Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) > Reviews (361)

Well in this review i'll compare the PS3 with the X360 and the Nintendo Wii.

Media Features: (Music Player, Video Player ect.)

Well on the Music front, the Wii is non-existant, as far as i know, incapable of playing music. The Xbox 360 has the best music player, with nice visualizations, and an easy and simple layout, not to mention capable of playing several file formats, such as MP3, AAC, WMA ect.

The PS3 does fairly well with music, it can get a little annoying, and the visualizations are quite boring, basically the standard bars and graph visualizations, similar to those on the PSP.

Video playing, i think the Xbox 360 does the best on this too, i think the controls are laid out easier, Left Trigger to go Rewind, Right to Fast Forward, the LB(L1) and RB(R1) to skip chapters, Start to pause/play, and the other buttons bring up a simple OSD which you can select about 20 different options. The PS3 is similar, although it doesnt look as though they changed it from the PS2.... at all, the OSD is a bit of a mess, instead of being a single bar, theres about 30 buttons that appear onscreen at once most of them useless. Although it does its job, you can do most commands without needing the OSD. The Wii, as im sure you know, cannot read DVD's, and therefore cannot play movies.

Photos:

Yay the Wii can do photos, moving on. Well you cant comment much on this, all 3 consoles can view photos, i presume the PS3 can read from Cameras like the 360 can, you should also be able to stream pictures, music and videos from windows based PC's on both the PS3 and Xbox360.

Miscellaneous Features:

The Xbox doesn't have many of these, probably these fit into the Facebook/Twitter/Last.fm/Netflix(US only) features it has, but other than that, nothing to comment on. The PS3 used to have the ability to support Linux on it, but among many things, this has been taken out, on April 1st (Today) no less. The PS3 does benefit from a internet browser, although i cant believe that im saying this, i actually prefer the Wii's browser. For a start, the PS3 seems to have memory issues, if you have about 3 windows open, or have been browsing a few minutes on pages with images, you will probably encounter 'Not enough memory left, window has been changed to a blank page'. Not to much of a hinderence, you can just refresh your page to get it back. The browser can run some flash programs, and also JavaSCRIPT programs, but it doesnt actually have Java, i believe the Wii doesn't feature Java either. This means games such as Puzzle Pirates or Runescape are not playable on either console. The PS3 browser has a habit of crashing on me, usually when i give it a command to do something, sometimes the clock dials at the top will stop moving, requiring a restart of the console. The Xbox 360 does not have an internet browser.

Both the PS3 and Wii feature a BBC Iplayer option (must be downloaded on the Wii). Whereas Xbox360 features Sky, for paying customers and Xbox LIVE Gold members of course, basically turns your Xbox 360 into a skybox.

Gaming:

Aha this is what we buy a console for is it not? Surprisingly some people don't! But enough of them.

Well we're aware that the Wii is largely mini-game and party game based, usually ideal for children that are from 5 to their early teens. It does have some gems such as Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, but theres not that many that have shattered any barriers. A topic of much debate is the Xbox 360 / PS3 scene of gaming, many argue that one has better graphics than the other, well its quite hard to say which is right. The Xbox360 has smoother and more high quality graphics on games such as Batman:AA and Assassins Creed 2, however the PS3 seems to benefit more on the lighting front, with smoother shading and better dynamic lighting. As the consoles are similar, most games that are released on one are released on the other, and hence only the exclusives tell them apart.

360 Exclusives:

- Halo Series
- Gears of War series
- Left 4 Dead series (Also on PC)
- Forza series
Cant actually think of anymore.

PS3 Exclusives:

- God of War
- Gran Turismo
- Resistance
- Killzone

So thats 4 games from each console, please note that if you say i missed out MGS for PS3 i didnt, reason is because its no longer an exclusive (New MGS is coming out for PS3 AND Xbox360).

As regards Arcade games, such as those on the PSN and XBLA, the Xbox definitely wins out here. It has far more arcade games, and some really high quality games too. Although both consoles have several rubbish games that dont bear thinking about. The Wii has Wiiware, but its not much compared to PSN or XBLA. XBLA also have both a full version and a trial (Demo) of the game available for all their games. PSN has full versions for all their games, obviously, however quite a few do not have trials, which means in order to test the game, you must first buy it, or at least get a friend to buy it and test it. The Wii also tends to suffer on the demo side of things, only recently did they start offering game demos, something which PSN and XBL have been doing since they started.

The Xbox 360 also has support to run some original Xbox games, the more popular ones seem to work the best. The Wii can play all GameCube games. The PS3 can run PSone games, but not PS2 ones, unless you own an older PS3 console.

The Online side of things:

Well we have Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network, and the.... Wii Thingie.

This is probably more debated than the gaming side of the consoles, which has the best online service? Well heres a list of facts i've collected whilst owning all 3 consoles.

Xbox 360:

- They charge for their service, about £3 or so a month, more like £2.50 if you buy from eBay.

- They have the largest selection of Arcade Games and game demos.

- They have the largest selection of movies to rent out.

- Their online service is the stablest(?), it rarely ever goes down, except when scheduled for an update, usually goes down a few minutes, or several hours if a large update, such as the NXE in November 2008.

- Online service also provides good download speeds, and rarely lags online, also provides excellent voice chat, for up to 8 people simultaneously.

- Xbox LIVE also allows users to sign into their MSN account and chat to people on their contact list.

PS3:

- Decent selection of Arcade games and game demos.

- Download speeds are exceptionally high (for me anyway) on my 8m/bit connection i usually get around 1000kbps on their service, i tend to get about 500-800 on Xbox LIVE.

- Their servers are usually stable, sometimes they will go down, but generally ok. In both of my online games i have however, i have encountered issues, mainly about not letting me connect to a server, however that may be the games fault and not PSN's.

- Updates for the system and for games takes ages, unlike the Xbox360 which seems to compress their patches, the standard game patch is usually about 600mb, hence you'll want a large HDD and a good connection if you want to truly use your PS3. Also the PS3 has to install patches and games once it downloads them, the Xbox360 doesnt.

Wii:

- Has about 5 game demos, and about 30-100 wiiware games?!? I don't actually use the pathetic thing.

- Service seems stable enough, sometimes timeout during games, but its not too bad.

Well thats pretty much all i have to say about them, really heres what the ending result would be for me.

1st - Tied PS3/X360.
2nd - Wii.

The Xbox360 may charge for its online service, but you can see that its superior, although not as fast, it is more stable, and provides a more enjoyable and content-full service, whether thats worth £2.50 a month is up to you.

The Wii is good for 4 players, or even 2, but if your on your own, theres not many games that will keep you interested for long, go and get a brand new Xbox 360 for £160 or so, or get a PS3 for £250 or so, they're probably worth the extra few quid.

You may want to keep some money back if your getting an Xbox 360, such as for XBL Gold service and also if you have no ethernet cable, you will need to buy one or a wireless network receiver, probably around £40-£60 nowadays, as the Xbox 360 does not have wireless networking by default, like the PS3 and the Wii. If your buying a PS3 you may also want to keep some money back, if your getting a 60gb or something smaller, chances are you will need to get an external HDD to increase the size of it, or you'll run out after owning a few games, as more recent games require to be installed to the PS3's HDD, taking up gb's of data per game.

As an end note, it appears while the X360 and Wii are gaining features, the PS3 is losing them.

60gb PAL stats:

PS2 backwards compatibility
4 USB Ports
Flash card Reader
SACD Support
Other OS capability (removed as of April 1st 2010)

120GB Slim PAL stats:

No PS2 backwards compatability
2 USB Ports
No Flash card reader
No SACD support
Never had Other OS capability

Concerns are rising in the PS community that Sony may remove even more features from the PS3, such as removing PS2 compatability for older consoles as well. Although this is unlikely.