So, remaining objective, a lot of the criticisms you’re choosing to selectively direct at one single system appear to apply to most systems. And most systems don’t appear to be making any effort to remedy the situation. So I’m a little puzzled as to why such severe appraisals are being directed at the one that is.

Which is precisely why I’m looking forward to the complementary articles covering all the other gaming systems. I’d expect to see consistency in the list of features being scrutinised rather than some ad-hoc list of features that don’t relate to one another.

If such articles are to be worth anything, I don’t think that’s a lot to expect.

As for Sony, they seem like such a badly managed company. Well, the gaming division, anyway. It seems like they really don’t have a direction or a goal. Or a clue. I don’t think this firmware changes anything, and I bet those working at Sony know just what a mess the place is in.

Neither does the Wii.

In fact neither do any of the handhelds.

So it seems that the 360 is the only one with this feature, making it not really bog standard.

I primarily use my 360, and by ‘primarily’ I mean ‘almost exclusively’ when it comes to actually playing games. The 360 impresses me almost every day and I can honestly say that Microsoft got it right. The stupid RROD has not happened to me but has for one of my friends. It is a bit unfair at this point to bash MS for the RROD since they have gone out of their way to make it right by the customers. Still, if you must throw stones then whatever. Xbox has a superior Live community, a vast wealth of games that kick ass, and the ability to download movies, tv shows, DLC, etc in an easy and fairly intuitive way. They also have many free informational elements under the ‘xbox live’ button that gives you previews, reviews, etc. Sony has none of that. I was never a Sony hater, but I wanted to see the 360 succeed so at first I was happy that Sony had some issues. No longer.

A month or so ago I got a PS3 for a wedding present from my fiance. I scroll through the XMB and think ‘wow! this looks cool’. I see how easy it is to download cool themes, to even make your own themes, that the game changes things as time and date change, the visual style is pleasant, the browser is nice (although flawed), and so many other things make me say ‘wow’. However, I almost never use it because I bought it for Blu-Ray and that is almost all it is good for. THere are some games on it. I like Pixel Monsters, I have Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank and a few more I borrowed from a friend when I first got it, but I can’t make myself play them. Mainly because the lack of achievements. Now they have the trophy system coming out and I was excited, then pissed when I saw the screens of the trophies, thinking ‘this looks like N64 crap!’, but was excited again to see the demonstration on the web (Sony reallllly needed to have those real achievement icons or many 360 people would never have converted). If you haven’t played a game with achievements you are missing half the fun. They don’t make me play differently, they just make me play the game multiple times in order to get the achievements/trophies.

Sony is starting to shape up, and Home looks really, really cool (who of us doesn’t like to have their own ‘tree house’?. It is just a shame that Sony has waited until they are literally dead in the water to come out with what should have been the system at launch. It is ridiculous and I feel sorry for the Sony fanboys that refuse to give Microsoft it’s due. While they have been looking at a system with potential 360 fans have been having a blast. I’m glad I own a PS3, and I see lots of potential for it…I just want to see it reach that potential.

Competition is good, you know.

It’s not a deal-breaker, that was never the point, it’s just a bog-standard feature that for some reason isn’t there.

That’d be great, thanks.”

Thanks for that, and yeah, I own both the Wii and 360 and will (hopefully) be writing those articles too.

Still not seeing the appeal of it though. You’d have to drop the game you were playing, go root around for the disc of the game they want you to play, wait for it to load. I don’t see why a cross-game invite is needed for this. It’s really quite a useless feature. It’d work better if everything loaded off the HDD in an instant. Usually by the time I’ve managed to join something I’ve been invited to, they’ve already started anyway.

Why would you have random dicks on your friends list?

I’m not saying either Sony or MS are bullet proof in their respective areas (360’s dash is pretty messy and sluggish compared to the XMB, and Live fell over pretty bad at Christmas) but I think things like that fall by the wayside when you look at the bigger picture.

Live is great and Sony are playing catch up, PS3’s are well built, whilst 360’s failure rate is legendary.

“Hey, stop playing that game you’re playing and play with us so we can shoot you in the face and cast slurs against your ancestors”

Fuck off. When I want to play with you, I’ll see if you’re online, see what you’re playing and hop on. Otherwise I’m quite content thankyouverymuch.

I’d like to request a journalist with a similar sentiment/relationship to the hardware platform under review as morriss has with Playstation when the other articles are written.

That’d be great, thanks.

(Sony’s A/V receivers are awesomest to the max. I just had to mention that.)

Although no simultaneous audio output and no hardware scaler…

The community features of Live don’t interest me much anyway. That’s not to belittle them, as obviously many people are heavily into online gaming, and Live does a fantastic service to this market.

I’m what you would call, a casual online gamer, so Sony’s approach works better for me, in that online gaming is free (and wireless is standard), but the trade off is that the feature set is more basic.

Either way, 2.4 is going to be a great bonus for PS3 users, and even if there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s mainly playing catch up with where 360 was on launch, at least Sony are addressing these issues, and have clearly said they’re not finished yet, so there’s hope that voice chat, and invites are still coming.

In truth, I get the feeling that Sony were positioning Home as their version of Xbox Live but have since found that it’s not going to be the solution gamers are looking for, and Home has been re-positioned to become a Face Book/Myspace style portal for PS3 users, which I imagine they’re hoping will hold wider appeal than a more closed system such as Live.

Anyway, I’m not going down this road again. The whole “yeahbutxboxbreakslol” thing is tiresome.

And anyway, Microsoft are next on my list.

are you talking bout the ps3 or xbox not playing games in hd? cuz my 46 inch samsung says otherwise.

most games made by sony are 1080 like they said. anything sony will be at least 720p. 3rd parties make sub hd games. upscaler isnt neccessary unless your tv is ass.

And yeah, there are many more things that could have been mentioned like the fact the controllers don’t “auto-off” after a few minutes if you’re not using it.

Again, all basic, fundamental stuff.

Still, I won’t say any more about it now, promise!

They missed 60hz output off of the options for SD modes too, so you really should’ve whinged about that as well.

Anyway, I’m not going down this road again. The whole “yeahbutxboxbreakslol” thing is tiresome.

And anyway, Microsoft are next on my list.

The PS3 is a finished product, the firmware isn’t and will continue to be updated. There, clear enough?

“The point is that Sony are still having problems implementing the most basic capabilities that should’ve been there nearly 2 years ago. And we’re thanking them for it.”

At least it’s just the software that’s the problem unlike the 360 and its hardware woes. I’d say that was more of a problem.

“safe” is the wrong word – it’s more that I can’t buy one with confidence that I won’t regret not waiting just that little bit longer to get a better deal when, say, the lineup for Christmas is revealed.

The question of whether it is finished is a rhetorical one. Of course more and more updates will be forthcoming but that’s not the point. The point is that Sony are still having problems implementing the most basic capabilities that should’ve been there nearly 2 years ago. And we’re thanking them for it.