I have both and I prefer the PS3. One annoying reason for this is that although the 360 is cheaper, it has a stupid number of accessories (although with the slim model there is not as much required). The first accessory is the stupidly priced wifi adapter. The second is the play and charge or quick charge pack, either one being essential if you wish to not spend a fortune on batteries (but in my experience, the former charger is of poor quality and broke very soon [it stopped working completely through no apparent fault of my own] after I bought it). The third is a hard drive, priced ridiculously high, if you bought a cheaper model. The final one is Xbox Live. Now I know the PS3 has many accessories too, my problem is simply that all of those are standard with a PS3 and if you wish to buy other accessories they are generally at a much cheaper price than the equivalent xbox accessory.
That is a minor issue however. My biggest problem with the 360 is the apparent lack of exclusive titles that interest me or exclusive titles that are not shooters. The exclusives the 360 has are very good, Mass Effect as an example is my favourite game series of all time beating Metal Gear Solid and Halo is one of my favourite shooting series', I'm not disputing that. The problem is that there is so few and all of them seem to be shooters or adventure games. Off the top of my head, I can name Gears of War, Halo, Fable and Mass Effect and that is it. The PS3 on the other hand, for me, has Metal Gear Solid, Resistance, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Heavy Rain, Demons Souls, Gran Turismo, ICO/SotC/TLG, Warhawk, Uncharted, Modnations Racers, Little Big Planet and Socom. Now, maybe other people will like different exclusives and the 360 would have more suited to that player but for me, the PS3 offers the greater variety of exclusives. One thing I will say the 360 is better at is multiplatform games. I know now that the difference between multiplatform games are rather small but the 360 tends to have slightly better multiplatform games (as in, there is less bugs and less graphical issues) than the PS3.
One area though where the 360 trumps the PS3 is with Xbox Live. The price is Annoying but the features and presentation are excellent. PSN is good and offers a lot of the same features as XBL but it feels more like an add-on whereas XBL feela like it's integrated into the system. The chat system, the market, the friends system and the party system are all far superior and presented much better on XBL than PSN. For me, the psn's menu is easier to understand/navigate but the Xbox's is very slick and the ingame menu is much quicker than the Playstation's.
Blu-Rays are incredible however. The picture quality is stunning and for TV box sets (Which I collect for shows I like) there will often be less disks (because there can be more episodes put on one Blu-Ray) making them easier to maintain and meaning I can watch more episodes without swapping the disk. The other advantage for the Playstation is the Internet browser which, until I got an iPhone (I'm mentioning it was this because the browser is very good and smooth on it), was used mainly for going on forums (if i didnt want my parents to know about the forum, WrongPlanet for example)and getting lists of unlockables in various games (as well as watching TV show episodes that weren't yet out in Ireland and it was perfect for those needs. It is clunky and can be quite slow but it is great for a moderate amount of use and controls very well. The PS3 will also very likely be used by Sony to promote 3D so if you have a 3DTV, that would be a big advantage.
I'm not saying the Xbox is bad (quite the opposite, for gaming alone it is very good [even though I feel it's inferior] it's just that in terms of features and variety it doesn't match the Playstation. If you do get the Xbox however, buy Mass Effect. That is quite simply one of the most amazing series' to ever be made with amazing characters, the best dialogue (and voice acting) to be found in any game and a grippig story. The second Mass Effect, although the story is not as good as the first (to be expected considering it is the middle part of the trilogy), it is still engaging and a vital part of the overall story. The gameplay though is also improved an infinite amount over the first, as are the graphics, and the DLC "Lair of the Shadowbroker" is by far my favourite section of any game. It's just a shame the rest of the game didn't quite match it. I realise Mass Effect 2 is coming out on the PS3 but without the first game I think it's pointless as, to me, the first is by far the best, most important of the two games and without it, the second won't be as impactful and it may make the conscequences of the first game more unimportant in the third game.
One other thing to keep in mind is that a new Xbox will likely be on the way sooner than the PS4.
16 Nov 2010, 6:58 pm
