I want a next gen console - which one?

[aphex]

Ok, well since i bought both systems (PS3 is still in the closet) and opened up the 360, i now have a few impressions under my belt.

The 360 is much more than I anticipated. The integration of Live into the console is great, i like how I can go onto the marketplace and download tons of demos right there, movies, shows, etc... On a side note, I was a bit disappointed by some of the free clips I got though, they seemed to studder a bit, not as smooth as I had hoped.

Maybe i expected too much from Gears of War, or maybe i havent played it enough, but so far i'm not in love with the game. Graphics look good, but I dont like having to hide constantly, and i seem to run out of ammo way to quickly. I'm wondering if it could be a problem with my controller though, the down button dosent seem very responsive at all, a light touch yields nothing, i kinda have to hit it hard, much harder than up. The only time I really say 'WOW' when playing is when you run, the camera movements just look pretty cool. Also, the story dosen't make much sense yet, am i missing something?

So far the demos I am enjoying most are the racing games and sports games. Burnout legends and Full Auto are cool, as is Tiger Woods golf and some College Basketball game where I get to play as my mighty Gators.

As for the streaming music/photos, it works, dont get me wrong, but the interface leaves me uninspired and I'm not a big fan of the visualizer at all, looks like the designer took some acid. I prefer something more understated and simple, rather than psychedelic disco. When browsing music, I dislike the big rounded buttons, i feel like I'm sitting in front of a Windows box, not a sleek console. Again, these are minute details, but since this was a major purpose of this console, I am unimpressed unfortunately

HD-DVD, specifically King Kong looked great. I like how it integrates right into the 360, but i don't like having a second drive on my entertainment center.

I dunno though, I am just not totally in love with the console yet. Maybe it will grow on me, but right now i'm waivering and contemplating opening up the PS3 and giving a real head to head.

 

[aphex]

Hmmm, well i cracked open the PS3 to try it out... and well..... hmmm.... this really isnt what i was expecting... at all...

#1. The sound, optical audio out, dosent seem to turn on quick enough. If i move one space on the XMB, it dosent make a sound, but when i keep moving, it seems to wake up and start making sound.

#2. Downloading Demos. Wow. C'mon Sony, No background downloading? You mean i have to sit there and wait for 885mb Resistance to download? and super slow downloading from Sony at that... Its been at 2% for almost 10 minutes now.

#3. Why the HECK do i need to plug in my wireless controller to run the update, or to reboot from it? Also, where are the user changeable batteries? When they die, am i Screwed?

#4. There is a mysterious 10gb missing from the HD, and i dont see any demos, music, etc installed from the factory? 10gb overhead? That seems a bit excessive. Fresh from the factory, with the 1.5 update installed, im already down to 46gb (i'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on the first 5, as most 60gb drives end up formatted as 55-57).

I dunno... So far I am not impressed. This just dosen't feel like Sony put any effort into this thing. Am i wrong here?

 

[jlmadyson]

Originally posted by: aphex
Hmmm, well i cracked open the PS3 to try it out... and well..... hmmm.... this really isnt what i was expecting... at all...

#1. The sound, optical audio out, dosent seem to turn on quick enough. If i move one space on the XMB, it dosent make a sound, but when i keep moving, it seems to wake up and start making sound.

#2. Downloading Demos. Wow. C'mon Sony, No background downloading? You mean i have to sit there and wait for 885mb Resistance to download? and super slow downloading from Sony at that... Its been at 2% for almost 10 minutes now.

#3. Why the HECK do i need to plug in my wireless controller to run the update, or to reboot from it? Also, where are the user changeable batteries? When they die, am i Screwed?

#4. There is a mysterious 10gb missing from the HD, and i dont see any demos, music, etc installed from the factory? 10gb overhead? That seems a bit excessive. Fresh from the factory, with the 1.5 update installed, im already down to 46gb (i'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on the first 5, as most 60gb drives end up formatted as 55-57).

I dunno... So far I am not impressed. This just dosen't feel like Sony put any effort into this thing. Am i wrong here?

Don't know bro, you got a lot of issues to work out it seems. Reading your posts makes me feel so much like the simple man lol. Nonetheless, go with your heart and whichever one you get the best vibe from at least, or I should say least problems.

 

[thawolfman]

Sony to replace SIXAXIS when batteries die.

Old but true?

 

[aphex]

Yea, well at this point, i dunno the PS3 just dosen't impress me as much as i thought. It just feels unfinished. Browsing around the PS3 forums, it seems that everytime anyone complains about something not working, the response is always "wait until the March update", which is then followed by a by a slew of random quibbles about how nothing for the March update has been confirmed.

I dunno, the XMB looks good, but, well,

 

[jlmadyson]

Originally posted by: aphex
Yea, well at this point, i dunno the PS3 just dosen't impress me as much as i thought. It just feels unfinished. Browsing around the PS3 forums, it seems that everytime anyone complains about something not working, the response is always "wait until the March update", which is then followed by a by a slew of random quibbles about how nothing for the March update has been confirmed.

I dunno, the XMB looks good, but, well,

Personally, there have been quite a few updates to the interface/marketplace on live in the last year. Thus, I believe MS will sometime down the road, or at least I hope, try to streamline the system a little better, making it a little more user friendly. Here's to hoping, solid system overall though.

 

[thawolfman]

Originally posted by: jlmadyson

Originally posted by: aphex
Yea, well at this point, i dunno the PS3 just dosen't impress me as much as i thought. It just feels unfinished. Browsing around the PS3 forums, it seems that everytime anyone complains about something not working, the response is always "wait until the March update", which is then followed by a by a slew of random quibbles about how nothing for the March update has been confirmed.

I dunno, the XMB looks good, but, well,

Personally, there have been quite a few updates to the interface/marketplace on live in the last year. Thus, I believe MS will sometime down the road, or at least I hope, try to streamline the system a little better, making it a little more user friendly. Here's to hoping, solid system overall though.

I hope Zephyr sees the light of day, even though it's a prototype board and all

 

[aphex]

Originally posted by: thawolfman

Originally posted by: jlmadyson

Originally posted by: aphex
Yea, well at this point, i dunno the PS3 just dosen't impress me as much as i thought. It just feels unfinished. Browsing around the PS3 forums, it seems that everytime anyone complains about something not working, the response is always "wait until the March update", which is then followed by a by a slew of random quibbles about how nothing for the March update has been confirmed.

I dunno, the XMB looks good, but, well,

Personally, there have been quite a few updates to the interface/marketplace on live in the last year. Thus, I believe MS will sometime down the road, or at least I hope, try to streamline the system a little better, making it a little more user friendly. Here's to hoping, solid system overall though.

I hope Zephyr sees the light of day, even though it's a prototype board and all

Wow, 120gb, nice... i guess thats one complaint i have about the 360, the 20gb isnt big enough, and from what i hear, cant be replaced with a larger one.

 

[jlmadyson]

Originally posted by: thawolfman

Originally posted by: jlmadyson

Originally posted by: aphex
Yea, well at this point, i dunno the PS3 just dosen't impress me as much as i thought. It just feels unfinished. Browsing around the PS3 forums, it seems that everytime anyone complains about something not working, the response is always "wait until the March update", which is then followed by a by a slew of random quibbles about how nothing for the March update has been confirmed.

I dunno, the XMB looks good, but, well,

Personally, there have been quite a few updates to the interface/marketplace on live in the last year. Thus, I believe MS will sometime down the road, or at least I hope, try to streamline the system a little better, making it a little more user friendly. Here's to hoping, solid system overall though.

I hope Zephyr sees the light of day, even though it's a prototype board and all

If that comes out I will upgrade there is no doubt about it. My feelings are, this is going to happen by the end of the year. They will probably put it at 399 while the now premium will be 299 also the option of buying the 120gb HDD stand alone as well. Just my own gut feelings but we'll see in due course. Something like this would be perfect for an E3 announcement.

 

[DigitalCancer]

I would say either if you only want it for movies. If you want a real gaming console for now...i'd say 360. I LOVE mine. I hate that they didn't make the drive an HD-DVD drive though...don't know what they were thinking!

Anyhow, i've seen a few BR players that are multi-format (DVD, HDDVD) i'm not familiar w/ those technologies though, as i don't even have my HDTV yet. =/ Also, got decide if you want to pay the higher prices they tend to come with BR discs over HD, usually $10-15 higher than HD discs.

IF the ps3 does HDDVD as well as BR....i'd say that were the way to go though. But...if you want good games and good online services...go 360. I'm sure Ps3 will have good games as well, given its had a shaky start so far, but its got some good exclusives (for now) like MGS4, thats the killer. G'luck to ya man. Do a little research on the ps3...then decide. Thats alot of money to spend on media, but they're worth it!

 

[Ciber]

Try this for streaming from your mac to your 360, it's what i use.

 

[aphex]

So after almost an hour of sitting at 12%, i stopped the download. Then got an error on screen that the download had failed. Nice.

So i pop in my SD card with some Music and Pics on it to give it a whirl. Hmmm, dosent seem to see ANYTHING on my SD card, thats nice.

Im batting 0/10 right now with this PS3.

 

[DigitalCancer]

ahh....should have went 360 i guess? ^_^

 

[Krazy4Real]

PS3 + Linux FTW!

 

[aphex]

Ok, got the PS3 to play music, but still cant get it to view photos. Music has to be placed in a /MUSIC/ folder on the disk. tried /PHOTOS/ for my pictures, but no luck.

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: aphex
Ok, got the PS3 to play music, but still cant get it to view photos. Music has to be placed in a /MUSIC/ folder on the disk. tried /PHOTOS/ for my pictures, but no luck.

its not perfectly streamlined yet, but Sony has stated they are working on an update that will fix the multitasking issues of the XMB and PSN, and generally fix up the XMB a little bit. who knows what exactly they are planning, but its good to know they are doing something.

i haven't worked with photos, but read the manuals and read through the message boards at us.playstation.com a lot of help can be had there. its sucks for now, since not everything is streamlined perfectly, but theres a great base to the system. the XMB is amazing, and once/if everything is ironed out, it will be unbeatable. its so simplistic and yet so limitless.
look at how far the PSP has come as far as features go. we can look to that as an example of Sony's neverending strive to continue to better whats already good. Sony already is pushing out update after update. they want the PS3 to be the best thing possible, so I have faith they will continue to iron out everything, from the smallest of bugs to the bigger issues.

 

[exdeath]

Only reason I want a PS3 is to play around with programming the Cell.

Anyone running linux mess with that yet? Whats it like?

I'm hoping the compiler can automatically produce SPE code and PPE code from the same source using little more than compiler directives, and that there is some kind of multithreading library built into the SDK that handles task switching the SPEs and maintaining local store <-> XDR coherency automatically ...

In otherwords, it would be nice if, say you loop through an array of structs in standard C code targeted for the SPEs, and the compiler would secretly insert the proper DMA code to pre-fetch n+1 at the start of iteration n, and handle the SPE local store automatically with double buffers, etc.

Somehow I doubt it, but it would be nice...

If the SPE/PPE divisions are handled transparently by the compiler, the majority of my PC based tread pooling stuff should port with ease

Double buffered object states = dependency decoupled multithreading for gaming =D

 

[mlm]

Originally posted by: aphex
#2. Downloading Demos. Wow. C'mon Sony, No background downloading? You mean i have to sit there and wait for 885mb Resistance to download? and super slow downloading from Sony at that... Its been at 2% for almost 10 minutes now.

#3. Why the HECK do i need to plug in my wireless controller to run the update, or to reboot from it? Also, where are the user changeable batteries? When they die, am i Screwed?

#2. Speed is YMMV. It's either your wireless connection (try wired to see if there's any difference) or your ISP. We were able to get Resistance in under 30 minutes with wireless.

Another thing you might try is using a different PSN account. I'm not positive, but it seems as if users connect to different servers. When Gripshift went up, it took a day for it to show up on my account, but it showed up right away on bf's account.

#3. Why is that a big deal to so many people, it's not like there's an update every time you turn on the machine

As for the batteries, there are supposed to be instructions to change it out yourself, but Sony will replace it for you. From what I've heard, they'll last at least a couple of years before that becomes necessary. Personally I'd take USB chargeable over the Wii60 batteries any day.

Anyway, sounds like you need to RTFM: PS3 User Guide

 

[Gunslinger08]

Most PS3 haters either have never touched a PS3, balk at the price (same as a 360 + HD-DVD drive, with more features), or talk about the lack of games (360 JUST got it's first good game in GoW. PS3 launched with one.) They are generally uneducated about the capabilities of the PS3 and/or choose to blow up one issue which may not even pertain to them (such as the 720p upscaling issue which will be fixed with the March software update).

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: QED
2) Neither console natively upconverts DVDs. However, playing DVDs in Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3 does allow you to upconvert/deinterlace using just about any codec or algorithm you prefer.

IIRC, 360 will upconvert regular DVDs with the HD-DVD addon or via VGA cable.

edit: doh, I'm waay late to this conversation.

 

[Randum]

i have both, and I enjoy the xbox live community idea so far, and gears is a ton of fun.

The ps3 has a ton of potential, and will allow playback from your PC eventually along with movie downloads etc.

Personally its a really tough call. 360 now?? But I would say if you get a ps3, its a ton power, looks good, blu ray and wi fi out of the box no problem and free online play. HOWEVER, I give it until march to match the 360 online features...if it doesnt, there will be a clear winner in the console wars...

if you have the money, ps3 is pretty good bang for your buck

 

[aphex]

Wow... I dunno Sony just TOTALLY pissed me off.

I went over to Playstation.com and posted my impartial feelings about the system (as well as my impressions of the 360 to show where I was coming from). It was meant as a post to see if any other PS3 users experienced the problems i had..

Well after drafting the post for 30 minutes, it was deleted right away... They don't allow comparisons, at all. What a LOAD OF CRAP. Sorry Sony, but what is your site, North Korea? I'm now getting VERY close to calling it quits on the PS3, just too many strikes against it right now.

 

[jlmadyson]

Originally posted by: aphex
Wow... I dunno Sony just TOTALLY pissed me off.

I went over to Playstation.com and posted my impartial feelings about the system (as well as my impressions of the 360 to show where I was coming from). It was meant as a post to see if any other PS3 users experienced the problems i had..

Well after drafting the post for 30 minutes, it was deleted right away... They don't allow comparisons, at all. What a LOAD OF CRAP. Sorry Sony, but what is your site, North Korea? I'm now getting VERY close to calling it quits on the PS3, just too many strikes against it right now.

Yea, kind of like the Soup nazi over their. :laugh:

 

[geckojohn]

I would get a 360

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: aphex
Wow... I dunno Sony just TOTALLY pissed me off.

I went over to Playstation.com and posted my impartial feelings about the system (as well as my impressions of the 360 to show where I was coming from). It was meant as a post to see if any other PS3 users experienced the problems i had..

Well after drafting the post for 30 minutes, it was deleted right away... They don't allow comparisons, at all. What a LOAD OF CRAP. Sorry Sony, but what is your site, North Korea? I'm now getting VERY close to calling it quits on the PS3, just too many strikes against it right now.

Try the same on the 360 boards?