PlayStation 3: Not quite an Xbox 360
I initially bought my PS3 because my best bud was tired of Xbox after he lost two of them to the RRoD in a month. He bought a PS3 and a few games and was telling me about them and how awesome Blu Ray was etc. After about a year of not being able to game with him anymore, I decided to go out and buy one too so we could do some multiplayer stuff in Call of Duty and Resistance 2. I immediately purchased the exclusives like Demon’s Souls, Uncharted, Uncharted 2 & Resistance 2 and loved all of them, even more than the Xbox exclusives Halo, Gears of War etc. I had decided that the PS3 was the system for me, I loved the smaller controller and nostalgia it brought, reminding me of my favourite system’s the PS One and PS2.
While my single player experience with the PS3 has been great, my multiplayer gaming experience has been an exercise in frustration to say the least. It all began when we attempted to play some co-op Resistance 2 stuff. I soon realized apart from the XMB dashboard being ugly and featureless compared to the Xbox Da shboard it also didn’t come with the same functionality. Party Chat was a thing of the past, it didn’t come with the PS3 and wasn’t even an option. No longer could I easily invite friends into a group and have open voice chat with them regardless of whether we were in the same game or not. I couldn’t believe that something so pivotal to the online gaming experience was excluded from a higher priced, more technologically advanced system. My second frustration was the realization that the PS3 doesn’t ship with a mic like the 360 does, so 90% of the online gaming community didn’t even have mics or chat when playing online! It was the strangest feeling playing Resistance 2 online in silence. While it was nice to avoid hearing racial slurs, bigotry and other garbage that comes out of some of the online gamers cowardly mouths, it sucked not having the option to simply mute them if I didn’t want to hear it. There was no need, it was complete silence. No teamwork or collaboration of any kind, it felt no different than a single player experience with bots. If there is no interaction between players, I don’t see the benefit of playing online with other gamers.
Yet another disappointment I discovered was a shit load of multi-platform games are developed on and for the Xbox 360 and then ported over to the PS3 by either a different studio entirely, or a different PS3 specific team from that same studio. This almost always results in a less than stellar end product for PS3 gamers. Red Dead Redemption, Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Bayonetta are just a few quick examples of games that not only look, but perform much better on the Xbox 360 compared to their less than stellar PS3 counterparts. A lot of the performance issues I’ve run into with my PS3 stem from not being able to simply install the game to the HDD like I can on Xbox, resulting in longer load times, more freezing and a less than pleasant experience. I have Black Ops for both the Xbox 360 & the PS3 and the differences are night and day in terms of graphics (right off the bat, the main menu at the beginning of the game looks much crisper and brighter with higher contrast on the Xbox) and performance (the PS3 version of Black Ops takes twice as long to load, freezes up on my PS3 on a nightly basis and takes twice as much time and effort to get a group game happening due to the shitty matchmaking and frequent disconnects, freezes and random bugs and glitches. Yes I realize lots of these connection issues are the result of lazy, poorly coded network support by both Infinity Ward on CoD4 & MW2 and Treyarch on W@W and BO but these issues are far more frequent on the PS3 version. Once a player is dropped from the match, the lack of party chat results in us all typing texts to one another requesting an invite explaining we were dropped, disconnected etc. On the Xbox, this is easily done via voice chat, as we are still in a group via Xbox Live and aren’t relying on the games shoddy voice chat or network support to communicate. Recently I purchased 3 copies of Borderlands: GOTY for the Graveside Crew to play online. Last night we fired up our games to be greeted with intermittent, broken voice chat. Words cutting in and out every minute made communication impossible and sucked the fun right out of the co-op experience we all were looking forward to experiencing. Apparently this is a known PS3 issue that still has not received a fix. Funny enough, my Xbox 360 copy of Borderlands works flawlessly.
Another gripe of mine is that the Trophies have to sync up every time I want to view them, or compare them to a friends. This should be done automatically in the background as I obtain them, I shouldn’t have to be forced to sit through a loading progress meter, just to see if my friends have the same trophies as I do. I don’t even want to touch on how useless PS Plus is. What a waste.
All in all, my PS3 gaming experience has been mired in frustration and disappointment after disappointment. While I loved the old Ps One and PS2 systems this most recent Sony console is an inferior, second place console. It’s outmatched, out featured and out classed by the far superior Xbox 360 console. I went in completely open minded, and gave each console a fair shake. I’m not a fanboy, I’m a gamer and I want the best possible gaming experience that my hard earned dollars will afford me. Hard earned dollars that from this point forward Sony will never see again.
