BY THE time his moment of joy arrives, Taiga Ishikawa will have been roughing it for 28 hours, but no one could be better equipped for a night on the streets of Tokyo.

He has his red cotton slippers and bamboo sleeping mat. He has 30 comic books to read and a supply of cold coffee and cold noodle sandwiches. Mr Ishikawa is a 20-year-old computer game otaku — a Japanese nerd — and in just a few hours his vigil will be rewarded with a jewel beyond price.

At 7am today, the shutters of Asobit City game shop in the Akihabara district of Tokyo will open, and Mr Ishikawa will be at the front of the queue to become one of the first people to own the Sony PlayStation 3. The PS3 is the newest games console in the world, and an immeasurable amount of money and credibility rests on its launch.

For Sony, this is an opportunity for success after a dismal spell. For gamers like Mr Ishikawa it is the most powerful games system in the world, quite apart from its capabilities as a storage system for photographs, music and a player of new-generation Blu-ray DVDs.

Even before it went on sale, a thriving black market had sprung up around the PlayStation 3, on the internet and on the streets of Akihabara. The console for which Mr Ishikawa will pay 59,980 yen (£267) was last night attracting bids of up to $1,800 (£940) on online auction sites.

In Akihabara a dozen homeless men queued incongruously in front of a game shop to buy the console. Each was being hired by a middleman to circumvent the shop’s “one customer, one PlayStation rule” to ensure the biggest number of consoles for immediate resale.

Seven British students from Bournemouth University, who had paid £700 each for a week-long stay in Japan, were debating whether to buy the PS3 and keep it for themselves, or sell it at a handsome profit. “I played a display model in a branch of Starbucks on the other side of Tokyo last night,” Christopher Poole, 19, a student of television production, said. “It’s true that they’ve only got the first generation of games at the moment, but it was a bit disappointing.”

This is the most important question. Amid high expectations, and in a market busy with rival products, how outstanding is the PS3? For, despite the excitement among the Akihabara otaku, the launch has been fraught with troubles.

The PlayStation was to have been launched worldwide last spring, but delays pushed it back to this month. Then in September Sony announced that, to satisfy the bigger Japanese and North American markets, European gamers would have to wait until next Easter for the console, missing the pre-Christmas sales period.The delay has given Microsoft a year headstart with its Xbox 360, which has already reached sales of six million.

A week tomorrow, the market will become still more crowded with the debut in North America of the Nintendo Wii.

If the botched launch of the PS3 translates into commercial failure, it will represent a crisis for Sony. The PS3 is more than just a games console. It represents the first salvo in what promises to be an even bigger war over DVD formats.

As flat-screen televisions increase in resolution, conventional DVDs have been unable to provide the necessary quality to keep pace.

Two new high-definition formats have been developed — HD DVD by Toshiba and Sony’s Blu-ray. Since they are incompatible, it is generally assumed that, just as the VHS video system crushed Sony’s Betamax in the 1980s, one format will oust the other.

Sony has incorporated a Blu-ray player into the PlayStation3, in the hope that it will bring the format into millions of homes at Toshiba’s expense.

When I played the PS3 I endured frequent crashes and one near-collision with a giant stone Buddha. A less incompetent gamer would have had a smoother ride, but I can attest fully to the remarkable visual beauty of PlayStation 3.

As I lurched and screeched my way round the track of Ridge Racer 7, it was hard to keep my eyes on the road because of the scenery’s beauty. Complicated backgrounds are a standard of computer games, but on the PS3 there is a level of detail that this inexperienced gamer, at least, had never seen before. Individual drops of water and leaves were visible in the waterfalls. The tarmac of the road ahead was granulated, and black smoke billowed from the tyres.

Standing on the street at the display model in front of the Tokyo game shop, it was harder to judge sound, and the subtlety of the graphics would be wasted on anything less than the highest-resolution television. But among seasoned gamers, it seems fair to say that there is no consensus on the quality of the PlayStation 3.

Meanwhile PlayStation has announced plans to sponsor some of Britain’s most famous art institutions. Sony has agreed a sponsorship deal with the V&A, The English National Opera Sadler’s Wells, The British Film Institute and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in an attempt to widen its demographic appeal.

Over a period of six months the institutions will each be running their own programmes that can be downloaded and watched by logging on to a PlayStation website. These include rehearsals for La Bohème with the ENO, interactive dance classes with Sadler’s Wells and workshops, short films and reviews with the BFI.

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