I have always been a PC man. Not a politically correct man, my views on clubbing baby seals and using the Japanese as toothpicks are well documented, as the pending lawsuits from the RSPCA and Japan will attest to.

The Personal Computer as it stands is a cornerstone in my daily life, from stalking ladies on Facebook without their knowledge, to shooting 10 year olds in the non-face with make believe weapons.

When not pondering why I’ve had sh*ts bigger than what supermarket’s idea of food portions for one person seem to be, I’ve tried before to get into the whole game console thing with the loan of an Xbox 360 “Arcade” (which still is wallowing in my sub-basement of solitude as a footrest) and the whole social scene, playing Call of pew-pew and seeing what ways I could waste precious life seconds with.

All the while I was scuppered by paying 5 British wing-wangs a month for the Xbox Live Gold service in order to play against others at all, no hard drive which meant I could download very little content out of the box and practically everything which might be a fun feature, required payment or a lung, whichever was cheaper. What was worse there was no “cancel subscription” button anywhere so the time I spent on the phone to Microsoft in order to cancel my Live subscription on the phone was another indication of how hard things were made for no real reason. Why?

Let’s face it, the whole package with the Xbox 360 just blows. And not in a good way.

Let us fast forward to not long ago, when my monthly money hemorrhage of a mobile phone contract was up for renewal. However the lure of an IPhone or Crackberry was none existent, as to grumpy people like me, smartphones are slowly responsible for the downfall of society and that they only serve to steal more money from you with endless applications stating you need more money to pay for more apps.

Given that they were doing “free” gifts with phones (LIES!!), I had spent some time at the Carphone Warehouse, a place which I’m not sure how they are still have the name; They sell other things other than phones for cars, and their shops are not warehouses where underground drug-based parties take place.

After literally asking for a phone that makes phone calls and a battery life longer than 3 minutes, it turned out I was eligible for a Shiny Playstation 3 with sex toy starter kit. Cue endless parades and moderately attractive women tearing their clothes off at the news.

So I arrive home with the new stuff and set to work with the new equipment in short order;

Ok, I put it on the bed to take a pointless picture of it, then I set it all up.

To be honest, I was fairly impressed with the little things, for example, it allows you to use a keyboard for typing in rather than spend years of your life trying to form a sentence with the joypad only to write GHN UION LOL when asked if your male or female. The fact the joypad that came with the system was wireless was another blessing in disguise, and thus opens up the world of gaming in bed, which of course badly replaces the lack of women in my life and the hollow emptiness of it all…..sniff….

Regretfully not having a flash HDTV was a bit of a problem as connecting up the PS3 to the standard yellow video bit at the back meant that you couldn’t read most of the words on the screen. Given that this pretty much meant that most of the system was unusable, you do have to invest in a different set of cables which then allowed humans to read the text far better. I felt as happy as the day I first learned to read, aged 19.

Remarkably for such a device geared towards gaming, there are other features which set it apart from the Xbox. The PS3 has a hard drive as standard, which you can save various music, videos and pictures to. The Xbox does as well but only if you get the more expensive models anyway, so you don’t save much.

The BBC IPlayer is available as a option for free, something which Microsoft basically refused to do, on the grounds that they aren’t allowed to charge for it. The system also features a basic web browser which you can connect your networkable printers to. Online Play is free (+1 again over Xbox), and probably the PS3 also has other bits I don’t know about yet.

What’s more is I have actually parted with slightly hard-earned cash to buy crap from the overly blue Playstation Store with real money as opposed to buy useless points to then buy aforementioned crap.

Which leads onto the most annoying aspect of the system, in that any software can take an age to install, and even after the initial fun of installing, there can be endless updates to also apply, even to games you get on shiny Blue-Everybody loves Raymond Disc. Forget about putting the kettle on, go on a round the world trip, have a string of lovers and develop mental problems, then come back to begin.

The menu system does also take some getting used to, like eating porridge with chopsticks. It does the job though and I suppose that’s all you can ask for in a menu system. However, if you’re the type of person to get hung up about menu systems on a silly little machine, I suspect you’re also the type of person that does naughty over pictures of airport conveyor belts, having forgotten what human contact is like.

Overall my second adventure with the new world gaming console order has fared much better than the first, the Sony system does have a number of advantages over the enemy Microsoft system and after this endorsement, I now fully expect a cheque in the post from Sony. Because that’s how I roll. Join us next time when we set an accountant on fire and let it loose out in Holborn…