Gordaen's Blog

My brother’s Xbox 360 broke a while back, and he finally decided to get a Playstation 3 almost a week ago. Though that’s obviously not enough time to thoroughly test it, I definitely have some initial impressions.

If you like a noisy system, get the 360. The PS3 is practically silent, whereas people who get the 360 identify other 360 owners by seeing their houses shake and watching the police tell them to stop jackhammering at 3am. Besides, the 360 puts out so much heat that I think it may be solely responsible for global climate change.

By looks alone, you’d probably guess the PS3 is about ten years newer than the Xbox 360 or else alien technology. If they painted the gray bits black, it would look like Darth Vader’s game system.

The controllers are incredibly light. If you’re lucky, they might just bounce off your brand new big screen LCD when you get mad and throw them. Just be sure to record the video, so you can put it on YouTube and have all the 12-year-olds leave comments that even single-celled organisms think are stupid.

Online options? It costs extra money to do all the wonderful online stuff on the 360 (not to mention that you may end up having to buy the wireless adapter instead of it being built in). Some people have said that charge creates a bit of a barrier, so you have a higher quality service. Honestly, I haven’t played any games online on either system, so I don’t know how true that is. Of course, either way you’re going to end up with spoiled kids whose 12-year-old voices are so high pitched you can barely hear them. Fortunately, you won’t hear the parents in the background because they’re in some other room ignoring their children and posting online about how video games have ruined their kids. Getting demos on either system is easy though.

In the end, it largely comes down to games. This is the part that calls out to all the flamers to type in all caps about how “X game is better than Y game because Z irrelevant reason.” For instance, Gears of War 2 (360) is considered a great game. I thought it was an example of a technically good game (graphics are great, cover system works well, etc.), that just didn’t thrill me. It was fun but not incredible. The storyline was disjointed and actually pretty dumb in a lot of spots. Yeah, I know, first-person shooter means you don’t need a good storyline, but if you’re going to have a stupid storyline, put it in the background like in Doom and the classics. Anyway, it’s probably the best game ever to a lot of people. The same might be the case with Killzone 2 (PS3). For me, it’s cool but not awesome. In fact, Resistance: Fall of Man (the original one, which comes with some new PS3s) is more fun to me. I haven’t had enough time to really explore the library of games available for either system, but it seems like you can find enough good games to overspend on either system with games as expensive as they are.

Obviously, I’ve already got a heavy bias toward the PS3 after just a week of using it. Each system has some advantages over the other, but the PS3 is clearly a better system, in my opinion (and I sure hope you don’t come to my blog looking for someone else’s opinion).