Xbox 360 vs. PS3

[hero0080]

Only 360 can play Gears Of War~~~

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[Leires]

Hoo boy..PS3 or 360.. Since i'm a bit bored, i'll go off on my (probably biased) personal experiences with both consoles.

PS3

(What they tell you)
It has free online, it has rechargeable controllers, it has wireless (this is based off a phat 360, i've not used the slims yet so apologies for needing an update to this down the line) the older models have backwards compatibility, it plays blu-ray, it has bluetooth, it has a web browser, it supports multiple types of media for playback.

(Free online) Free online, i'd argue that with it it's easier to grief than a system like 360, but that's not the case at all. 360 compared to PS3 has had many more griefers, modders (i had played a game of Left 4 Dead 2 where everyone on my team spawned as tanks and the world was a technicolor nightmare. It was awesome, but it probably sucked for the humans.) and cheaters. So really, free online is quite a plus, if you can get over sony's TOS..

(PSN vs XBL)
The store on PS3 is better as well in that it used to be you could share 5 games, but now it's been reduced to 2. Still, that's better than 360 which requires you to purchase a license (download the DLC) for every user. However, PS3 generally has -very- slow servers for downloading games. It's not a deal breaker, but it's annoying for those who don't wish to wait.

(Rechargeable Controllers)
Rechargeable controllers, they last quite a while. I've nothing but good things to say about that. Charges fairly fast and since it's USB compatible, you can plug it into your computer/laptop and charge it if your system is across the room.

(Built-in Wireless)
Wireless...To me, and again, this is pre-slim 360, I've found that having wireless promotes lag and such from users who have poor wireless quality. At least on the old 360s, you were forced to use an ethernet which provided a constant connection verses one that was open to congestion..Not to say i haven't seen laggers on 360, just, in the few games i've played on both consoles, the lag was lessened by a noticeable amount.

(PS3 Phat [CECHA])
The older models have BC, which is awesome..But lets be honest here, the upscaler looks beautiful on an -sd- tv, but if you're playing your PS2 games on a gigantic 50 inch TV, it doesn't make it look any less horrible. D: Blu-ray, i've only seen one movie, and it was with an HDTV and a stereo system, and i rather enjoyed it. If you have those things, i can totally vouch for blu-ray being a worthy reason for a PS3 if you enjoy both gaming and watching movies. The older phats (backwards compat ones) even supported SACD! Heck yeah. They also have multiple readers (SD, memory stick duo, etc) and four USB slots.

(Bluetooth)
Bluetooth..While it sounds like a feature, my goood it can be your worst nightmare online. So many people with 2$ bluetooth headsets. Some of the more expensive ones may sound nicer, but online i've noticed people with bluetooth generally sound atrocious. Then again, however, PS3 is kind in the fact that it lets you use any USB headset, so that's always a plus if you're close enough to your console for it.

(Web Browser)
I've not used the web browser in a while, and i heard some improvements have been made so apologies if i'm mistaken. When i used the PS3 web browser..It used to crash on websites. A looot. The flash video worked fine if you put it in fullscreen, but it did drop frames every now and again if you were doing other things on the PS3 (listening to music, that is). Big text-based pages (faqs, for example) would lag when you'd try to scroll the page. It's nice to have a browser but for me the PS3 browser isn't a reason to buy a PS3 or even worth bringing up as an arguable point over 360. >_>

(Video and Audio Playback [codecs])
If i recall..PS3 supports FLAC, MP3, WAV, ATRAC, AAC and possibly more. Video codecs it supports the same that 360 does, as well as AVC natively. For people like me who have to have 10GB files for 2 minute songs, flac is a blessing. PS3 lets you rip it to your console either via downloading it online, copying from a USB, or taking it directly from the CD. Playback is generally good, the visualizers are pretty, though not as abundant as 360s (I personally prefer PS3's over 360's visualizers.)

360
(What they tell you)
Online is better, games load faster, timed exclusives, the controller is better, it's a cheaper system, cross-game chatting, music in any game.

(Online is better)
Online is better is subjective to your gaming preferences. Quality-wise, the servers can be i suppose. After all, 'you pay for what you get'. However the online is plagued with hackers and such much moreso than the PS3. So again, it's subjective.

(Games load faster)
From disc? I'm not positive either way. However 360 lets you install to disc (PS3 does too for some games, but it's not mandatory and it's not supported for all games which is a shame) and it shaves noticeable seconds off the load times. It takes a bit to install, but it's totally worth it for big games with a lot of loading, like RPGs. Collectively for a good RPG you can probably save 30+ mins from just those few seconds alone if you play a lot. I totally love this feature to death.

(Timed exclusives)
Well, 360 as we all know tends to get DLCs a month+ before PS3 does. While this can be something good for people who are obsessed with being first..Really, it's only a few months. If you need DLC that fast, you're not really enjoying your FPS to it's full potential. ;P

(The controller is better)
Subjective, subjective, subjective. God dang all the people who argue that 360's controller is better. For some things, it totally is. The triggers on the 360 are great for shooter games. But the joysticks wear down faster (in my experience, much faster), it requires batteries, which can set you back every week (less if you play a lot), set you back an initial cost for rechargeables (and even then, you're in trouble if you forget to charge them!) or set you back an initial cost for their USB battery pack. To be honest, there are in fact some games i prefer a 360 controller for, but for most things, i'm fine with using whatever i can for a controller. (Heck, i was using my PSP as a controller for a time, thanks PSP homebrew devs! : D)

(It's a cheaper system) Yes, it is. PS3 is dang costly. It can be attested to whatever you'd like, blu-ray drive, cost of parts, licensing, in the end though, the 360 is a cheaper system, which can be a buying factor for those just looking to play games.

(Cross-game chatting)
This is another good thing about 360, but last i played it required a gold membership. You can talk to your friends across games. Be it different lobbies in an FPS or be it you're in one RPG and they're in another. It's not an amazing feature or anything, but it's nice.

(Music in any game)
This. This, man. God dang this. You can play music from your USB or hard drive in games. It automatically lowers the game volume so you can jam. I love this feature so dang much. x.x PS3 has support for this in a few games, but it slows down the XMB quite a lot and sometimes it causes the system to lock up (though this may just be a personal experience thing.)

360 vs PS3: The cons

PS3 supports the audio formats listed, but the 360 only supports WAV, AAC, and MP3. You can only listen to music off the hard drive by burning a CD and ripping it from that, making playing music from your hard drive a very tedious maneuver.

Both consoles suffer from problems (YLOD, RROD). Neither are perfect, and neither should be a reasoning why not to buy one or the other. The 360 as we all know, the older consoles suffer from the RROD (poor thermal paste.) However, i've had my 360 for 5+ years, my friend has a launch console and did the towel thing, and our 360s run perfectly fine. I have friends however who've sent their 360s in 4+ times and they still got the RROD. It's purely a chance thing. With the new slims removing this, it's a moot point and one that shouldn't be argued anymore, so you, good reader, shouldn't.

The PS3's YLOD was caused by a similar problem, though in much less amount. However, the PS3 also suffered from a multitude of problems. Poor thermal paste, some had less efficient PSUs, others had inefficient fans, and still even prevalent now, the lens can die on the drive. The PS3s, at least the older ones (and ones you may be considering buying for the backwards compatibility) have many things to worry about. The newer ones, not so much. Still, both consoles have their chance of failure (though 360 less so as of late. My friend hams56's slim's lens died, so it's not a problem that was fixed recently or anything) so don't go into it worrying about those things. If they're gonna happen, they're gonna happen. Read up and choose which you'd prefer.

The 360s, even the current ones, can eat your discs. By eat, i mean decimate worse than any mortal kombat fatality could. Your disc will be worse off in a wood chipper. Jokes aside, it does ruin the disc if you bump it while it's running. While most users may not think about this, some people have their consoles on their sides, or have kids. If a kid trips over your console, you're in trouble. Remember that when you buy a 360, because it's a very viable reason to avoid one if you don't have a high place that's out of reach to place it.

Both consoles are quite expensive for their branded hard drives, however, PS3s accept most 3.5 drives, and those can be very cheap. 360 supports..i forget, i apologize, but you can swap out the hard drives if you want to use your own, it takes a bit of work however. Hard drive size is more prevalent in 360s than they are in PS3s, so remember that if you think you're buying a 'deal' on an Arcade edition of a 360.

PS3 & 360: The exclusives

Here's where i may become biased. 360 tends to have a lot of shooter games. PS3 tends to have a lot of (j)RPGs. I'll go into my personal ramblings, but i'll put it in a spoiler because this is purely my take on games, as well as only the ones i've played and not really important as a whole when buying a console as the games i like may not be the ones you do.

[spoiler]360 has Gears of War, Fable, Halo, and two games that deserve their own spot: Saints Row and The Darkness

PS3 has Demon's Souls (which is moot as their servers shut down. Still, was a great game in it's prime.), God of War, Infamous, LittleBigPlanet MGS4, Tales of Graces, Trinity Universe, Warhawk, White Knight Chronicles.

360 exclusives and my experiences

Gears of war..I never really cared for. A bit of a short review, but i played a small bit of it and wasn't really impressed. : x

Fable..Oh fable, i loved you. You were so fun. Then fable II came around, and while it didn't have the same charm, it was still fun. No mana really made me dislike you at first though. Fable III..We don't talk about you. You disappoint me too much.

Halo..Halo i played a bit of halo 2 and 3, and from what i can tell, there's too many dang spots where people can sit on a hill on a difficult to sneak to place and just headshot players as they spawn. : /

Saints row..It should be said right now that Saints Row II is probably the best sandbox game out there at time of writing period. SR2 is multi-console, however, but SR1 is not. So if you want to get the original story, SR is only on 360.

The Darkness.. Oh my god this game is amazing. It's morbid though, heart eating and whatnot, but it is an incredible game, and if you have a 360, go pick it up. It's probably dirt cheap. Darkness II is nowhere near as good as the first one.

PS3 exclusives and my experiences

Demon's Souls..This game was a blast online. My friend used to sit on a bridge in the prison level that you -had- to pass. He'd sit there, wait for them, and just shove them off the cliff. Great times man, great times. Best of all, nobody got *** about it because the game was so hard that such dickery was expected from the game.

God of War..It's entertaining to watch when someone is really good at it. Me personally i wasn't very good. I'm horrible at platforming, or anything that has even a mild semblance of puzzles. ._.

Infamous..This game wasn't really my kind of thing. I'm not one who enjoys these such titles. You might, however. Platformers and me don't mix though. D:

LittleBigPlanet..Ugh. This game to me is just a bunch of user content. It always *** me off they charged full price for an innovative GUI and some modding tools. The game is run purely on user content, which isn't a bad thing, but the fact they did so little work and just coast off the user left a bad taste in my mouth.

MGS4 (Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots)..This game man..When i first played it and had no idea about the MGS world, i thought it was just a movie game. I still think it's a movie game, but my god, it's a dang good one. MGS has a great, albeit slightly wha? story. Playing it, maybe as a rental. I highly suggest watching Chip and Ironicus's LP of the MGS series if you don't want to play. They do a great job showing off everything in the MGS world, and it really makes you appreciate this game moreso than if you just picked it up out of the blue.

Tales of Graces (f)..When i got this game, i was seriously turned off by the battle system. I warmed up to it however and i really enjoyed the game quite a lot. There's tons of things to grind for (i love grinding if it's a fun system, and this one is), there's plenty of humor, the story is a bit '...really?' at times but overall it's a great game and i wholeheartedly offer this as a starting point to the PS3.

Trinity Universe..Oh man, this game. I love GUST/NIS games, so this was a huge fanservice to me. It has atelier characters, disgaea characters, a few other characters that i forgot where they come from. The game is a great dungeon crawler, the cast is humorous, there's tons of grindability to make your char beyond godly (disgaea style). If you like GUST and NIS games, this is a great game.

Warhawk..When this game first came out, it was fun as heck. So many fun things to do, dogfights were amazing..But as the game went on, cheap playstyles evolved that were never addressed or fixed. For example, it's possible to rocket a person who's driving a jeep so far that the game counts it as a suicide vs a kill. This means two things: Your teammates can kill you in CTF mode and grab the flag for themselves, or the enemy can stop you from going anywhere altogether. In CTF, you can't fly from cap point to cap point, but at least you had a chance before this. I stopped playing after all that since CTF was one of my favorite game modes, and all the other game modes people would just troll-teamkill you and not be booted because they were the host. x.x

White Knight Chronicles i loved. The game was dang short, but i really enjoy that FF12 playstyle. Plus you could create a combo of a move and name it yourself, which was great for hilarity online. It had online quests, but i thiiink? the servers are down now.[/spoiler]

Modability, Homebrew, and Hacks.

I can only touch lightly on this subject for reasons that obvious, but from what i've used my PS3 for, i can totally suggest it if you're looking for homebrew. The ability to watch MKVs (Mildly moot since if you have a decent computer and a good router you can stream through PS3MediaServer), backup your games to the console and play them with faster load times, PS2 emulation via ISOs (though it requires you to buy a dongle which is kinda effed up, honestly, but this means you can play games like FFXII IZJS or other games that have translation patches for PS2), PSP games (with moderate to poor compatibility, also requires the same dongle) Emulators (SNES!! D: D: ), and a plethora of other things i'm forgetting, i really liked my PS3 for homebrewing. Someone else will have to mention what a 360 can do, as i don't have hands good enough to solder.

So, which one do i buy?

Personally, despite kinda taking a bat to 360 exclusives..I'd still say a 360. It's cheap(er), the ability to play music in any game and the ability to install to the hard drive are the main sellers for me. The PS3 is great for homebrew, though, so if you can get one on 3.55 i'd totally recommend that one over the 360. Nothing like playing SNES on a console a decades after it's time. (plus SNES is awesome and you should totally get one instead of either of these! D;< )

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[rabies]

My Dreamcast is better than the XBOX 360. full stop, just in case you didn't notice the first.
.....XBOX live, online game play is SEGA's BRAIN CHILD so all praise GOES TO THEM.
The Dreamcast is the first console to introduce that experience.
The XBOX control is a copy of the Dreamcast control so whatever pros you guys giving Microsoft is meant for Sega. Just letting you know.

[Zix]

easy one for me, PS3, Its much easier to hack and does not involve opening it up to mod it, where as xbox not only do you have to jtag it but your forced to pay some homebrews too, which sucks.

[Faltimar]

I dont really have a favorite. I think xbl is a rip off so I wont pay for that. I like the 360 controller better. Really, both of my consoles get more use as media devices than gaming devices. I use PC and handhelds for most of my gaming needs.

As far as I can tell they're pretty much the same now. I like the "free" games on ps3. If I didnt get those I would probably never play on console.

[Acid_Snake]

my vote's for the ps3, why:

- more exclusive games: just look at all the characters in PS Battle Royale, they are all from exclusive titles, if microsoft were to make an xbox allstars game it'll end up being Master Chief vs himself.

- the controller: anyone who says the DS3 sucks is a hypocrite, we've all used the DualShock on our beloved PS1s and PS2s, and I never heard anyone from that era that say the DS sucked, if you are saying it sucks now, either you never had a ps1 or ps2 or you are a hypocrite, plain and simple. And those saying the xbox controller is better for shooters, I disagree, never had any trouble with shooters on the ps3, oh and I prefer a controller that is "ok" with most genres than a controller that only works for one genre, it limits the system up.

- power: no matter how much fanboys will tell you that the xbox is more powerful, it's not true. The ps3 GPU only lacks a bit behind, but the Cell processor has the ability to act as a second GPU and at the same time still has enough power as a CPU to outperform the 360, just look at uncharted 2 and 3, where they make full use of this scheme.
Also, at all you people saying the 360 has 512MB of ram and the ps3 only has 256MB, do you know math? yes the ps3 has 256MB of main ram, but it also has 256MB of VRAM: 256+256=512, wow how did I do that?

- quality: I know the RRoD issue has been progressively fixed to a certain degree, but it still has the same failure rate as old ps3 models, while newer ps3 models have near 0 failure rate. oh and if you didn't know, the RRoD wasn't the only problem the 360 had, there was also the problems with discs being scratched by the poor design of the disc tray, and the E74 error, which was also very common.

- sales: no matter how you look at it, the ps3 has sold more worldwide than the 360, taking into consideration that the ps3 launched a year after the 360 it's very impressive, I don't know how sony managed to revive a system that was a dead as the vita, but they did and they deserve my props for it.

- the interface: I find the ps3 interface (the xmb) to be very simple, organised, ergonomic and easy to use. You'd have to be a monkey to not know how to use it. I can't say anything about the 360 as I haven't used it much.

[Shobaik]

I used to like my 360 over my ps3, but over time I found myself using my ps3 far more. PS Plus probably helped in that too.

[Purrster]

I personally like the Xbox 360 more.
To me, it feels like most of my games lag/have lagspikes on my PS3, while nearly none of my games slow down on my Xbox 360. (It might just be the games, though. I don't exactly have a giant game libabry. )
I have to admit that I DO hate the "Paying for multiplayer"-thing, though. It might not be extremely expensive, but it isn't cheap either.
Also, even though it's IE, the Xbox's webbrowser is quite amazing, in my opinion. Definitely beats the PS3's browser.

[JeoWay]

PS3 All the way. I tried xbox, i got banned for modding the firmware and I had 2 years LIVE all lost -_-