Greetings and salutations and welcome to my…..well, normally I’d say little corner of the T4 website, but this week, things are just a little bit different. Instead of doing my weekly review spot, I’m opening it up to everyone out there. I want your input!This week is going to be all about the consoles and what you believe is the best console out there on the market. The three obvious choices are, in no particular order, Nintendo’s Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and Sony’s Playstation 3. I’m gonna list my quick pros and cons of each system and we shall see where it takes us.
First on the list, the Nintendo Wii.
Pros
1. The backing of the longest, active console manufacturer. Nintendo has been in the console market since the mid 1980′s when it came out with the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), which in my opinion, was a pretty ballsy move considering that the video game market just crashed a couple years earlier. But the move paid off for Nintendo as it’s still around to this day.
2. The cheapest console out right now. Brand new, a Nintendo Wii will cost you $139.99. The cheapest brand new Xbox 360 is around $200, while the PS3 is still the most expensive out there at $249.
3. Games can be a little bit cheaper. While not all games fall in line with cheaper pricing (FIFA 12 was released today across all systems for $59.99), there are new titles that come out at $49.99, X-Men Destiny for example, also released today.
Cons
1. Hate to say it but when I think of Nintendo, I think of gimmick marketing. While I applaud them for thinking outside of the box and doing things before the competition, maybe there’s a reason that the competition hasn’t gone there. Looking back through Nintendo’s history, you’ve got such failures as R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy), and the Virtua Boy. Sure, all companies have their fair shares of failures and no company is perfect, but how could these really seem like good ideas at the time? Even with the popularity of the Wii and it’s motion controls, I’m not a huge fan of it. I might be guilty of playing a few dozen or so games of Wii Bowling, but I wanna relax when I play my video games, not swinging my arms around or dancing or mimicking motions of throwing a football or whatever the case may be.
2. I see the Nintendo systems more aimed at the younger generation or more kid friendly. Maybe it’s because Nintendo was such a huge hit with the Mario Bros franchise, but when I think Nintendo, I think of Donkey Kong, Star Fox, Mario Bros, and Zelda. All cartoony graphics and all safe for young kids to play with. The problem with that is unless you’ve still a got a hold of your older gamers through your vintage game collection on the Wii Marketplace, you’ve pretty much neglected them. You don’t have the hot hits like the Gears of War series that the 360 has, or the Uncharted games from PS3. Which actually kind of leads into my 3rd con…..
3. Controls. Continuing on from Con #2, any of the hits that you do manage to get on your console have weird controls cause the developers have had to tie them into your motion control scheme or between the nunchuck and the other handheld controller. There are games that do work with the handheld controller turned sideways as it acts like a normal controller then, but then why’d you buy a Wii if you didn’t want the motion controls? I’d say stick with what works and they should’ve left it alone or gone the Sony way with the motion controls on the inside of the controller with the option to turn it off.
4. Graphics are nowhere near the competition. While Xbox 360 and PS3 are all about the high definition graphics and 720/1080p picture, you’ve got the Wii that seems to be stuck on graphics from 2 systems ago. Why haven’t they updated the graphics? Yeah, games shouldn’t be sold on graphics alone, but it sure helps if you got something pretty to look at when playing a great game.
5. No HD video support of any kind. Outside of Netflix, you are stuck with DVD quality movies. And while a little off topic, it seems like Nintendo is fine with that. At this past E3, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has confirmed that the “next gen” Nintendo console, Wii U, does not have DVD or Blu-ray playback capabilities. He said that the reason they will be not be including it into the Wii U is that “enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray, such it didn’t warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies.”
Next on the list, the Microsoft Xbox 360.
Pros
1. Great overall system for a pretty fair price. You can get a new Xbox 360 for around $200 which is the basic system and a 4 gigabyte hard drive. You’ll want to either upgrade to the next system up which is around the $300 mark and it comes with a 250 gigabyte hard drive or you can buy refurbished 360 hard drives for about another $40-50 depending on the size you want. The reason the 4 gigabyte hard drive won’t work for you is pretty easy to explain. A decent game demo will take up about 1-2 gigs, so there’s half of your hard drive right there. Then you got your save files, and your music, and your videos. 4 gigabytes just isn’t enough for all of that. Do yourself a favor. Get a bigger hard drive.
Cons
1. Red Ring of Death/overheating. God how much I hated my Xbox 360. I always used to joke with my friends that it doubled as a portable space heater. I’d never have to worry about my room being cold in the winter. Just turn on the 360 and you’ll be nice and toasty all night. Not sure how true these figures are, but they used to say, back when the Xbox 360 first came out that anywhere between 33-50% of new Xbox 360s would have overheating problems and have to be sent back to Microsoft for repairs. I personally had the Red Rings show up on my systems 6 times I believe, and no, I’m not exaggerating. The only reason I would have a friend of mine fix it is because of the amount of games I had for the system. If I had maybe 5-10 games, I would’ve tossed it in the trash ages ago, but at that time, my collection of games was probably close to 100, if not more, so I just kept getting the thing fixed. But after spending over $1 billion dollars on Red Ring of Death related issues, Microsoft redid the internal structure and chips inside the Microsoft 360s and took out the Red Rings display so people can longer say it’s an issue. Now we just get error codes or mystery issues.
2. Have to pay for online gaming. Outside of the heating issues I’ve had with my 360s, one thing that really never sat well with me was having to pay to play online, and as time moved forward, needing to pay to really access all the Xbox 360 has to offer. Right now, if you chose to play your Xbox 360 online, you’d be paying around $50-60 a year. Granted, it’s not a whole lot of money but if you want to say watch Netflix, or listen to Last.fm, or watch ESPN, you have to have a Gold membership. If you don’t, you’re pretty much left in the cold buried in snow and old demo releases, looking inside at your friends who are all sitting around the nice warm fire, watching the newest release on Netflix while the latest and greatest demos are downloading in the background. Sucks, don’t it?
3. Odd pricing in the marketplace. I kind of get Wii’s marketplace pricing (100 tokens = 1 dollar) and the PSN is just plain jane with their costs with whatever it says is how much it costs. Xbox 360 has a points program and it works out to some crazy equation like an 800 pointarcade game would be $10 in regular money. So why not just say it’s $10? And let’s say that you don’t have 800 Microsoft points. Let’s say you are at 745 Microsoft Points cause you just spent 55 Microsoft Points on that Philadelphia Eagles jersey for your Mii….oops Microsoft Avatar. If you are short in points, you have to buy a new card or more points but it doesn’t work out that you can buy the 55 points you are missing. You have to buy another 400 Microsofts points ($5) and then deal with the leftovers later. I’d rather just pay what I owe and get it out of the way.
4. No Blu Ray support. Yeah, I know this is gonna be kind of a cheap shot, but oh well. Microsoft backed the wrong horse when it came to the HD movie format. While Microsoft went with the HD-DVD format, Sony decided on the Blu Ray format and Blu Ray prevailed. Unless you feel like renting a movie off the marketplace, stream over Netflix or another device, or have a Blu Ray player or PS3 to fall back on, no new movies in high definition for you!
And last, but certainly not least, the Sony Playstation 3.
Pros
1. Blu Ray support. You got your movies and games under one format and you don’t need to have another side gizmo like you did with the 360 and it’s HD-DVD player. Everything is built into the system.
2. I think the PS3 has a better overall game selection. While Xbox 360 has the big name First Person Shooters, but Sony seems to be more well rounded with their exclusives, examples being the Uncharted Series, God of War, Metal Gear, Twisted Metal, and MLB The Show.
3. Free online gaming and applications. Pretty much the exact opposite of Microsoft’s XBox Live. You don’t have to pay an extra monthly/yearly fee for online gaming to play games with friends or to access your Netflix account or MLB.TV, NHL Gamecenter, and so on.
4. Small Pro but easy to upgrade your PS3 hard drive if you want to. All you need is a screwdriver and obviously another hard drive. Open the port, unscrew 4-6 screws, pull out old hard drive, plop in new one, rescrew the screws, and you are good to go. All it takes is basically a laptop hard drive. I updated my launch model PS3 40 GB hard drive to a 500 GB hard drive for about $50. Rather cheap, quite easy, thumbs up all around.
Cons
1. Security concerns. Anyone who is even the slightest bit of a gamer knows about the hacking Sony’s dealt with earlier this year. I’ll even take it a step further, my mother, who was never too crazy about video games and my addiction/fascination with them knew about it! I know Michael traded in his PS3 during that dark period in Sony’s history. I’m sure lots of people traded in their systems and went with 360s since Microsoft has never reported such a breach. And another thing that angered people was Sony’s lack of response to it for days after the Playstation Network was down.
2. Mandatory firmware updates. How many times have you wanted to play a quick game with a buddy, just to find out that you can’t play online till you update your system’s firmware? Yeah, it’s kinda nice that Sony keeps giving us patches, but they are freakin’ annoying! No I don’t wanna download this 4 gigabyte firmware update! I wanna play a quarter of Madden football before work! You don’t download the firmware update, you don’t get online access. Firmware updates have also caused issues in the past. Removal of the “Other OS” option anyone?
Overall, I think the PS3 is the best system out there on the market. Yeah, it the more expensive of the 3, but I think you really can’t beat what you get. You have a movie player, game system, and entertainment system (Hulu Plus, Netflix, MLB, NHL, NFL Sunday Ticket) all wrapped up in one machine.
With that being said, which system do you prefer for your gaming console? If I forgot anything on any particular system, I’m sure one of you will let me know with your comments. This editorial was written for everyone to contribute to. I’d like to see what systems people are playing and how they feel about the others.
As always, if you agree with what I said, feel free to leave a comment saying so. If you don’t agree with my choice or what I have said, leave a comment. I read all comments that you guys leave and they are greatly appreciated. Hopefully I’ll have a new game to review next week for you guys and girls. If there is a certain game you’d like to see me review out of my collection, once again, just say so, and I will do the best that I can to write one up for you. To steal Michael and Colm’s closing line, best of luck in all your future video gaming endeavors.
My personal video game collection: http://www.icollectmedia.com/collection/game/wboyd31/?display=
My Xbox Live Gamertag: WBoyd31
My PSN Gamertag: LonesomeRaven
