Five Reasons to Get Dad a PS3

Affordability

3) PS3 is "More Affordable" Than Before.

When the PS3 launched in 2006, the $600 price tag (compared with $250 for the Nintendo Wii and $350 for the Xbox 360) took a lot of potential buyers out of the market. While Sony tried to say the price tag was worth it for the technology in the system, it was a hard sell considering the lack of good games and the uncertainty of the high-def drive.

Sony then dropped the price of the PS3 to a more reasonable $400 (for the 40GB model), while the newest 80GB model sells for $499 (each package includes some kind of software title with a controller; i.e. Spider-Man 3 *cringe*). With better features on the higher-capacity 80GB model, including flash card support, PS2 compatibility and more USB 2.0 ports, most gamers should consider this version.

4) Sony's Online Network has Improved Greatly.

When the Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 launched their devices in 2006, the general consensus was that Microsoft's Xbox Live service (in which owners needed to pay $50 per year for the "gold" level, the only useful level) was far superior to Sony's PlayStation Network (which was free, but didn't have lots of features and was tediously frustrating to use). Sony has since dramatically improved the online service, and allows users to access the network without having to pay for a yearly service.

The system is now quick, elegant, and highly intuitive. Currently, the store includes software for PS3 and PSP (including a variety of free trailers), online-only games, movie trailers, and some very cool things programmers are starting to do with the PlayStation Eye. There are a variety of other features available as well.

5) Owners Can Help a Good Cause

If any of the other reasons don't convince you to reconsider the PS3 as one of your video game console choices, consider that the PS3 can act as a client for Stanford University's http://folding.stanford.edu/ project, a distributed computing project aimed at understanding protein folding, misfolding and related diseases.

PS3 owners with the client software installed can leave their devices powered on and connected to the network, and "donate" their device's powerful Cell processors to the distributed computing project. You may also join with friends, rivals, or complete strangers to form a "mini-collective", and focus your combined cell processors on a single task.

Since launching the PS3 client in May 2007, hundreds of thousands of systems have added their processing power to the project. In September 2007, the project received a Guinness World Record for achieving a computing power of 1 petaflop (1 quadrillion floating point operations per second).

So if playing video games can lead to breakthroughs in diseases like Alzheimer's Disease, that should make you feel a whole lot better about powering up the console.