Lack of Sony PS3 games makes me get my Xbox 360 out

Bob says:

If you have a PS3 stick with it, no doubt Sony wont let it die, if it does then the comapny as whole will be in question for the future.If you have a 360 then you’ve made the right choice for the next 2-3 years.
The PS3 which yes ive seen and played feels rushed, feels cheap but no doubt the games will start pouring in in a couple of years. Its not worth the money.
The 360 is at the right price point with a ton of games, feels and looks good too. Also HDMI is an equal to compnent with a digital audio port ala 360. If you dont believe me get over to toms harware guide, they have an article on it now. So if youre looking for a new system for now 360 is the choice.
The Wii is a great cheap piece of kit which is great for you and your mates but get boring fast, i know i have one.
So the best plan is, buy a 360, its cheap had loads of games, wait 2 years until PS3 becomes cheaper and has games, then buy that.
oh and another thing, i have over 200 DVD’s why would i want blu-ray or HD-dvd?? im not replacing them all for better picture quality!

MK24ever says:

@ Bob

“The PS3 which yes ive seen and played feels rushed, feels cheap but no doubt the games will start pouring in in a couple of years. Its not worth the money.”

Man… you must be blind os just ignorant!

PS3 feels rushed and cheap?? That’s the most absurd thing I ever read, PS3 is one of these hardware equipments that really feels “special and expensive”!

Or you have played a X360 painted of shiny black or you played a Popstation…

And if you have 200 DVDs a PS3 would be a great choice for you since it would upscale them to 1080p.

Component is not equal to HDMI for a lot of reasons since it can’t output 1080p signals for movies (with DRM), you need… what… 5 cables instead of one?

Just stay in the reality ok, yes, Sony has a lot of work to do if they want the PS3 to succeed, but they made the best hardware home-console ever!

Games are just around the corner, Home is a matter of weeks… I coundn’t be happier with the future of my PS3, and if you search in the news, a research prooved that people want more a good PS3 Sony console than a faulty X360 M$ product.

Tim Reed says:

I own both consoles and I have to say the PS3 sucks big-time for gaming. The only reason I bought it is because it was the cheapest Blu-ray player at the time, and where I live, in Hong Kong, is where you can get the cheapest PS3 in the world at launch, at US$485. There’s no way I would pay USD$850 for PS3, which is what the PS3 is selling for in the UK. You would have be to a complete retard to pay that much for this piece of crap.

As a Blu-ray player, the PS3 is very good. However, the lack of IR remote capability completely sucks as any AV enthusiast worth his salt would be using a universal remote. The PS3 BD remote is junk, and the PS3 controller used to control BD is complete crap. How many times have I tossed the controller on the sofa and see the movie fast-forward or rewind because the controller hit one of the trigger buttons. There are some ways around this buy buying an old PS2 USB remote adapter, and there a few 3rd party fixes available now, but none are really good and if PS3 was to be considered an videophile piece of equipment, then it’s already failed.

Talking about the controllers, there’s vital fact about PS3 - it has NO RUMBLE!!!! Yes, Sony took PS fans back to the stone ages of Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis with no rumble. That was the last generation to not have this feature, until Sony released PS3 this “next gen”. Even N64 had rumble, and Playstation 1 offered it as an accessory wit the first dual-shock. Long story about how Sony tried to rip off its customers by not including it so they won’t have to pay rumble technology licensing fees, but ended having to settle a huge lawsuit anyway for USD$150 million, which was way more than if they didn’t appeal in the first case when the judge only ordered USD$90 million in damages. Unfortunately for gamers, because of Sony thinking their fanbase would support PS3 no matter what they did, this robbed us of rumble with PS3. Of course to pay off that USD$150 million, Sony is now going to offer a rumble controller as an ACCESSORY which will come out to be like USD$50 for one controller or USD$100 for two, which is what most people get. Don’t forget to add that cost to the PS3 if you want to do an accurate price per feature comparison.

But with as many faults as PS3 has, it would matter less if they had the kind of game library that PS2 did. Let’s face it, even though the original Xbox was miles ahead in terms of technology to PS2, PS2 had a way better games library and pretty much why they dominated. Halo was the best game last gen, but other than this series and a few others, there wasn’t as much on offer on the original Xbox. PS3, however, is even worse than the original Xbox in terms of offering games. The games just suck. LAIR which was hyped up to be this Wii-slayer turned out to be the biggest piece of turd ever. I’ve never seen such a so-called “AAA” game get so many 50% scores, it’s embarrassing. On the other hand, the same month you get Bioshock on the 360, which is has gotten an average of 96% reviews, one of the highest scores ever (#8 highest ever amongst all tens of thousands of games ever released, and the highest game to rank in the past two generations). So that in a nutshell shows you the discrepancy between games on these two consoles.

All the other hyped-up games on PS3 so far have turned out flat. Motorstorm? Complete rubbish. Resistance? Average FPS which was trumped by Rainbow Six on 360 last year, and it didn’t nearly receive the same level of hype and expectations. VF5? Another boring retread and what’s worse, it doesn’t even have online. Supposedly VF5 needed such microsecond reactions that it wasn’t possibly to have online on this game - that is, until they announced the 360 version. Warhawk? Another average game that went from so-called AAA status to being so poor that Sony decided to release it as an online game. Ninja Gaiden? Probably the best PS3 game ever released, and it’s a REMAKE of an original XBOX game! I played this game 4 years ago. Xbox 360 will have exclusive of Ninja Gaiden 2, a new game that people have been looking forward to, not the 3rd remake of the same game (the original Xbox even got a remake of this game, called Ninja Gaiden BLACK).

Sadly most of the anticipated PS3 “exclusives” have now gone multiplatform. We’re taking Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 4, Devil May Cry 4, Unreal Tournament 3, Virtua Fighter 5, Resident Evil 5, etc., etc. All PS3 has left with is FFXIII, MGS4 and GT5, and those won’t be out until late 2008, if we’re lucky. The 360, on the other hand, is bursting with AAA exclusives, too many to mention, but which include Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Rising 1 & 2, Forza Motorsport 2, Project Gotham Racing 3 & 4, Gears of War 1 & 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Crackdown, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Too Human, etc., etc.

Even taking the exclusives debate aside (despite it being really one of the most important factors in choosing a console), the multiplatform games are even better on the Xbox 360. This was once shocking in light of all the “4D” graphical claims made by Sony about the PS3 and the Cell processor, etc. Now that PS3 has come out, we see time and time again the Xbox 360 version of a game being better than the PS3 version. This superiority is probably the glaring on sports games, where the majority of the major 2008 titles (Madden NFL 08, NHL 08) on the 360 run on 60 frames per second, while the PS3 version runs at 20 fps. You really have to start to wonder when the differences become so obvious. Beside frame rates, side-by-side comparisons of multiplatform games has the 360 looking better GRAPHICALLY as well than the PS3.

Take look at the 360 version of NBA Live 08 (http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q262/anonim1979/nba08d360.jpg) and then compare it to the PS3 version (http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q262/anonim1979/nbaps3.jpg). The difference is night and day.

It very well could be it’s because games are developed on the 360 first, and then ported to the PS3, but as a consumer, it doesn’t matter. Multiplatform games are superior on the 360. Throwing wrench into this argument is that fact that many of the 2008 sports games are developed from the ground up on PS3. So why is it still the case where the 360 version has double the framerate AND looks better graphically?

People talk about PS3 online being free. Yes, it is, and in this case, you definitely get what you pay for. PS3 online (PSN) sucks! Let’s start with the content available. There’s hardly any. If you’re a avid gamer like me that checks for new content online at least once a week, on Xbox Live (XBL), you are sure to find at least one if not a few new demos a week, as well as videos. On PSN, you might as well be watching grass grow. There is very little new content that is updated often, and now with PS3 almost being a year-old, there is maybe 20 demos available, while there are literally hundreds on XBL. What’s surprising is that even for multiplatform games, you’ll find a demo on XBL and not on PSN. The menu for PSN sucks too. It’s basically like a webpage, and for some reason, webpages load incredibly slow on the PS3, whether you are in the “store” or using their browser. The XBL menu is simple to use, and easy-to-navigate. For the PS3, because it is set up like a webpage, navigation is not intuitive with the D-pad. Often, you have to pull down the left thumbstick and place the cursor on the “next” button just to move forward. Thankfully, to go back to a page, you only need to hit the left bumper button (L1). The whole set-up is just a mess and painful to operate.

And why is it that after you have downloaded a demo, that you need to install it first? This takes some time, and occasionally PS3 will have to restart. On the 360, you never have to install the demos, they are ready to go after they are downloaded. Same with firmware updates. On the 360, you are alerted to a firmware update, and then asked to hit one button, before there is a quick download. Your 360 will need to restart, but its done automatically. On the PS3, they don’t even notify you automatically about a firmware update. You find this out when you try to log on to the store, and it tells you that you must first update your system. But instead of offering you a button to press, they say you must first navigate through the menu to the settings to the system menu. After you get there, then you click and button for it to CHECK on whether there is an update. If there is, you click a button for the download to begin, but the download takes FOREVER. At least it seems forever, for me, it averages between 20 and 30 minutes, which is incredibly annoying when I only have a limited amount of free time that I can devote to gaming and this is eaten up by this downloading. But what’s terrible is that after it’s downloaded, it doesn’t install automatically, which means I need to check on it every so often. With the 360, I can watch TV or surf the web and now everything will be down automatically. On PS3, after it’s done downloading, you need to then agree to the service conditions (yes, you have to scroll through the whole document before it lets you hit “agree”), and then it INSTALLS (yes, just like the demos), which takes another 10-15 minutes. It’s just a painful process, and to make it worse, last week, there were TWO updates. Yes, both times that I turned my PS3 on and logged in to the PSN Store last week, I had to do this update. I didn’t research the reason, but either Sony’s being awful in managing these updates where they didn’t bother just combining the two into one, or the made some huge errors in the first update that had to be corrected in the second.

Now if you’re going to talk about gameplay, then there is no comparison. XBL is just miles beyond PSN. First of all, you are pretty much guaranteed that any game on 360 that can have online where it makes sense will have online. That is just not the case for PS3. In fact, there are many, many mulitplatform games that will have online on 360, but no online for PS3. To me, that’s just BS. Online is a huge component in gaming, and it adds so much more shelf-life to a game. Not having online means once you’re done with a campaign, you’re pretty much done with the game. Sure, you can play with your roommates and friends if they are in the room, but that’s not going to be available anytime, and pretty much if you own someone in a game, there are only so many times you want to beat that person (or get beaten if you’re crap). Not to mention that the 360 comes with a headset INCLUDED whereas for the PS3, you need to buy a Bluetooth headset. Now you can get one for an extra $20 if you buy the disc version of Warhawk, but it still sucks having to pay extra for it, and guess what, the Bluetooth headset connectivity is totally unrealiable! What a piece of crap. And the reason why you hardly ever can talk to anyone online is because no one has a headset. With the 360, people are always chatting because the headset came with the console!

Now there is a lot of hype about PSN offering “Home” supposedly this fall. It’s this Second Life type platform where you control a doll, basically, and you get a doll house that you can decorate, and instead of achievement points which you get on the 360, you get “trophies”. To house these trophies, you get a trophy room, and the main selling point of Home is that you can decorate your doll house and trophy room, and then you can invite other virtual dolls to your doll house and show it off. I don’t know, I’m in my 30s, and I’m not looking to pick up teen (or younger) virtual dolls of my own sex and show them “my pad”. I have a real house if I want to decorate, and the kicker is Sony will actually charge you for these virtual items like clothes, furniture, etc. Yes, they have a virtual doll Bravia flatscreen that you’re going to have to pay for. Might be cool for the tween set, but Home as it’s sounding doesn’t really appeal to me.

So do I regret my PS3 purchase? Absolutely not. For USD$485, I got a good Blu-ray player to match with my front projector, and so far I’ve collected around 30 BD discs already. It’s definitely been bang-for-the-buck considering other BD players at the time were $USD1,000+. Of course now, BD players have come down in price tremendously, under the cost of PS3 and with higher video and audio quality and more features, so I probably wouldn’t make the same choice today. At the same time, for USD$180, I got the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on, and that was and still is a steal. It’s a fantastic player, and strangely, HD-DVD releases, even multiplatform releases, are consistently better than its BD counterparts. I’m talking VC1 codec vs. MPEG-2 (though AVC is getting more popular on BD and just as good as VC), and generally more HD-DVDs have Dolby TrueHD/DTS-HD, etc., than BD discs. But I love both formats, and it’s great that I can play every HD disc released (I even own D-VHS).

So if you’re into Blu-ray, then the PS3 may be a decent purchase, though you can certainly do better with the newer, less expensive models that have come out, particularly the Samsung models. But if you’re buying PS3 for games, then you’re out of luck ’cause PS3 sucks for gaming. Might as well wait a year and a half when possibly FFVIII and MGS4 might come out (we’d be lucky if they came out in time for the holidays in 2008) to see if you still want it. Buying a PS3 now is basically like flushing your $$$ down the toilet.

Tim Reed says:

But with as many faults as PS3 has, it would matter less if they had the kind of game library that PS2 did. Let’s face it, even though the original Xbox was miles ahead in terms of technology to PS2, PS2 had a way better games library and pretty much why they dominated. Halo was the best game last gen, but other than this series and a few others, there wasn’t as much on offer on the original Xbox. PS3, however, is even worse than the original Xbox in terms of offering games. The games just suck. LAIR which was hyped up to be this Wii-slayer turned out to be the biggest piece of turd ever. I’ve never seen such a so-called “AAA” game get so many 50% scores, it’s embarrassing. On the other hand, the same month you get Bioshock on the 360, which is has gotten an average of 96% reviews, one of the highest scores ever (#8 highest ever amongst all tens of thousands of games ever released, and the highest game to rank in the past two generations). So that in a nutshell shows you the discrepancy between games on these two consoles.

All the other hyped-up games on PS3 so far have turned out flat. Motorstorm? Complete rubbish. Resistance? Average FPS which was trumped by Rainbow Six on 360 last year, and it didn’t nearly receive the same level of hype and expectations. VF5? Another boring retread and what’s worse, it doesn’t even have online. Supposedly VF5 needed such microsecond reactions that it wasn’t possibly to have online on this game - that is, until they announced the 360 version. Warhawk? Another average game that went from so-called AAA status to being so poor that Sony decided to release it as an online game. Ninja Gaiden? Probably the best PS3 game ever released, and it’s a REMAKE of an original XBOX game! I played this game 4 years ago. Xbox 360 will have exclusive of Ninja Gaiden 2, a new game that people have been looking forward to, not the 3rd remake of the same game (the original Xbox even got a remake of this game, called Ninja Gaiden BLACK).

Sadly most of the anticipated PS3 “exclusives” have now gone multiplatform. We’re taking Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 4, Devil May Cry 4, Unreal Tournament 3, Virtua Fighter 5, Resident Evil 5, etc., etc. All PS3 has left with is FFXIII, MGS4 and GT5, and those won’t be out until late 2008, if we’re lucky. The 360, on the other hand, is bursting with AAA exclusives, too many to mention, but which include Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Rising 1 & 2, Forza Motorsport 2, Project Gotham Racing 3 & 4, Gears of War 1 & 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Crackdown, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Too Human, etc., etc.

Tim Reed says:

And why is it that after you have downloaded a demo, that you need to install it first? This takes some time, and occasionally PS3 will have to restart. On the 360, you never have to install the demos, they are ready to go after they are downloaded. Same with firmware updates. On the 360, you are alerted to a firmware update, and then asked to hit one button, before there is a quick download. Your 360 will need to restart, but its done automatically. On the PS3, they don’t even notify you automatically about a firmware update. You find this out when you try to log on to the store, and it tells you that you must first update your system. But instead of offering you a button to press, they say you must first navigate through the menu to the settings to the system menu. After you get there, then you click and button for it to CHECK on whether there is an update. If there is, you click a button for the download to begin, but the download takes FOREVER. At least it seems forever, for me, it averages between 20 and 30 minutes, which is incredibly annoying when I only have a limited amount of free time that I can devote to gaming and this is eaten up by this downloading. But what’s terrible is that after it’s downloaded, it doesn’t install automatically, which means I need to check on it every so often. With the 360, I can watch TV or surf the web and now everything will be down automatically. On PS3, after it’s done downloading, you need to then agree to the service conditions (yes, you have to scroll through the whole document before it lets you hit “agree”), and then it INSTALLS (yes, just like the demos), which takes another 10-15 minutes. It’s just a painful process, and to make it worse, last week, there were TWO updates. Yes, both times that I turned my PS3 on and logged in to the PSN Store last week, I had to do this update. I didn’t research the reason, but either Sony’s being awful in managing these updates where they didn’t bother just combining the two into one, or the made some huge errors in the first update that had to be corrected in the second.

Now if you’re going to talk about gameplay, then there is no comparison. XBL is just miles beyond PSN. First of all, you are pretty much guaranteed that any game on 360 that can have online where it makes sense will have online. That is just not the case for PS3. In fact, there are many, many mulitplatform games that will have online on 360, but no online for PS3. To me, that’s just BS. Online is a huge component in gaming, and it adds so much more shelf-life to a game. Not having online means once you’re done with a campaign, you’re pretty much done with the game. Sure, you can play with your roommates and friends if they are in the room, but that’s not going to be available anytime, and pretty much if you own someone in a game, there are only so many times you want to beat that person (or get beaten if you’re crap). Not to mention that the 360 comes with a headset INCLUDED whereas for the PS3, you need to buy a Bluetooth headset. Now you can get one for an extra $20 if you buy the disc version of Warhawk, but it still sucks having to pay extra for it, and guess what, the Bluetooth headset connectivity is totally unrealiable! What a piece of crap. And the reason why you hardly ever can talk to anyone online is because no one has a headset. With the 360, people are always chatting because the headset came with the console!