The PS3 Only Needs Two Inches

More to prove Gavin wrong than for any other reason, I hooked my PS3 up to an old portable, two inch wide TV I have. The TV worked much better than I remembered; the PS3, noticeably worse. I found these results to be unexpected.

For some reason, whatever game I wanted to test demanded I wait for an update. I found myself hunched over my two inches, just waiting for something to happen.  When I was finally allowed to play, ignoring the unreadable text (which is unreadable on anything other than an HD TV anyway) I was actually able to see a surprising amount of what was going on.

Two inches of Killzone is enough
The grey and grey colour of Killzone 2 and the annoying bloom makes for an interesting challenge. Though the game itself is far less confusing than the menu I had to navigate though. Do I want unreadable menu item one or two? I tried to go into the multiplayer, but because I couldn’t remember what menu option got me there, I gave up after unintentionally restarting the single-player three times.

Killin’ hookers in micro-def
GTA IV has no menus, which is great. Sadly it does have a phone and a mini-map which are slightly important. I could tell the mini-map was a mini-map, but beyond that I was struggling. Due to the bloom and, again, limited colours I found it hard to tell what was a road and what was a flight of steps, tree or pedestrian. Add in GTA’s awful driving physics and you get a rather unfun, jelly-based accidental carnage simulator.

Size like this is Uncharted territory
Uncharted 2 doesn’t work on standard definition for reasons I wrote about here, so I wasn’t holding out much hope for a playable game here. I was right. The need to see hand-holds is important, the inclusion of visible hand-holds in two inches is missing.

I’ll ridge your two inch racer
Due to Ridge Racer 7‘s title as The Best game On The Playstation 3 Ever, it comes as no surporise that the game runs perfectly, without any problems, on the tiny display. I found that the game was so good that I lost weight, my reseeding hairline had vanished and my bank account had gained several thousand pounds inexplicably.

So, to conclude, I was right and Gavin was wrong.