Gordaen's Blog

I haven’t owned a console since my PS2, which I sold three or four years ago. I didn’t sell it because I thought it was bad, rather, I knew it would distract me in college. Since then, I’ve only occasionally played console games. My limited exposure told me that the Wii was for “surface level” fun and the Xbox 360 was the best choice for real gaming (and that no one in the entire world actually owns a PS3).

I’ve personally leaned toward the PS3 for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t until the past week or two that I really saw the problems with the Xbox. Now, everyone has a horror story about the Xbox 360 red ring problems, so I won’t bother with any detail about that. My brother had that problem and had to send his system in. Microsoft sent him a refurbished system from the wrong region, so he couldn’t use anything that was regionally coded. It got more complicated than that, but I’ll keep this to my limited week-and-a-half of exposure.

The first problem I saw was with Rainbow Six Vegas 2. It worked fine for a few days and was a damn fun game, and then it suddenly quit working. Partway through the initial loading was a screen that said something along the lines of “Game experience may vary online,” and it froze at that point. In fact, it froze hard enough that the controllers quit responding, and the power button on the console had to be used. Since my brother had recently bought that game used, he took it back to the store and got an exchange. The new (used) copy loaded through the main screen fine, but it would come up with an “Xbox can’t read this disk” error about one second after the main menu had loaded. If you were really fast, you could select your choices and have it hard freeze instead. So, you can either blame this on the system, or you can blame it on a disk magically going bad (since it wasn’t removed from the system from the days it worked to when it quit) and a bad replacement. Honestly, I’m not sure.

There have been some other hardware-related issues, but I have also noticed bugs in pretty much every game I’ve played. Here’s a screenshot from Mass Effect (sorry about the crummy one-in-the-morning camera phone shot):

I created a character and got just about to the actual start of the game when I went to an undefined menu that froze the game (but not the system, this time). Programmers will recognize some of the possible reasons for this, but in the end they don’t matter. It only matters that I wasted time created a custom guy and then lost everything because of a bug. At least I had only just started, but it didn’t exactly make me excited about the game.

I also tried Forza 2 Motorsport, which was relatively fun. It wasn’t awesome, but it was a decent game. Or, it was until one of the computer cars decided to ram into me because I was going down the straight on the correct racing line. Apparently that car hit me hard enough to make me sink into a hole.

I guess I ought to be a game tester because I seem to find bugs extremely quickly. Really, the system is pretty fun, but I keep seeing usability issues that surprise me. Most of them revolve around accessing system settings/options and having it disrupt game play, but those kinds of things could be ignored, assuming there weren’t so many other problems.

Yeah, a PlayStation 3 sounds like a pretty good system now. Well, one of the thirty versions of it does anyway.