We’re through the looking glass here, people. Up is down and black is white. Today I bought a PlayStation 3.
Well, I said I would buy one when the day came that I could stroll into a store and pick one up off a shelf without any hassle, and it turns out that that day was today.
This wasn’t my intention. I went to Target to do some Christmas shopping for my girlfriend, and the path to the section I needed took me past electronics so I decided to stop by and ask the clerk if they had any PS3s or Wiis in stock, just to see what kind of dirty look I would get.
Except I didn’t get a dirty look. He instead pointed me toward the PS3s sitting on the shelf that they had apparently unloaded from the truck about five minutes earlier. They had received a shipment of three units (OMG three! Count 'em!) comprising one 60Gb and two 20Gb systems. The 60Gb unit was already being rung up for a customer who had got there 30 seconds before me, and people were beginning to circle like vultures around the other two units. They looked a bit shocked, as though these apparent “PS3s on sale” must be some kind of cruel trick, but that confusion wasn’t going to last long. If I was going to act, I needed to act fast.
I asked the Gaming Gods for a sign. And as I looked around, I saw the store’s demo kiosk Xbox 360 blinking its three red lights of death at me. As signs go, I think that is a pretty good one. I grabbed one of the two 20Gb units, and the remaining one was grabbed by another customer immediately after that.
It should be noted that as I congratulated the guy at the register next to me for getting the only 60Gb unit, he immediately offered to sell it to me. I asked him if it was his plan all along to flip it for a profit, and he gladly admitted this to be the case.
So, now I have a PS3. I’m not quite sure what to do about it yet. It remains unopened so far. I have 30 days to return it to Target if I decide that my on-instinct purchase was a stupid one. Plus, I’m trying to figure out if the 20Gb model is really the “tard pack”. I can easily live without a built-in card reader (just plug in a USB card reader), the HDD is easily swappable for a larger model down the line, and I have a wireless ethernet bridge that will happily substitute for the WiFi. And I actually kind of like the fact that this model doesn’t come with the (I feel) somewhat tacky pseudo-bling chrome trim. So on the face of it seems like the 20Gb model is a perfectly adequate unit. I guess the only thing that’s totally missing is the PSP remote play feature, but I read somewhere that router functionality may be added in a firmware update.
Anyway. Here it sits, for now.
