It was the spring of 2008 when my husband came home and said "I was just at Doug's house, and we played this game called something-something Eden that we have to own." "What platform was it on?", I asked. "I think it was a PlayStation 3, the controllers are different from our Xbox."
Up until that point, I had been putting off getting a then-next-gen console. We had bought an Xbox in 2002 after getting fed up with the never-ending troubleshooting of graphics and sound drivers involved in PC gaming. That Xbox was one of the best electronics purchases we had ever made: it supported the full resolution of our Panasonic 42" widescreen television, most of its games made effective use of surround sound, there were quite a few multiplayer games, and many of the PC games we liked or were anticipating were available on Xbox. All that value was even before we modded the Xbox -- XBMC opened up a whole new world of content from YouTube, 1up, and Revision3. As of 2007, we were pretty set for games (and media)*.
When Geoff came home and made the request for me to purchase a gaming machine to play PixelJunk Eden on, Toshiba has just dropped the whole HD-DVD format (other than in China) just a few weeks before. Still, the hardware failures of the Xbox 360 had put me off of all then-next-gen consoles until new hardware revisions would come out. (I tracked the Xbox 360 hardware reverse engineering community super closely, waiting for a 360 with a motherboard that didn't have fatal flaws.) I did a lot of research on the PlayStation 3 hardware and failure rates and became quite impressed with the capabilities of the architecture (then-crazy amounts of memory bandwidth), and the motion sensor technology/sample rates on the controller which put the Wii-mote to shame. With Blu-ray having won as the HD video physical disc format and becoming convinced on the PS3's hardware viability I went to Fry's Electronics and bought a PS3 bundle that included Metal Gear Solid 4 (which we played for 30 minutes and then discarded) and an extra controller. I also bought Pan's Labyrinth on blu-ray, along with one or two other movies.
Our first 5 or 10 game purchases were on the fledgling PlayStation Store digital storefront. As I recall, the console even had a free PSN code for PAIN (still one of my mom's favorite games on her own PS3). PixelJunk Eden was one of the first, along with Echochrome, Everyday Shooter, and Blast Factor. I still vividly remember surprising Geoff on his birthday by coming home early, getting everything set up, and then hiding the PS3 controller underneath a pillow on the couch. When he got home, I asked him to help me "find my keys" to get him to discover the controller himself. He was really surprised, and we played for hours that night.
PixelJunk Eden, for all its surface simplicity in screenshots and verbal description, was simply amazing to behold at the time. First, because the PS3 supported HDMI output, our receiver was getting LPCM (uncompressed) 5.1 surround sound from the PS3. PixelJunk Eden didn't really make effective use of surround sound, but because audio wasn't being decoded from low-bitrate MP3 and then re-encoded as Dolby Digital, the dynamic range and clarity were an enormous leap from the original Xbox. (The incredibly unique synth sounds of the PixelJunk Eden soundtrack, especially in the first few minutes, are an aural experience I'll never forget.) Second, the color palette was insanely vibrant and took great advantage of the wider color gamut afforded by the modern HDMI connector -- even though our decent Panasonic HDTV didn't have the best contrast ratio. Third, while some Xbox games supported widescreen 720p (The Warriors and X-Men Legends being two favs) , none of them rendered at 60 frames per second or had HD-native assets -- the smoothness and responsiveness was impossible to describe and just had to be experienced to understand.
Seeing and hearing PixelJunk Eden in motion totally blew us away, and the fact it supported fluid and fun co-operative play out of the box sealed the deal. Even though the Xbox 360 had backward compatibility for many of our favorite XBox games we still owned (Fuzion Frenzy, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Halo, etc), our eyes were opened to a totally different concept of what gaming could be: an immersive, beautiful experience that was even more fun to share together than by ourselves. We never looked back, totally skipping Xbox 360 as a platform, and still haven't regretted it.
Post-script: When we upgraded our TV to a Panasonic Plasma with a dramatically better dynamic contrast ratio and native 1080p resolution a few years later in 2010, we realized we were only experiencing about HALF of the background layers and other details on our previous HDTV. The improved resolution and contrast on the new plasma TV actually made a number of the trophies easier to get, and we played through the entire game and the Encore DLC a second time. It was just as fun and captivating as the first time. I'm looking forward to experiencing PixelJunk Eden again when our children are old enough to play video games with their dads.
* [I must say that I was *extremely* excited for the Nintendo Wii leading up to its release. I had friends at Ubisoft who had told me some details of the development kits and capabilities, and it sounded very cool and significantly more capable than the Gamecube. At some point, the later development kits had significantly scaled-down hardware with a totally different GPU and significantly reduced texture memory. From that point on, the Wii kept getting referred to as an "overclocked Gamecube" and both the quality of the motion sensors and the sample rate of the motion sensor data were cut in half. At that point, I tuned out of Nintendo Wii as a platform I would personally spend money on.]
