Games For Sail

Though all videogame consoles would like to be the entertainment focus of your home, Nintendo’s Wii is marketed towards a more general audience (with which it has been wildly successful) while the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and Sony’s Playstation 3 chase the hard-core action-gaming crowd dominated by male teens and tweens, as reflected by Xbox 360 Accessories like an Xbox 360 Wireless Network Adapter.  When it comes to hardware, the Wii is outclassed by both the Xbox and the PS3, but it’s really the software that makes a game console. Thus do Microsoft and Sony’s catalogs appear rather similar, as both are going after the same market with a similar issue of titles providing a similar range of action gaming.

But high numbers allow bragging rights in action-gaming, and it must also be remembered that, in the final analysis, hardware makes software possible.  (Though no one boasts of their Xbox 360 Power Supply.)  And so it is that many find the Xbox 360 and the PS3 fairly similar under the hood, regardless of Sony’s much-promoted “emotion engine” said to render facial expressions so realistically as to make for a much more engrossing gaming experience. However, each console does have its share of near-rabid fanatics who swear that major differences abound between the two. Yet it’s safe to say that very few would turn down a rival console given as a gift!

The only differences, in fact, involve those truly special features unique to each platform, in addition to the online experiences each one offers. And Microsoft presents a noticeably more varied online experience than that by Sony, whose online service is not bad at all. But the Xbox 360 supplies a much wider experience in that regard, even though the PS3 tries very hard to make up for things through a built-in Blu-ray DVD player, WiFi web surfing, and support for Bluetooth wireless devices. To which it should be added that NetFlix on-demand is available through the Xbox 360, probably doing away with all the PS3’s multimedia advantages. But the PS3 is quite moddable by users with the technical know-how, while Microsoft tries to discourage such hobbyist tinkering under the hood.

Then there’s the issue of costs, with the PS3 selling more than the Xbox 360 due to its slightly greater number of features. Then again, if you’re a hard-core gamer, prices are probably not going to be all that big a consideration, because purchasing decisions will often be made based on software exclusive to each platform. Of course, the truly hard-core don’t care about prices at all and would simply buy both systems!