During Christmas the family purchased a PS3. There are many games available either in DVD format(the DVD drive also plays Blue ray movies) or online that can be downloaded into the PS3 hard drive. One I like is called "Flower" which at the first level is very restful and something nice to do to unwind before going to sleep. However, it is important to remember that many video games could possibly cause a seizure if one is epileptic or has epileptic tendencies. For example, I had childhood epilepsy but haven't had a seizure since age 15. However, I still have to be very careful around strobe lights like in a night Club when people are dancing or in October on the Eiffel Tower in Paris during the White Night one weekend when the Tower strobed and I was at the top of the ride. I found I had to halfway close my eyes and step back from the edge until the strobe all over the Eiffel tower stopped before I proceeded. Also, there are strobes in Disneyland in California that I had to be careful of this summer and other times I visited there in the past. So, just be aware of what you are experiencing with these games if you are sensitive in this way.
Another game I have enjoyed played with three other family members is "Little Big Planet" where my daughter enjoys putting her puppet like character in costumes while we all run around as puppets getting keys and other stuff on the planet.
I have watched my 35 year old son play Avatar also on PS3. I tried it tonight and because I couldn't get the view to work to my liking I couldn't focus on where wild animals were attacking very well and so my character died. Obviously, I'm not a today gamer because I don't like to kill things. I have just seen to much mayhem and blood and guts in real life to want to kill things in a game even in jest. However, in the 1980s I really enjoyed playing Asteroids.
However, like my son said, the price of the PS3 has finally come down enough to be fairly practical for a lot of people to buy. We have had a lot of Xboxes and they are great but it appears the hardware is of higher quality in the PS3 so there is much less chance of a breakdown. It is like the difference between a PC and a Mac. I have pretty much gone over to Macs almost completely because I got so tired of dealing with viruses and addware. My son still builds and rebuilds his desktops though in PC form even though he put a 1.5 Terrabyte hard drive on one of our IMacs which gave it ten times the hard drive memory for storage. He says it increased the life of this IMAC about 3 to 5 years.
My son discovered as he rebuilt and loaded new software on several of our and his computers this Christmas vacation from College that even though PCs are backwards compatible almost all the way back to the 1980s XTs that Apple computers because the software isn't supported beyond about 10 years can't be run online much beyond that if your software starts having glitches unless you have a CD or DVD of the software to reload. So for most people that means an Apple computer can live about 10 years. So even though Apple makes high quality products there tends to be a theoretically shorter shelf life than say PC desktops that can be taken apart and used and rebuilt in new or rebuilt computers as long as it is useful to you around the world. He also built me a special older desktop to run to stream netflix movies from on to my 52 inch flatscreen. He says I need to run the flatscreen unscaled for it to work right but the clarity is still pretty good even at 52 inches. We got the netflix DVD from PS3 to do it that way since the PS3 has a wifi connection if you have wifi in your home or office. However, he realized that it would just wear out the blue ray Dvd drive in the PS3 faster and besides the graphics card he put in the computer he built to stream netflix onto my flatscreen has a better graphics processor than the one in the PS3 at least for streaming netflix.
So, it has been a fun Christmas vacation and I'm sorry to see my son go back to college. It was nice to have another guy around the house to hang out with the past 3 or so weeks during Christmas and New Years.
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