I have owned a PS3 for a few months now and I am pleased to report that I have changed my initial stance of it simply being “a waste of money”. Oh no, far from it in fact, for over time I have seen what it has to offer to the fragile human subspecies known as the Gamer.

To help put things in perspective I am a firm believer that the £400,000 spent on the 2012 Olympic logo was a waste of money as too the £30 gabillion Chelsea spent on Premiership flop Shevchenko. 

You see the PS3 is so underwhelming in its functionality as a games console that it renders itself more than a waste of money, as it is also a waste of space, effort and time as well. At least the poorly designed logo (barely) does its job in informing you of what it relates to and Shevchenko could probably still direct a few footballs goalwards if he played for a team that knew how to utilise him.

In a way the PS3 is similar to the Ukrainian striker as it has all the right tools under the hood but its owners have made a poor job of utilising and implementing the experience and power.

It’s almost as if a few years ago the Big Cheeses at Sony came together to conceive unique, colourful and groundbreaking ways in which the PS3 would irritate and frustrate the gaming masses around the world. I am here to congratulate them on a mission well accomplished.

I mean what more could I ask for after spending £400 on their product than to be made to wait a few more hours from the moment I got my console out of the box to actually getting it to work?

I love having to spend more time doing System Updates than actually playing the one or two exclusive platform games; maybe this is what they envisaged as their “next generation” experience.

Who wouldn’t prefer spending 45 minutes installing a new game, followed a mandatory downloadable update and a new installation prior to actually playing it?

The icing on the cake was this week’s ordeal with Metal Gear Solid’s online Beta. Below I have listed the hoops I was made to jump through before I had the pleasure of playing through a boring and lengthy tutorial. You probably cannot be bothered to read the list so you can only imagine how I felt when I was being asked to provide them with the following and the time involved:

Download Beta: Took over 24 hours.

Install: Left on overnight to accomplish.

Unable to play, as there is a new update, download: Left overnight to accomplish.

Install: Left on overnight to accomplish.

Unable to play, need a Konami ID: Site kept crashing from a week.

Finally access site: Must register a Konami ID (“8-32 characters, only lower case, numbers, hyphens, underscores and periods”), Konami password (“8-32 alphanumeric characters”), GAME ID (“8-32 characters, only lower case, numbers, hyphens, underscores and periods”), GAME ID password (“4 – 16” numbers in length”), email, name, gender, postcode and finally address.

Back to game: Input the new ID and password.

Piece of piss, right? Nothing like switching on my PS3 for a nice relaxed unwinding session of gaming after a hard day’s work. Every time I switch on my PS3 I feel like that lion in Circus Charlie that had to jump through flaming hoops and consequently get my rear burnt to a very well done crisp.