The Xbox 360 Gamercard, vs the PSN portable ID
I picked up a PS3 a few weeks ago, and I’ve been playing quite a bit of PS3 since then, but I recently installed the New Xbox Experience on my 360, and I have to say that…ummm, wow.
The PS3 is a beautiful piece of hardware, but the 360 is a much better experience overall.
PS3 is still stumbling around online. They’re trying to figure out how to integrate trophies, how to set up friends lists, and how to create a seamless online experience. This is something that Microsoft got right on day one.
The big knock against Xbox Live is that you have to pay for it. Well you don’t have to pay a cent for Playstation’s hacked together, non standard approach, and what you get in return is something that isn’t even half baked.
An obvious example of the differences is in the Playstation Network ID’s, here’s my My Playstation ID account.
First off, I can’t just go to www.playstation.ca to log into my PS3 account. You have to go to us.playstation.com and log into Playstation Underground, then you click on your name to get to your account which has…nothing to it really. If I want to do anything with it, I need to do it all on the console. There is no connection between the two.
Now contrast that with my Xbox Live gamertag. I go to www.xbox.com (or xbox.ca for that matter), log in, and have all of the functionality of being on my Xbox. I can change my profile, add money to my account, even purchase stuff online and download it later.
Xbox doesn’t get it all right though. Microsoft points are annoying, I have no idea what the correlation between 200 MS points and the real world is, whereas the PS3 store actually tells you what you’re paying for.
There’s another difference though, the PS3 store doesn’t seem nearly as up to date as the Xbox store. Xbox Marketplace also took care of the whole “Canadian Content” thing in the spring, whereas the PS3 store doesn’t have any movies or TV available for download.
Hardware is the obvious difference. The PS3 is a really nice unit. It’s quiet, it has a built in blu ray player, and the hard drive is user upgradable. All of these are nice things. The sixaxis controller is kind of cool, and I like the tilty control action, but I have to say that the Xbox 360 controller just fits my hand better than the PS3 one.
Personally while I really like the PS3, and I’d love to make it my only console, I don’t know if I can. The Xbox 360 just has a better online experience than the PS3, and with the way I play games, that’s kind of the most important thing for me.