So after 3 years day for day of having an xbox 360, long after growing confident that I had luckily side-stepped the Red Ring of Death difficulties of the microsoft console, I was greeted with a 3-bar R.R.O.D this weekend. Thankfully, microsoft representatives have agreed to replace it.

Still, between getting a raise and a 500$ bonus for the holiday season from my bosses, I'm considering getting myself a playstation 3, in part due to the many exclusive titles, but mainly for the blueray drive. My question is: does anyone have experience between the older, larger PS3's and the new slim design? From what I gather, the new slim design lacks the backward PS2 compatibility, support for non-bluetooth universal remotes, and overall the design feels cheaper. I'm curious about its longetivity, whether the new parts might wear out faster and whatnot.

Any thoughts whether I should try hunting down an older generation, or simply go with the 120gb (or maybe 250gb for 50 more bucks) slim model?

What articles I've read do not answer some questions for me :

Does the PS3 read mp3s and can I store them on the hard-drive akin to the 360? Can you dump games on the hdd like you can on the xbox to help decrease load times? Is downloadable content anywhere as interesting as it is on the Xbox? For a long time (and even now when it comes to game releases) ps3 users seemed to get a swift kick in the teeth. (Fallout 3 dlc anyone?)

I may not be able to answer all of these questions:
I own an original 60GB PS3.

Yes, the new ones don't have backwards compatibility.
Can't tell you about longevity, but Sony sees the PS3 as a 10-year console *shrug*. Mine is just starting to have weird issues, like occasionally locking up (very rare occurrence) or making loud noises like the fan is louder. (it used to be much quieter).

Yes, it reads MP3s. I haven't put any music on my PS3, but if it's anything like my PSP then it shouldn't be hard to put music on it. (there's a "music" section in the menu).

Some games require an "installation" to play, but I don't think there is a controllable "dump" option for games as far as I know.

As far as DLC, some stuff is delayed, but alot is on time. When Resident Evil 5 came out the "Verses" mode came out almost right away. The exclusives are on time for sure

Alrighty then, that sounds about right.

Anyone else have opinions and/or experiences they want to share about this potential purchase?

Say, how is online gaming through the PS3? From I understand, its free, and as a result it isn't as developped as Xbox Live. Still that is a vague statement, and I would love to hear what those differences might be?

Do those who own a ps3 and play online have any difficulties finding online matches? Is there a prominent enough player base?

Oh yeah yeah, it's free.

Playstation network isn't quite as spiffy as XboxLive but...

I've been working on my Resistance 2 Platinum Trophy for awhile and I always find matches for online gaming. (theres a 10,000 kill platinum trophy for online matches :P)

I rented Borderlands when it first came out, lots of players, had no trouble finding other players.

I haven't played them recently, but I always found people playing GTA4, RE5, and Littlebigplanet. Supposedly Theres a Metal Gear Solid 4 online community, but it's basically a pay to play thing and I really didn't get into it.

If you log into Playstation Home, you get a feel for how many players there are. There are multiple instances of some rooms, and theres usually hundreds (possibly 1000's?) of people on Playstation Home during peak hours, like nights/evenings/weekends (throughout the VARIOUS rooms, not in 1 place).

Seroiusly, your fear of a lack of players was something that may have been an issue, like, when PS3 first launched 3ish years ago, but it's definately not now. It's just not as massive as XboxLive is all, doesn't mean its small.

Oh yea definately. And wow, 3 years ago? Its insane how time flies. XD

I'm going to be visiting various retail stores, see what prices are out there. I'm kind of put off that they sell the ps3 with only one controller and no ****ing game at all. Its real cheap on their part. Especially when you look at the xbox 360 elite sitting right next to it for 350$ with 2 controllers, 2 games, and a ton of accessories. (costco). Although the gf is swearing up and down that she saw the ps3 for 259$, though I remember it at 299. I'll have to check again.

A. Bluray on the Playstation 3 is actually pretty bad compared to dedicated players. It still supports everything, but it's slow.
B. Most games require some sort of installation. Many games require gigabytes of installed files in order to play. Expect to fill at least half of your hard drive with just installation if you get a few games. And yes, installation takes a loooong time.
C. Playstation Home is nothing more than a god-awful gimmick. It's empty more often than not, and full of idiots (people will stand in front of you while playing/looking at stuff, blocking your view, they swear and talk like idiots, and there's really very little to do). It takes up a lot of space, requires you to download even more as you "explore", requires purchases for most items, and basically serves only to advertise.
D. You cannot dump entire games to the hard drive.
E. There are online communities for the Playstation games, they're not empty. That said, they're about 1/4th the size of the communities in the 360 versions.
F. Rumor has it Sony is looking to start charging for PSN access soon, after realizing how much money they were losing on it compared to XBL.

All in all, if you have a 360, save yourself some aggravation and money, just get a bluray player.

Well the exclusive titles (most of them being tons more interesting than the xbox games) are what attracts me along with the blueray drive. I've read from many other sources that the ps3's blueray drive was alot better than many dedicated readers out there. There was no mention of speed, of course, but I'm not one to be pressed on time enough to care about a few seconds more load time or not.

That was only when it first came out. Almost all bluray readers are better than the Playstation 3 now. And we're not talking seconds, it's actually closer to minutes.

I just bought a Blu-Ray player made by LG that's superior to the one in the Sony PS3 for $86.

n00b question: in what way can a blu-ray be slow? As in, you put in a disc, then wait a full minute before anything comes on screen?

You don't get backwards compatibility on the old models either -- except the really, really old launch models. Thus: not all the bulky ones have it, in fact, probably most don't. And regarding universal remotes, it's my understanding that the old bulky ones also don't support non-bluetooth remotes. I know the one I ordered for my bulky is the official one and it's bluetooth. I tried to find a remote that advertised xbox 360 support & ps3 support and I was unable to find them.

Well, it depends on the disk. Sometimes they show a loading screen at the beginning, other times they flash or show icons and then show the default ps3 loading icon thing. I'm not entirely happy with the loading on the ps3 for blu rays either. It seems like it's sped up a bit since I first got it, likely due to a software update or something. However, it's worth it because the movies look so awesome.

Thats pretty much what I'm wondering. And ps3 owners I'm currently chatting with say its currently sitting at around 20-30 seconds. Which I can live with.

Brian, you own an Xbox too don't you? How would you compare your experience with the two?

(I re-read this after I wrote it and it's pretty disjointed, as you can see I'm ambivalent. Both seem to have their strengths and weaknesses.)

I like the xbox better for games. I dislike all the apps they are adding to both of them, like twitter, facebook, etc. I like the remote on the ps3 a lot better -- the bluetooth rules. We use the ps3 actually for blurays and dvds all the time, and games only very rarely. The UI for the xbox is crappier -- it's really busy, it has these stupid wii/mii things and the navigation sucks. For example, to do netflix streaming I have to scroll up/down to the "video store" and then go right to the netflix app -- they should have some way to create and boot to your list of shortcuts so I don't have to do all the navigation. It confuses my wife especially, so she uses the roku even though the picture quality is worse (roku uses our wireless which can be flaky). Also, it constantly asks every controller to sign in which is moronic. Why should I have to sign in to my xbox? Of course, if you want to use netflix streaming you have to use and be logged into xbox live, so we are forced to do that. Which just makes it more confusing for her.

The ps3 has a much simpler understated ui with just some line drawing icons.

I have never ending problems with xbox live ever since I got it, and on the contrary, my online for the rest of my components works fine -- ps3, roku, wii. I like the controller on the xbox a lot better. The xbox seems to have a much better selection of games. Or maybe just games I'm interested in playing.

And regarding the hardware, the ps3 has stupid soft-touch buttons that are really gimmicky. Also, I've never had hardware problems (like rrod or other hardware failures) with any of my consoles (unless you count the NES which I still have to jiggle to get games to play).

Oh, also, as you probably know, ps3 has built-in wireless which rocks. We use it for netflix streaming (using the free disk from netflix) and game demo downloads. I have never used either console for managing or watching movies from the hard drive or windows media center or anything like that. Oh also, the ps3 has a built-in web browser which I suppose can be nice if you have an HDTV and you're too lazy to get off the couch to check your email.

The new version of the PS3 (slim) doesn't have the soft touch buttons anymore. Its just your typical press-that-mother****er-to-fire-things-up button.

I'm honestly torn. I have the choice of either getting access to more games by having both, through an older 20gb xbox without even hdmi support and buying a new ps3, or selling my xbox to my dad for a 100$ and upgrading to the Elite.

Of course, I really want to play Demon's Souls, God of War series, Killzone 2, Little Big Planet, MGS4, Infamous, etc. Whereas on the 360 I'm really only looking forward to Mass Effect 2 and Fable 3. And Elderscrolls 5 whenever it comes, someday.

Of course, I'm reading that PS3 lacks AA in many game, whereas the xbox has it. Antialiasing is a big deal for me. I hate jaggies. >.<

Blu-ray loading is definitely not a matter of minutes. It's more like 20 seconds or so tops. Easily tolerable when you're about to sit down and watch a 90+ minute movie.

I've never really had problems with the 360's Netflix UI. The Netflix UI that the PS3 and Roku players use is a little better I think (they're very similar), but the PS3 suffers from the horrible problem that it absolutely must display Netflix content in its native resolution for some reason, so it'll switch its output resolution to 720p for HD content and 480p for SD content instead of upscaling everything to 1080p (or 1080i/720p depending on your TV's max res).

And on the overall topic of owning PS3's and/or 360's, I'd say if you can manage it and play lots of games, get both. I have both, and I play both quite a bit. The PS3's gotten some pretty good games recently (Uncharted 2, Demon Souls, etc.), as has the 360. When it comes to multiplayer stuff though, I tend to stick with the 360 when I can because most of my friends have them, whereas I know very few people with PS3's, and also Live's matchmaking and general online quality is a lot better.

A. PS3 is actually the fastest bluray player currently available... if you're experiencing slowness 99% chance it's a BD-Live title that's having problems connecting to a server my load time for bluray is counted in seconds not minutes
B. i've only had a couple games that took more than 1GB to install and quite a few games with the 4GB installs are multiplatform
C. this is mostly true... there are a few fun things to do in home but it generally loses it's appeal rather quickly...
D. true...
E. also true the multiplatform titles will have more players on the 360
F. the existing free features will remain free sony's comments were somewhat vague but it was still pretty clear to anyone with proper reading comprehension skills that they weren't going to suddenly make you pay for what you already have for free...

for the OP... here's the difference between the PS3 fat and the PS3 slim

PS3 slim isn't shiny (except maybe the bit in front of the disc slot where the buttons are)

PS3 slim has actual buttons instead of the soft touch things

PS3 slim cannot run linux

PS3 slim can bitstream Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD (the fat could only decode these formats internally and output as PCM... no difference in sound but this will allow the little lights for those formats to light up on receivers that can decode these formats)

PS3 slim uses less power

PS3 slim cannot play PS2 games (this is also true about a number of PS3 fat models (the quickest way to check is to look at the USB ports... the systems with 4 are the ones with PS2 BC)

the non bluetooth universal remote thing also affected the PS3 fat... you need a separate IR receiver to make them work



yeah the PS3's netflix UI is not as fancy but it's better for readability as for the no upscaling... PS3 does not upscale any content on a bluray and since it's a BD-Live based setup... no upscaling (at least not from the PS3... your TV is more than likely upscaling everything)

this is actually better for my own situation with an old 4:3 CRT HDTV (displays 4:3 content at 40" and 16:9 content at 37") the 360 was upscaling all 4:3 films on netflix which created a windowboxed effect where i have the black bars from the TV displaying a 16:9 image on a 4:3 screen plus the bars on the side from the 4:3 video being pillarboxed into a 16:9 frame... PS3 doesn't do this... so those films that are 4:3 actually take up my whole screen

Oh, yeah, and with a PS3, don't worry about install sizes and stuff like that because it's piss easy to upgrade the hard drive in it. All you have to do is back up everything to a FAT32 formatted USB hard drive, install a new 2.5" SATA hard drive, and then restore the backup to the new drive. It's one of the things where the 360 really falls behind, since unless you mod your console, you're stuck with the expensive hard drive options, whereas on the PS3 I can go and spend $100 and put a 500 GB hard drive in it.

Ah, that's why my bluray sped up, I remember now. It was taking forever and when I set the settings to not auto-allow BD LIVE everything was much, much better. Thanks for jogging my memory.

Also, MS recently disabled all non-1st party memory cards, so it seems likely that they'll do the same thing to non-1st party hard drives at some point as well.

If you haven't played ANY God of War, you should probably play one of the PS2 originals.. its not for everyone.

I had my buddies PS3 for almost 6 months, and the only thing I ever used it for was a BR player, and I never noticed it to be too slow. (He had the 60gb model). I played some Resistance (both), and some Uncharted (both), they are good.. but nothing amazing IMO. I love sony, but I've yet to get enough reasons to buy one. The only things on my list for the console in the 'to buy' category are MGS4, FFXIII, and BR playback. Which to me, is not worth $300.

Not entirely true. In reality they're disabling all non-licensed third-party memory cards. So a licensed third-party memory card will still work. I think mainly they were trying to stop people from using the Datel memory cards that can take microSD cards, because 1) it makes it a lot cheaper, and 2) those open up things like soft-modding because the memory cards can be accessed by a PC.

Honestly not a concern for most people though, since most people don't even bother with the official memory cards, much less the unofficial ones.

I've been teetering between want and not want all morning and I still can't decide. Still, I'm in no hurry so I'll continue to way the options.

Like I said before, aside from a handful of RPGs on the 360, most games are more appealing on the PS3.

God of War Collection is out now for around $30-$40, so if you want to play GoW 1 and 2 on the PS3, you can get that and play them with slightly better upscaled graphics.

And of course, don't forget that FF13 is coming out on the 360 now as well.

Also, the PS3's browser sucks. Almost not worth using. It's the same "NetFront" browser that the PSP uses, and has some seriously old version of Flash. It'll play youtube (barely, and crappily), but that's about it. It won't do Hulu. The Wii's browser is much better, really.

I love my PS3. Wanna know a secret? If I want to browse the internet, I use a computer. The PS3 has replaced my DVD player. I have no problems with it as a bluray player. I use the PS3 for watching movies on disc and streaming from Netflix and it's great.

Boohoo it takes a few minutes to install a game. Big ****ing deal. I'm not a super hyper ADD retard and can go take a leak or make a sandwich while Metal Gear Solid 4 installs for four minutes without having a ****ing aneurysm.

Get the PS3. Get the God of War collection (I just finished 1 and will begin 2 tonight), Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, Resident Evil 5, and the Uncharted games.

Assassin's Creed is amazing, the gameplay is fun, not completely unique, but the story has me in its grasp.

Agreed, AC1 and 2 are great games. But I own them on the 360 XD

I think you mean an hour or more, and you're forgetting the amount of HD space that stuff takes up. Which is incredibly annoying if you only play a game occassionally, since you must then decide if you want to continually reinstall (since installation is NOT optional), or work around the lack of disk space.

To CM's comments about PS Home: Yes it pretty much sucks, but its fun to briefly go through and explore. It's nothing you'll "need" or "want" to use on a regular basis, but it's mildly fun at first.

Nobody has mentioned Uncharted 1 / 2 or Resistance 1/2, all of them are exclusives.

Resistance games are no Halo or call of duty, but they're pretty damn good. Should be fairly cheap now too.

Uncharted 1 is still worth 50-60 bucks in my opinion, and its definately be much cheaper now.

Uncharted 2 I haven't played yet but its getting a few GOTY recommendations here and there. Looks like they really upscaled the action.

I think you don't know what you're talking about. What games take an hour or more to install? I played through MGS4 two times. It would install between chapters - a total of five times. Each install took about 4 minutes. Between each install was about 4 hours of gameplay.

Assassin't Creed II installed one time, and took about 5 minutes.

I'm unwilling to comment on your HD space complaint, as I only have 6 games installed right now. I haven't run into any storage issues. How many games would it take to fill my HD?

I've never waited more than 15 minutes tops. MGS4 had one of the biggest installs I know of, something like 5-6 gigs, and it only took me 8 minutes I think.

And most modern PS3 games I've noticed haven't really required installations. It seems that with time, developers have gotten better at optimizing their games for loading from the PS3's blu-ray drive.

I've not really had any space issues on my PS3. I have a 120 gig drive in mine (came with a 40 gig, but I had a spare 120 gig sitting around unused, so I switched to that), own something like 20 PS3 games, and have yet to have had to worry about space. Every game I have that has a mandatory or optional install is installed on it, and it's still got plenty of space. Now if it were a 360, it'd be a different story since the "installations" are actual full images of the DVD, so they take up a lot more space on average.

A. It's not 4 hours of gameplay, it's like an hour of gameplay and 3 hours of cinematics :p
B. Even the initial install is lengthy.
C. MGS4 is one of the rare games that actually splits installation up. For a worst-case offender, look at a game like Haze.

Also, I'd like to throw in the time of patching, which is easily orders of magnitude longer than it is on the 360.

haze took like 5 or 6 minutes for it's install

also... who the hell would play haze except for odd people like myself who love to play mediocre generic shooters with godawful voice acting...

patching takes a little longer than the 360 but not by much... unless you're getting the patch at the same time as everyone else who owns the game and the servers are getting slammed (same for system firmware... getting it on day 1 can test your patience specifically when it's a "required" firmware update)

Maybe my brother's system is broken then. It took nearly an hour for Haze to install for him.

(And yes Haze sucks)

Oh man Uncharted, what amazing games.

I freaking love my PS3. My brother's starting to get jealous because of all the awesome exclusives I have/will get while the only games he gets are multi-platform, which I'll get anyway. The last exclusive he got was ODST, and what a waste of money that was. On the note of FF13 coming to 360.. well it's coming out on PS3 too, so who cares. I hear Versus is still a PS3 exclusive

I actually haven't watched a single blu-ray on this thing yet, and I still use it more than we use the 360. PixelJunk Eden and LittleBigPlanet pretty much take the cake when it comes to having fun with my friends. That reminds me, many of the PSN games are fantastic. Flower, Eden and so many others are awesome, and most of them are at least 2 players. They're pretty cheap (Eden being 9.99$) but they're worth it.

On the design point, I personally prefer the new one, no finger prints, small design and has physical buttons, but I've got myself a nice PS2 b/c 80GB model, so I probably won't end up getting a new one.

Anyway, my advice: Don't listen to CM on the PS3 stuff, seems like he hates the thing with his entire being. For god sake he used Haze in his argument :gonk:. I mean, he's the only one in this thread who's going out of their way to bash the PS3 so that you don't get it, while all the other owners are taking it pretty easy when they tell you they enjoy it.

Oh, and Uncharted 2 has no install process, and making a snack while MGS4 installs and then eating it during the (awesome) cutscenes works great. Man.. that game rocked.

I'm considering buying a PS3. If I work a double on Christmas day I'll have enough to buy the console. All this is good stuff to consider. It'll also be my first current gen console (my folks own a Wii, but that doesn't count). I'm not really sure why I want a PS3 over the X-box.

My only major complaint about the Sony systems (both PS3 and PSP) is that you have to install anything. X360.. If I want to download a demo, the very SECOND it completes, I can play it. I don't have to then wait for yet another bar to go from 0%-100%. This is especially annoying on the PSP.