East meets West: The mayhem of wanting a PS3

We know demand for Sony PS3s on both sides of the Pacific is high (or bad?) enough to incite quite a few riots and inspire some crazy bull including chattel slavery, drive-bys, and one case of robbery. Wanna know how crazy it gets, though? We’ve got a couple of off-topic stories on what’s it like to be in the middle of the PS3 hysteria at its worst.

First, East. badam submits this clip in GameVideos of a profile of PS3 Launch Day in Japan (let’s just say titling it “M:I-PS3” is more than appropriate…). When those crowds swell, they really swell. It’s kinda a longish video, and in Japanese to boot, but you’ll get the gist towards the end when the store doors open and you see what literally is a swollen sea of humanity crashing on the breakers. (Too bad we can’t clip clips from GameVideos…).

Now let’s take it across the Pacific. Kotaku reports on a fight among PS3 campers and staff of Super Wal-Mart in Palmdale that called the sheriff’s department out and shut the 24-hour store down. It apparently began as an act of charity when staff initially decided to let the campers in from the cold to warm up. Charity turned to confusion, however: people started becoming confused as to “where the line is,” so to speak. And somewhere else, campers were given US$ 400 tickets for, well, camping.

Since Yahoo! Videos doesn’t have an embed option of the news report which Kotaku sourced, we’ll just provide a link to visit. Beyond that, yeah, we’re crazy for the PS3, but not that crazy.

We know demand for Sony PS3s on both sides of the Pacific is high (or bad?) enough to incite quite a few riots and inspire some crazy bull including chattel slavery, drive-bys, and one case of robbery. Wanna know how crazy it gets, though? We’ve got a couple of off-topic stories on what’s it like to be in the middle of the PS3 hysteria at its worst.

First, East. badam submits this clip in GameVideos of a profile of PS3 Launch Day in Japan (let’s just say titling it “M:I-PS3” is more than appropriate…). When those crowds swell, they really swell. It’s kinda a longish video, and in Japanese to boot, but you’ll get the gist towards the end when the store doors open and you see what literally is a swollen sea of humanity crashing on the breakers. (Too bad we can’t clip clips from GameVideos…).

Now let’s take it across the Pacific. Kotaku reports on a fight among PS3 campers and staff of Super Wal-Mart in Palmdale that called the sheriff’s department out and shut the 24-hour store down. It apparently began as an act of charity when staff initially decided to let the campers in from the cold to warm up. Charity turned to confusion, however: people started becoming confused as to “where the line is,” so to speak. And somewhere else, campers were given US$ 400 tickets for, well, camping.

Since Yahoo! Videos doesn’t have an embed option of the news report which Kotaku sourced, we’ll just provide a link to visit. Beyond that, yeah, we’re crazy for the PS3, but not that crazy.