I finished Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony recently and it sent me back to a constant source of debate for me. I finished that game on my most recently purchased console, the Xbox 360 and it was a downloadable exclusive to Microsoft.
I was the most reluctant to purchase this one out of all three of the current consoles. I had my reasons, including the fact that I already had a Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3. There were also various reports of colossal hardware failures in the first few iterations of Microsoft's box. I'm also an Apple mark, and citing many frustrations Microsoft machines have given me over the years compared to almost none with my Macbook, iPhone, iPod, Time Capsule and other yuppie Apple accessories, you can see why I might have relented in the investment.
In the last three years or so, gaming became more of an intense hobby of mine. I'm always watching online reviews of new titles, frequently watching G4TV, for new developments, and playing what I can when I can. I'm not officially "hardcore" by gaming definition, because I still play on "normal" difficulties; dying lots in shooters, falling my fair share in platformers, and getting beaten in sports games. I'm no master, just an average enthusiast kinda like some of you golf marks out there.
I've had the Nintendo Wii for two years now and I usually only enjoy it when other folks are around. The Wii is a party console with gimmicky controls and a few bright spots here and there, including the Mario stuff and the Sports titles. My wife got hooked (and ended up hooking me) on Animal Crossing: City Folk for about 6 months but neither of us have since given that title it's due since this past spring or so. I only bring that up because sadly it was the game that I have played the most on the Wii to this point.
For my birthday in April 2008, my friends pooled together (with my wife's leadership) and got me the Playstation 3, and I must say that it is a really great and versatile machine. I gamed and gamed often for the better part of a year on the PS3. GTA IV is probably my favorite game and my first encounter was on the PS3, playing it obsessively for months, accumulating about 100 hours or so of play time. Hockey, First-Person Shooters and the like were soon to follow, all in HD.
It was great until I realized just how much folks were leaning to the Xbox 360 as the primary fun box of choice. No, it's not a peer-pressure thing, but something called soon became a thorn in my side and I began to covet the Xbox 360 for Downloadable Content (or DLC for the savvy).
In July of 2009, I found an Xbox 360 on eBay, placed my bid and got it about 5 days later -- an Xbox 360 Elite with 5 Games for just about $300 -- and started a whole new campaign of GTA IV which was one of the 5 that came in the box. It's been about half a year now, there have been no failures of the machine, and I've played through all of the GTA universe through three characters for well over 100 hours. I'm starting to play other games and the controller is unbelievably well-designed, to the point that Sony puts out controller enhancement add-ons to seemingly make it more Xbox-like.
I hate to admit it, but Microsoft has done a better job at making a gaming console. It took about 3 years to work through huge problems and backward thinking, but I'm happily playing most of my games on this, my box of choice.
Sony is trying to catch up, and I have to say that I'm still using the PS3 for a lot of things and will have a lot of future uses for it. The PS3 sounds better, has an easily expandable hard drive for media storage and a Blu Ray player built in. Also, my next game to play will be Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which is a Sony exclusive title and widely considered to be the best game of the year. I'm looking forward to it and I'll likely blog about the experience.
In a perfect world, Microsoft and Sony would join together, and all controllers would look like this:
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