Well, I gave up my first PS3 quite a while ago. Is imply did not use it. The Blu-ray did not bitstream, so I had a standalone player and the games I played most were on Xbox. I also found Live! to be a far superior online experience and XBLA to have much better casual games.
Well, here I am now with a PS3 Slim, bitstreaming my Blu-rays and my Xbox in retirement. Do I miss the Xbox, yes. But not nearly so much. And thanks to PSN getting better downloadable games, I'm missing it less and less.
Once PSN has Alien Breed Extract and it's enhanced version of Magic The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalker's, PSN will more or less reach parity with its current offerings with XBLA; at least for me. They should be able to maintain that parity as long as they keep providing games normal casual gamers want to play and stay away from the wierd strange eccentric games they were stuck on early on. I still don't know who plays flower.
Additionally, Sony should invest more in developers to prevent exclusives or timed exclusives on XBLA. By the time Zombie Apocalypse got to PSN, it wasn't even interesting. While Zen Pinball is superior on PS3, I wore it out on XBLA well before PSN got its version. Magic the Gathering already has 2 expansions on Xbox, though I'm skipping the second as I've retired my Xbox primarily due to noise and bulkiness and the lack of HD features.
I will eat crow and admit to all the fanboys, Uncharted 2 is one of the best console games ever, and definitely the prettiest. Though I can't draw comparisons to Gears 1. They're just too different. There's nothing like Gears 1 on PS3 except imitations and there's noting like Uncharted to on Xbox period. Every Xbox owner should try it out on a friend's PS3. You may not go back.
The one glaring deficiency holding PS3 back given its superior audio/video features and price (wifi, blu-ray) why isn't it blowing Xbox away?
Aside from XBLAs shrewd exclusive moves, the one majore area that is still clearly far and away supeior on xbox is the Live! network.
The PS3 handles friends and invites in a mishmash kludgy manner. I mean, seriously, accepting and invite through messages? Why have a Playstation button and friend notifications when you can't do much? And the lack of cross game chat is just terrible. It's unacceptable if you've experienced Xbox Live!
The consistent implementation of the XBox button with friend notifications and invites is fluid and seamless and combined with the superior chat and network infrastructure of Live! is enough to keep MS in the game despite so many other inferior aspects to the Xbox platform.
Want to know how bad it is. Play High Stakes Poker. Create a room. Now try and get a friend into it. Ha! The game developer should not have to write the code to create this functionality.
See an invite notification on PS3, hit your Playstation button. OK, now, see an invite notification on Xbox Live!, hit your Xbox button, voila!
See a friend online notification on PSN, hit your Playstation button... OoooK. See friend notification on Xbox Live!, hit your Xbox button, voila!
It's not even close.
Sony should make the investment to create and infrastructure and APIs developers can use to create a seamless and fluid online experience that equals or betters Lives! The lack of this truly makes the online experience of PSN seem like an experiment compared to Live! I would gladly pay $49 annually to have a Live! like online experience on PSN. Sony fanboys need to get of their high horses and demand these improvements. If Sony did make these improvements, MS would be in dire straits. As it is, MS will probably make it safely to the next generation tied or leading the market and they will have the Live! network and infrastructure to thank for it.
Listen up Sony. Microsoft does software. That's their thing, and Live! software is far superior. Just copy 'em already. Then we can move on to network performance. But first things first.
Square Enix has announced a new crossover with the Evangelion will be coming to Final Fantasy XIV in the form of a new Alliance Raid.
While this sci-fi, rogue-like, bullet hell, third-person shooter has issues that keep it from being a classic, it still manages to be exciting and engaging.
Did you guys heard that ? 🦗🎶
It’s the sound of no one care about your corny political sad jokes
In an exclusive interview with Game File, new(ish) Xbox boss Asha Sharma and Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty explain their vision for Microsoft’s gaming division
it's all about the games, friend. if it doesn't have any games that i want all the bells&whistles in the world wouldn't matter to me.
maybe i'm an oddity these days but i simply can't and don't give a rats ass about any online features. i don't care what sony does with psn, i'd rather they spend the money on games. i think most sony die hards like myself share the same sentiment:we simply don't care, games are more important.
i don't care what my friends are playing, i'm capable of functioning as an individual, i don't need to be up my friends asses 24/7. i don't bother them to play games with me 24/7. it's irrelevant...and certainly not worth $50.
Multiplayer is where it's at. Sure, single player campaigns are the staple. But some games, particularly casual games which is the biggest swing market, multiplayer is a must. Playing poker by yourself just isn't any fun. Neither is Wheel of Fortune.
I am with you though, most campaigns are better than multiplayer frag fests. But, co-op trumps them both IMO.
Why not have it all, eh?
The community has been asking sony for all of that for years. Their just epically slow in delivering any of it. Then when they do they put out such a half assed copy that's optional for dev's to use that many just don't. Total craziness.
"Sony should make the investment to create and infrastructure and APIs developers can use to create a seamless and fluid online experience that equals or betters Lives!"
The problem with this is that existing games would not benefit. So you would not have universal invites, universal cross-game chat etc. Maybe they should have added it earlier - but it is a big challenge.
The one advantage of not having such a rigid standard is a diversity of online play - devs are not so reliant on P2P and games like Demon's Souls have innovative multiplayer that devs would not bother to implement (maybe could not implement) on live.
Your main complaints are of interface; I mean if Sony simply changed the interface such that game invites and friend invites were not displayed just as messages but came up as soon as you press the PS button, and if game invites were consistent across games, and if games without specific invites still had an option to message your friend quickly and easily, most of your complaints would go away.
The only thing that would have secured consistency across games (game invites, cross-game chat) would have been some forward-planning. In fact with no more cost to Sony, they could have made online free AND better than live, and one wonders why, given that they released later, they didn't come up with a better product. As it is even if they do implement cross-game chat it will conflict with existing chat systems that you'll have to manually turn off.
Something Steam has that xbox live lacks is the ability to change your name mid-game to anything you want. Your account name is unique, but the name you are known by could change depending on your mood. This is a great feature but MS charges you to change your gamertag. And it can't be anything that anyone else has. So I'd have to be called Xx__Thor__xX but on steam I could be RacingGod one day and MW2Daemon the next. The point about this is that with forward-planning, MS could have implemented this feature, but there's no way they could implement it retrospectively.
I wouldn't mind a new inter face for the XMB. PSN is fine for being free and all..