What Is Better???

Owning both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 has sparked some curiosity in the subject of which system is better. People can argue many different aspects of this topic, like which system has better games, better online play, and most of all which system has the better graphics of the two. Since I had just read an article written by Carl Nelson entitled “Ps3 vs Xbox 360:One Year Later” about some of these things it made me think of what I truly think about some of these topics.

Nelson’s article was written several years ago and a lot has changed for both systems since he posted that article. They both have improved in some areas and some areas both systems could use some work. Nelson talked about the price, performance, graphics, game selection, online support, and multimedia of both systems. In each of these sections, Nelson gave the Xbox a “higher grade” so to speak.

The first section in Nelson’s article, he wrote about was the price of each type of system. The Xbox has three different systems, the Arcade, Premium, and Elite. Nelson gives a brief description of all three systems, and how the improvements were not drastic at all. One of his comments made me wonder if he called the Elite System the “New Retard Edition” because of the minimal changes between the Premium and the Elite for more money. The only difference between the two systems is that the Elite comes with a bigger hard drive, so nothing too special. 

this is what the PS3 hard drive looks like

On the other hand, the PS3 only has only two systems compared to the Xbox’s three. Nelson wrote “you can get a PS3’s ‘lower’ model for just $50 more than the XBOX 360’s ‘middle’ model.” In retrospect the PS3 seems like a better deal based on price and memory storage because Nelson also added ”You can’t really look at it that way though, since what sets the Premium XBOX 360 apart from the Arcade is mainly the 20GB hard drive. And the ‘low end’ PS3 still doubles that”. One thing that Nelson did leave out was the fact that the PS3 is very easy to upgrade. You can simple buy any size Serial ATA HD for the PS3, which is the same type of HD a common laptop use. At the end of all the back and forth arguing of which system has the better price and memory storage Nelson said “It’s still the XBOX 360, not just because the respective models are $50 cheaper, but all versions of the XBOX 360 come bundled with some games now.”  The games that come with the systems are pretty much the “rejects” of the gaming world, but nonetheless you still get something to play right out of the box.

In the next section, Nelson briefly touched on the subject about the performance of each system. Nelson noted, “On paper, the Playstation 3’s Cell engine is more capable than XBOX 360’s triple-core Xenon CPU. However, as our developer alluded to last year, the XBOX 360 is much easier to develop for.” Nelson also said that because the PS3 is harder to develop for, most of the cell engine is not being used to its full potential. Even though Nelson never stated which system had better performance, from what I understood, the Xbox is better at performance due to the fact that the cell engine is being used more properly than the PS3. Personally, I can’t wait until a game developer decides to stop being a baby and take a few extra months to utilize the power the PS3 can produce.

The next section Nelson wrote about was about the graphics of each system. This subject always gets pretty heated whenever I talk to someone about video game graphics. Fact of the matter is, no matter what game anyone can talk about, the Xbox has better graphics. Nelson wrote “The Xenos GPU on the XBOX 360 is superior the RSX on the PS3.”  Any computer nerd will tell you that the Xenos has, more power, higher pixel processor power, higher vertex processing power, and higher memory architecture. I don’t know what all that means, but it sounds impressive when you throw that out during an argument. I’m not sure how I feel about those facts, just because I have my PS3 hooked up to my TV via HDMI cable and my Xbox hooked up with the regular component cables, so the PS3 looks better then the Xbox on my TV. To me, my PS3 seems like it has better graphics.

The next section that Nelson wrote about was the game selection. At the time the Xbox had a one-year head start on the PS3, so naturally it would have more games than the PS3. Nelson noted that the Xbox had exclusive titles like “Gears of War, PGR3, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, F.E.A.R., Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Dead Rising, Burnout Revenge, Fight Night 3, and Rainbow Six: Vegas, all of which were either titles exclusive to the 360, or weren’t made available on the PS3 until some time in 2007.” That just goes to show how hard developing for the PS3 was at first. Since that article came out, it seems that developers have gotten a little use to PS3 engine. Now the PS3 has several good exclusive titles, such as Heavy Rain, MAG, and God of War III. Even with titles like those, the PS3 still falls short with game selection.

The second to last section Nelson wrote about was the online features for both systems. I personally think that this is a no brainer. Xbox Live (without a doubt) kicks the crap out of the Playstation Network. Nelson did give the Ps3 credit for one aspect of online play; it’s free unlike Xbox Live.  Nelson wrote, “Playstation Network has the sole advantage of being free for the most part (game makers are still allowed to charge for online play if they want, such as MMO games, etc). However, to play any game at all on XBOX Live, you must subscribe at $50 per year at its cheapest.” One thing about the PS3 that kept frustrating me was some of the online features that Nelson touched on, like “One drastic disadvantage of the Playstation 3 is the fact that you cannot send messages to your friend from within a game.” It is very frustrating when your playing a game and a friend sends you a message, and some games wont let you read them until you quit the game. I think this was one of the very few points that Nelson made that I actually agreed on.

Finally Nelson wrote about the multimedia feature of both systems. This section was my favorite one out of the whole article. First and for most, Nelson liked the PS3 better because it is a Blu-Ray player. Even thought the Xbox could play HD-DVD’s when HD –DVD’s were made it didn’t seem like a good idea to me. Nelson wrote, “ The XBOX 360 with HD-DVD player will cost at least $530”.  Now-a-days Xbox Live supports HD movies, which is a lot cheaper than $530, but the movies take up a lot of memory. At the time when the PS3 launched, people were buying them just because it could play Blu-Ray movies (that’s pretty much the reason why I bought mine) and they were about $300 cheaper than a standard Blu-Ray player.

The main reason why Nelson didn’t like the Xbox is because he wrote, “it is excruciatingly LOUD”. I can say from experience that the PS3 runs like a hybrid car and the Xbox is like a diesel truck. Sure the trucks have more power, but the loud noise gets annoying especially when you’re trying to watch a movie. For anyone who loves to watch movies, the PS3 is definitely the way to go. Unlike the PS3, the Xbox doesn’t allow you to save your own movies to its hard drive, unless you get them from Netflix, or Zune from the Xbox Live Marketplace, which cost money. For many reasons the PS3 completely dominates the Xbox in terms of Multimedia features.

After reading Nelson’s article, it is clear that the Xbox is more superior compared to the PS3. Since the Xbox did “win” 4 out of 6 topics, the PS3 has a lot of things to fix if they want to out sell Xbox. From the developer issue to the online features, PS3 has a long way to go. Even thought the Xbox did get a better score than the PS3, it still is not perfect. The major issue with the Xbox is the fans in the system itself. I agree with Nelson on this matter completely. The system is ridiculously loud, not just when watching movies, but during playing games as well. Xbox released an update that allows people to install games to the hard drive to fix that problem, but what happens when gamers run out of memory space. If Xbox could fix the fans it would be the ultimate system.