SporkBomb

So I finally broke down and bought myself a Nintendo Wii.

What?! You don’t have a Wii? 2006 called and it wants its blog post back!

That’s really funny, alter ego. That’s right, I never got the Wii. I got the PlayStation 3 and sold it in short order. I wanted to get the XBOX 360 but the 3 ringed monster of doom scared me off. This must be a really hard one to fix since it keeps happening with every new iteration of the console. I won’t pretend to know what I’m talking about here. Microsoft has a few smart people. If they can’t figure it out, I sure can’t.

Stop rambling and write about whether you liked the Wii!

The Wii came nicely packaged, a bit a la Apple product. Not quite as beautiful of a job, but close. Plugging everything together was a breeze. The low definition cable which came with the console did the job of showing the graphics on my 37” LCD TV just fine. I don’t really see a difference between 480i and 480p with my new “high definition” cable from Belkin. I’m glad it’s actually a really nice cable so that I have something to justify the $15 I spent for the cable.

The Wii comes with the sports game everyone surely knows about at this point. It’s a perfect showcase of what the Wii can do with its trend changing remote thingy.

Let me tell you, the Wii does a much better job with reading my movements than the Duck Hunt gun I played with when I was young!

I’m going to go downstairs and play another round of Wii Tennis. I can’t keep writing when I still haven’t made pro at it.

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2009-08-20 UPDATE: Haven’t played in two months. I guess this shows just how much I like my Wii. Or I just prioritize better nowadays. Yes, let’s go with that.

Originally Posted in December 2007.

In the past month or so, I’ve been researching which console to buy. XBOX 360 or a Playstation 3? The Wii was off the table because I am not really into the concept. I like to sit still while playing my games.

So I did what every other self-respecting geek would do–I googled xbox 360 vs playstation 3. I was hoping to get a few objective reviews based on facts and reality. No luck there. Every single review I watched was biased. Most were annoyingly biased. Next, I tried to go to YouTube and do the same thing. 10 minutes into it, I just had to quit because I was getting angry at just how ludicrous most of the videos were. I had to sit back, close my eyes and rub my temples. I was completely mind raped by the misinformation flowing from the net like a sea of poisonous radioactive waste.

Why do people hang their whole self on a gaming console?

In the end, I believe I made the right choice in my situation. I purchased the $399 PlayStation 3 with a Blu-Ray drive and a free Spiderman BR-DVD. My reasoning was simple. I knew that at some point I would like to install Linux on my console. The PS3 made that easier than the XBOX 360. I also knew that I didn’t want to spend more than $400. But I also wanted to watch some next generation DVDs. I didn’t really care whether it was the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. As far as I was concerned, both are DRM-laden systems designed to steal and inconvenience of the consumer. But they look pretty!

Another factor for my decision was the upgrade ability of the hard drive in my gaming console. I found out that I would grab any 2.5 SATA drive and put it in a PS3 without too much tinkering.With the XBOX 360, the process was more convoluted and involved voiding the warranty. For the price I was willing to pay, I could only get a 20 GB drive with my XBOX 360. I would also need to pay $150 for an add-on HD-DVD. The price point of the XBOX 360 was out of my range.

The final nail in XBOX 360’s coffin was the fail rate of the system. In the past it was as high as 30%. Now with the new Falcon chipset, the rate is supposed to go down due to the decrease in heat output, but in general it doesn’t seem like Microsoft made any structural change to remedy the situation. Even if the fail rate fell to 5%-10%, that’s still too high for my liking.

In the end, this was a very hard decision to make. Microsoft’s XBOX division has really outdone themselves in developing (minus the fail issue) and promoting this next generation console. In my case, however, the cons simply outweighed the pros and the PS3 won.

Note: This post is very time sensitive. Don’t rely on information within this post to make your decision about which console you purchase. Buy what’s best for you. Or don’t buy at all and support two arguably “evil” companies.

Three months after my decision to go with a PlayStation 3, I still feed that I made the right decision. Blu-Ray recently won the war of formats. XBox 360 has stopped shipping the HD-DVD add-on, and has also recently declined to ship a Blu-Ray add-on; leading me to ask a simple question about future games–what about them? The Xbox 360 console needs a high capacity disk in order to ship high content games. Dual layer DVDs won’t cut it for long. Some people say that Microsoft’s gaming division will focus on online delivery, but has the time to do this come yet? I’ll be eagerly awaiting what happens next.