demod's guide to gaming consoles (part 1 of 2)

My GF and I recently bought a Playstation 3 and this was supposed to become a small review of it; however, a review by itself is often pretty useless if its subject is not directly compared to its competitors. Therefore I've added information about the other consoles on the market which is more or less the same set of knowledge that we used to base our decision on.

I hope that I've managed to keep the comparison fair and balanced; however, I can't guarantee it since we only own a Wii and a PS3. Therefore I had to rely on a friend and the net for information about the Xbox 360 – should I've missed something essential or got something wrong → please write a comment.

Because of the size of the topic I decided to split the article into two parts. In this part I will discuss all (IMHO) notable attributes of the different consoles and in the next part I will take a look at the games available for each of them and maybe do some pseudo statistics.

Note: Listed prices are not the cheapest available but were taken from amazon.com and amazon.de – therefore you might be able to get much better deals elsewhere¹⁾.

The Wii was first released in the end of 2006 and its unique selling point is its motion based controller. Its other particularities are its focus on casual games and its low-end hardware²⁾.

Nintendo got this pretty much right. Its all simple and clear; however, it lacks real profiles and forces you to use the Wiimote to point at things whenever possible.

The Wiimote was a very cool idea; however, at least for me it got old quickly. While there are plenty of people who really like their motion controls there are also those who are just plain annoyed by them – therefore, make sure to test the Wiimote in a few different games before buying a Wii. Apart from that the Wiimote is a cool controller and also can be used with PCs thanks to it using standard bluetooth.

As for the Wii's classic controller imho nintendo just really failed at cloning a Playstation DualShock controller with it. Luckily you can use gamecube controllers³⁾ in its place in many (all?) games.

Well, it got the power of 2 gamecubes duct-taped together and costs more than some Xbox 360 models, doesn't even have an optical audio out and produces graphics that are much closer to the Playstation 2 than to real 7th-gen-consoles. To make matters worse it also only supports 480p⁴⁾.

On the upside the Wii got built-in WiFi and its gamecube hardware allows it to run gamecube games without any emulation; however, the gamecube wasn't exactly the winning console of its generation which shows in the games available for it compared to the Playstation 2.

The Wii got the worst online store ever. Its slow, offers little (no screenshots large enough to actually allow you to recognize the game, no videos, no downloadable demos, …) and is rather expansive (5-12€ is an ridiculous amount of money to download tiny ROM-images of old and often mediocre games). Apart from the store the other channels you can download are also rather useless, WiiWare got a few semi-interesting titles but if I think about it I'm not really sure if it is possible to botch your online store any worse than nintendo did.

To my knowledge there is only a handful of titles available that support online multiplayer gaming. However, I have yet to find a complete list therefore I might be wrong on this.

While getting a lot of the core-concepts right (gameplay instead of graphics, casual and non-gamers as target audience) nintendo IMHO failed badly at the execution. Even with its weak hardware the Wii is full of possibilities; however, nintendo only focuses on its motion sensing abilities and other silly addons instead of trying to make it into something that doesn't depend on silly gimmicks to succeed.

Luckily their marketing department managed to make the Wii as hip as an average Apple product which proves again that you don't need to be competent in your field of work if you've got good marketing.

Average game prices appear to be lower than on any of the (other) 7th-generation consoles.

The Xbox 360 was released in the end of 2005 which made it the first 7th gen console on the market. Its focus is affordable high-end gaming.

As mentioned before: We don't own one, should I've overlooked something please comment below.

For 3 years the Xbox 360 had the worst interface by far. Luckily, with the release of the “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) just a few days ago this finally appears to have changed. NXE offers a nice looking, functional interface as well as new features like the ability to install games on the consoles HDD – or at least so I've been told. Since I yet have to get a chance to try it myself I will just leave it at that for now.

Also, the 360 supports profiles that are linked to your savegames in case you are sharing your console with others. Sadly I never had the chance to play with these but I will just assume that they are as nicely done as the Playstation 3's.

The Xbox 360 has a long history of technical defects. From harmless problems like being rather loud, over scratching discs, to overheating and dying for no special reason – actually it had so many problems over the years that there is a wikipedia article just about the topic. Some sources even claim error rates above 30% for the early iterations of the hardware. Sadly Microsoft never openly addressed any of its problems and always claimed that “that the Xbox 360's failure rate was within the consumer electronics industry's typical 3% to 5%”. This behavior also makes it rather hard to determine if the known problems have been fixed in newer versions of the Xbox 360; however, I believe it is safe to assume that the most grave have been fixed in the current iteration, for the most part. Also apparently the first few 360s with the new Jasper mainboard are now being sold in the US⁹⁾. Considering that this is the 5th iteration¹⁰⁾ of the hardware I wonder what the chances are that they actually got it right this time. Personally I would wait a few weeks or months till the Jasper boards have proved themselves before I'll believe that they actually work as good as they are supposed to.

Additionally there is no built-in WiFi and it only can read DVDs instead of HD DVDs or Bluray discs which might be quiet a hindrance for future games; however, considering the age of the console this is at least understandable.

On the upside the 360 can run a few titles of the original Xbox, giving you access to some great games.

Most people appear to like the controller – while some dislike the d-pad the only real issue I found is that it is not using standard bluetooth and therefore forcing you to buy a “Xbox 360 Wireless Controller for Windows” for 40€ if you ever want to use one for anything else than your Xbox.

Additionally, while the 360 in theory supports USB keyboards and mice games don't (can't?) use them.

From all I've heard the store does its job well, providing demos, videos and reasonable prices games. Just like the store on the Playstation.

You need a Xbox Live Gold account to play most games online. Yes you need to pay for something as basic as online gaming and it costs you US$49.99 or €59.99 annually and yes it is really that much cheaper in the US.

The 360 also got the capability to replay media files from USB storage devices or the network. For network playback you are supposed to use a windows pc; however, apparently you also can use other operating systems as long as your UPNP server supports microsofts variation of the protocol¹¹⁾.

Average game prices appear to be a good bit above Wii games but still a bit below Playstation 3 games.

The Playstation 3 was released in the end of 2006. It has the best hardware of this generation, with the most processing power, a Bluray drive and no major hardware faults. It also got the highest price-tag.

The Interface is very aesthetic, clean and overall nice looking. While it displays media and games as a list by default (which doesn't exactly scale well) other views (that scale a lot better) can be activated using the square-button.

Another nice feature is how they integrated profiles. Every users profile is associated with his favored theme-/color-settings, savegames and PSN account making sharing your console with others quite comfortable. Even nicer is that every user can use the media and games other users bought on the PSN – which was quite a surprise for me given that the PS3 is a Sony product.

The PS3's standard controller is the DualShock 3 (however, there are still a few rumble-feature lacking SIXAXIS controllers in circulation). Compared to its Playstation 2 predecessor (the DualShock 2) it gained the following features:

• Bluetooth for wireless gaming
• A micro-USB-port for cable-bound gaming and recharging (both works fine with PCs)
• Analog R2/L2 trigger buttons which are great especially in racing games (the 360's controller got something similar); however, some people appear to have issues with the buttons getting slippery after prolonged periods of gaming. Should this turn out to be a problem for you you might want to consider these.
• Some motion sensing capabilities that are comparable to the Wiis nunchuk

The only thing I dislike about the DualShock 3 is that you can't change its battery by yourself (well, and its price). Apart from that if you liked the DualShock 2 you will most likely love its successor (and should buying more DualShock 3's get too expensive you can use DualShock 2 controllers thanks to cheap adapters¹⁶⁾).

Another nice detail is that you can use any standard USB keyboard or mouse and also some bluetooth devices¹⁷⁾ with it. These make text entry while gaming or using the web-browser much more fun. Sadly, the only game using this to allow PC-style controls appears to be Unreal Tournament 3 – which is kinda sad but at least the possibility is there for future games to use.

The PS3 is quiet big and heavy and imho looks more like a grill than a console. Luckily apart from the design they got everything else more or less right: its not too noisy, got no built-in defects I know of and its Bluray drive may more than pay off in the long run (DVDs are growing too small for games and my PS2 has after all been my primary dvd player till now). Also to my knowledge the PS3 got a good bit more processing power than the Xbox 360 which sadly matters rather little because most games are cross-platform anyway.

As for the different iterations of the PS3s hardware, in the beginning some models had hardware PS2 emulation, a flash card-reader, 4 USB-ports and/or WiFi. The PS3s built nowadays all got 2 USB ports and WiFi but lack the card reader and any kind of PS2 emulation.

Additionally its also possible to upgrade the HDD yourself using cheap standard 2.5” SATA drives.

The PlayStation Network (PSN) allows you to download demos, videos or reasonably priced games – pretty much like the Xbox's online store. As usual the stores content differs per continent; however, Sony apparently realized that this is annoying and is currently streamlining the approval process to allow games to be released everywhere at once¹⁸⁾.

Its free, works fine and plenty of games use it, 'nuff said.

A quite novel feature of the PS3 is that you are actually allowed to install another OS on it. While you can't do any real homebrew inside the Playstations OS anymore installing Ubuntu or another Linux distribution might replace the need for a HTPC for a lot of people. Also, if you don't feel like installing another OS the PS3 already can play mediafiles from any UPNP capable NAS or PC.

Average game prices are the highest overall and a bit higher than Xbox prices – probably due to the use of bluray discs. Also you might have noticed that I found very little wrong with the PS3 until now; however, reliable, high quality hardware doesn't come cheap.

In the next part I will take a look at what actually matters: the games available for each console.