Nah, the thing runs cooler than the sidewalk. I don't have my stereo system all hooked up yet, still need to finish my project for that, so I haven't tried out the SACD. The Bluray looks beautiful, it upconverts DVDs great and it even has flash card readers. Though I haven't tried pulling my card from my camera to try it out. I did pick up Motorstrom used and played that. It is the modern day version of excite bike. I suck at it, I suck at all console games though, but it is a pretty game at least. One of those short quick action type games. The controller is of course made for 5 year olds or small asians which doesn't help my plight.
The thing was a pain in the ass to get. First I was going to buy one a few months back but they discontinued the 80gig version which is the only one that plays SACDs. I wasn't going to get some over priced PS3 off ebay either. So I had to wait several months for this new 80gig PS3 version to come out. On the day Amazon did their preorders I go there, wait until they went up for sale and tried to buy one. In the amount of time it takes for me to add it to my cart, confirm my address and select payment method, they sell out. I wasn't happy about that since many of those were just the ebay resellers. Everywhere else is sold out too.
So I hit ebay to see what they are running for, since ebay had this 10% off coupon, basically their cut. I try biding on a few, not willing to go above retail+sales tax, and never won a bid. I finally find someone dumping 10 PS3 of the older 80gig bundle. I win one of those below retail cost and I am feeling pretty good about that. On a side note the same person also was selling a bunch of Wiis so I won a bid on one of those too, again below retail. I go to pay and the person's paypal account won't accept any payments. They said to send them a money order, which is basically cash with those cheap check cashing places around. I'm not stupid enough to do that and a few days later the person's rating goes from 100% to 20% as all the negative feed back piles up. Their account got canceled.
So I don't lose out on anything other than my time worrying about all that. Next Game Stop had preorders for the second shipment of PS3, so I preordered one of them. However they required that you buy an extra controller, sales tax and $22 shipping. The final cost was well over $600. Now I already bought an IR to Bluetooth converter to use with my remote so I really don't need an extra controller since I didn't buy this thing for games. Wasn't too happy about that price, I could still cancel it so I decided to hit ebay again.... I finally find one that isn't over bid on, and win the thing. After shipping and the coupon it came to $484, below retail and the stupid ebayer, who probably bought the thing from amazon, lost out on a few dollars. So I am feeling pretty good about this, his paypal works and he has a good rating. However it takes the guy 5 days to ship. In fairness to him I did buy it on a Friday and he was losing money so not exactly over motivated to ship it out. Still 5 days? I didn't want to cancel my preorder with Game Stop until I got the tracking number. The funny thing here is, as soon as I get a tracking number from the ebayer, I get one from game stop..... nearly a week before they said they would ship.
Game stop of course sends it out a bit quicker and I get that box last week. I had to wait until yesterday for my actual PS3. After making sure all aspects of the thing works, I can now return the other PS3 to game stop. I'll have to eat the $22 shipping so I'll end up paying $6 over retail in the end. And this is just a PS3. The Wii is even more of a nightmare to buy. I still don't get why it is so damn hard to buy a stupid console these days. Really annoying.
And Star, buying the Xbox for DVD playing was a mistake. I also wanted the Mechwarrior game as well. The Xbox would work some of the time with some of the disks. It's been sitting in one of my closets for a couple years now, not worthy of being used. I still never got to play Crimson Skies cause the thing would crap out after a few minutes into the game. I also rented KOTOR once and it couldn't play it either for the same reason, Xbox's are what is left after you are done going to the bathroom. "Hey, wait up, I have to go take an Xbox." So now I have something much better than the Xbox, something made by Sony, and we all know how good they are. :mep: