Sony! Soni! Soné!

I'm not going to attempt an in-depth analysis of the Sony-Kotaku kerfluffle, as the implications seem fairly self-evident. A part of me thinks that the scoop was not nearly interesting enough to merit the blow-up on either side, but as a matter of principle I will always side with the free press.

The larger thing to take away from this is Sony's continued, baffling incompetence in almost every phase of the PS3 launch. And I'm not just referring to their continuing PR arrogance and pronouncements from Bizarro World ("We can't keep them on the shelves!" being the most notorious of these). I finally acquired a PlayStation 3 a couple of days ago, and while I have yet to stretch its legs, I've already raised an eyebrow or two at some of their more illogical decisions.

First, it's no secret that the PS3 has been sold as the most powerful game system around -- one tech site even calling it a supercomputer. That may or may not be true (the only thing I can say for sure is that the thing runs freaking hot), but I'm willing to accept the claim of raw hardware power. So if this thing is so powerful, why did Sony only decide to include a composite video cable in the box? No component cables, no VGA or DVI, no HDMI. Surely it was a cost-cutting consideration, but a boneheaded one. In the meantime, it does come with an ethernet cable despite native Bluetooth support. I think they made the wrong compromise here.

But even worse is the front-end interface. Xbox Live may have spoiled us all, but my mind is already blown by the inefficiency on display here. The only thing I've done so far is download the Resistance demo. It took about five steps more than I would have thought necessary. I selected the option to log into the PlayStation store and got a little message that I was logging in -- at which point I was returned to the home menu and had select the store option again to access the storefront. Why isn't that one step? What am I missing? As for the store itself, well, Penny Arcade sums it up much better than I can. Suffice it to say that you need to perform about three actions in order to accomplish any one thing. It's bizarre.

I did want to help out, so when the PS3 asked me to take a survey, I accepted. It was standard stuff: how many video game systems do you own, what kind of games do you like, that sort of thing. When they asked what was the primary reason I bought a PS3, I said for the Cell processor. But I lied. I bought it because I'm bad with money.