very sparkly. Literally. Little sparkles dot the background and foreground of the XMB, shifting in and out of focus alongside the fancy fluctuating XMB wave.
The whole background even blurs when you head into a sub-menu, bringing whatever you’re looking at into focus more and making it easier to read. It looks pretty slick too. It’s all very posh and fancy and lah-dee-dah.
Untiiiil you start reading some text, which has been turned up to 11 in terms of font size. And sadly, that’s not 11pt; 11,000 would be closer to the mark. For little discernable reason all of the text is ridiculously huge, along with the icons accompanying each piece of text, presumably to make PS3s friendlier with standard definition TV sets.
Couldn’t this have just been something done only for the SD outputs though? The text size was perfectly legible before on my own 720p set and I don’t see why I should have my screen cluttered because Joe Bloggs hasn’t bothered upgrading his telly from his mum’s old Matsui yet.
The friends list has had an overhaul too and ohhh boy is it motherfriggin’ U-G-L-Y. Each friend now has a great big grey box surrounding their name and avatar: the advantage is that you can pack more info into the screen without it looking too crowded (ie: the game your friend is playing). It’s just that it’s so horrifying offensive to your eyes that you wonder why Sony even bothered.
All is not lost though. The useless Information Board news ticker has been eradicated and replaced with a “What’s New” menu you’re presented with at start-up (if you like). In the top right of the screen, a clock/status indicator and an online friends counter dominate, and the battery indicator has been relocated to the left of this new bar (hurray!).
Problems already there though: Sony are too lazy to make the European version of the “What’s New” section any good but have overloaded the US version with some nice videos and things. One can dream, I suppose. Sighface.
Anything else? Ah yes, we have animated themes. As Sony in the West tend to do, they’ve screwed up in introducing a pretty cool feature, as the closest you’ll get to being familiar with the new animated themes is by bidding farewell to a small chunk of your wallet. LittleBigPlanet theme for a quid or whatever? No thanks.
That said, as Sony in the East tend to do, they’ve gotten it right. The folks at TheSixthAxis have pointed out that you can hop onto the Japanese PlayStation Store and download a zebratastic Afrika theme, which shows some nicely rendered herbivores roaming around the savannah and pooing a lot.
Folks in the UK will also find they have access to the BBC iPlayer (which, er, they did already..) and you can also niftily control the playback speed of videos by twiddling the right analog stick in a circle. Copypasta of messages from friends is also in. And that about covers it.
A little underwhelming, perhaps? Where is, for instance, the cross-game voice chat, as the internet will probably whinge? Was anyone expecting more?
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“You could find out for yourself, or read this while you wait seven years for your own update to download. Your call.”
Gee-Zus … it takes just over 12 minutes to download and install – GTFO!
It’ll be 70 years at the speed mines going
Well, the reason for Slim to not include 3.0 is probably because they started to pack the slims for the launch way before it was done, so there would be no shortage?
Anyway, I didn’t like this update. Ugly logo, ads, no more jingle when booting a game, big ugly text making my HD tv look like SD.
No thank you, I regret on updating.
how do you get rid of the scrolling marketing in the top box ?
Sony sure dropped the ball on this one. Im very dissapointed. The new avatars and animated themes were the only thing i was looking forward to, and they didn’t even drop any. Besides the sparkles in the background are very girly. SHAME ON YOU SONY!!!
PS3 owners should be used to waiting, considering that every gorram game you put into the console has to transfer memory over to the hard drive for 10 minutes before you can even play it.
Oh, and *I WANT ANIMATED ANIMALS ON MY PS3!*
Waiting sucks.
Lol. Ps3 still failing 3 years on…
Good God, people! What is it that will satisfy some of you lot? It’s a free update, it works and it’s made some bits nicer. The bit’s you don’t like, turn them off. Don’t like booting up into What’s New? Go into settings and make it not do that anymore. No biggie. Will we all really miss the game-on chime in a few weeks? Or will we be too busy actually getting into our top games, like Arkham, Uncharted 2, GT5 etc.
You know what? The Afrika theme is actually pretty good. Nice and relaxing, though the next person to comment on it is bound to say that you can’t read the icons against the clouds in the sky. They’ll be right, you can’t read the icons. You know what that doesn’t do? Matter, that’s what.
I’m enjoying my PS3 on version 3.0.
Englishman
yeah but everyone wants in-game chat like the 360 gamers have. Though it is free so i guess we can’t really complain about getting something new that’s free…unless it’s a dead horse’s head.
Or a monkey. They throw poo. Some gamers would only be happy if sony suddenly decided to make all the games and stuff on PSN free, you should be glad that their doing anything at all.
AMEN!
I’ll just stick with my 360 with the soon to be last.fm, Facebook, and Twitter Support
You guys are weird the friends list is frikin amazing looking as far as I know (started downloading it yesterday only another week til I get it)
“The text size was perfectly legible before on my own 720p set and I don’t see why I should have my screen cluttered because Joe Bloggs hasn’t bothered upgrading his telly from his mum’s old Matsui yet.”
You make it sound like HD TVs are
a) Necessary, and
b) Inexpensive
ZOMGZ X_X my little brother updated the console without asking me… and on our 76″ 1080P TV in the theatre room I have to agree this is not what i was hoping for…. also there were rumors floating around about the new software backwards compatiblity coming with this update… also rumors of me loosing my linux partition but I haven’t checked yet X_X
ooh and there is a “classic theme” in the themes settings in sections… go there and it will fix almost everything you are complaining about!!! O_O