So my Xbox 360 has recently developed something of an annoying habit. Whenever I play for longer than an hour or two, it just freezes up on me. Not quite as bad as RROD, but still irritating. After having this happen more times than I can count I started thinking, "hey, my PS3 never freezes up like this! XBox 360 is the suxxorz!". Until I realized exactly why the PS3 never froze on me.

I never turn it on! Thing can't freeze if it's not on ;).

OK that's a bit of an exaggeration. I do turn it on sometimes. Like the hour or so I played Killzone 2 (then promptly returned to the 360 for more Gears action). Or maybe that one time a few months ago when I watched a Blu-Ray movie, then decided it wasn't all that different from a regular DVD. But I find it amusing that for a moment there I almost lost faith in my 360. Of course it's going to develop problems, since I use the console pretty much every day!

Although I do wonder, do any of you who actually use your PS3 ever get those kinds of issues? I don't play on the thing long enough to have any data to say either way, but I have noticed that heavy use of my 360 causes all sorts of annoying glitching like the stupid frozen console thing.

My Wii's also never developed this problem, but then again it's not usually me that plays on my Wii (ironically enough it's my parents).

I'm just wondering if my 360 is on it's way out. Recently, all kinds of strange errors have started popping up. So first, when I turn on the console, nothing shows up on my TV. I turn it off, wait 5 minutes, and try again: no dice. Finally, I unplug the HDMI cable and insert it into a different HTML input on my TV. Presto! The screen lights up with the dashboard. What's up with that?

Afterwards, I start playing a game, and then about half an hour to an hour into it, the game freezes. It doesn't matter what buttons on my controller I push, nothing happens. It doesn't even make any noises (like that "whoosh" sound you hear when you push the XBox button for when the mini-dashboard pops up), it's just dead. The only way to get it to react is to hit the power button on the console directly to shut it down. I do so, wait about an hour, and try again. 30-60 minutes later, bam! It's frozen again. Makes it almost impossible to play certain kinds of games.

It doesn't ALWAYS do that; sometimes I've gone for as long as 2 hours without a freeze. But that's rare. I'm just wondering ... are these the early signs of RROD? Should I go try to find my reciept so that I can make a call to Microsoft soon? Is there anything I can do to try to delay the onset of RROD, or is my 360 basically doomed? I've never gotten an RROD before, so I guess it's just my time, huh? It's almost like a rite of passage for 360 fans...

[QUOTE="Eddie5vs1"][QUOTE="ps3_owns_360Wii"]i dotn see why someone would see a console...ps3_owns_360Wii

it was a honest mistake, don't "sell" your console.

lol yeah I was a little confused by that myself. I figured you meant "sell", but I thought maybe you were making some kind of existential statement (i.e. if an Xbox 360 RROD's in the woods and no one sees it, did it really die?). :P Anyway, it looks like not too many people have sold their console, which I guess makes sense. I mean, if you put down as much as $400 for a console, it would be very hard to part with it knowing the majority of that money's gone forever. That said, there are legitimate reasons to sell a console: the main one being that the console's gonna depreciate.

In other words, the longer you wait, the less money you're gonna get back for it. So if someone was figuring to sell their console anyway, they'd try to do it as early as possible. Also, the PS3 can still recoup a decent amount, so if there are one or two games you really want, but can't really afford, selling a console just might get you the spare change you need to get them.

I'm just curious. As for myself, I've had a PS3 for over a year before selling it. Lost it like a bad habit and glad of it too! I purchased a PS2 so I could still play the PS2 games I owned, sold back all the PS3 games plus the system and managed to recoup some of the loss and never looked back. Obviously, I would've preferred to have never bought the system in the first place, but unfortunately, I was blinded by too much stupidity. Anyway, what about you? Have you ever owned this awful system? Do you own it and wanna get rid of it? Or maybe you've never owned it and never intend to?

Curious minds want to know! :) Besides, it'd be interesting to see how many people were in the same boat as me, blinded by marketing and purchasing a terrible system that they tried to like but ended up realizing that they'd been hoodwinked.

That really depends. If there are specific games you want on the PSP then go with that. If you already have an iPod the Touch becomes less important. On the other hand, the PSP is a lot bigger physically, and there are a limited number of games that are really any good on that platform, while it looks like the iPhone/iPod Touch platform's been getting the attention of a lot of studios.

Personally, I would recommend the iPod Touch, just because it can do more than just play games, it can also serve as a PDA of sorts, as well as play your music and movies. The PSP can do that too, just not as well. On the other hand, if you're going to mostly play games and not do the rest of that stuff, the PSP does have the advantage of a (slightly) larger screen, and physical buttons as opposed to touch screen and accelerometer.

No.

I already sold that piece of junk system, I'm not spending $400 to re-buy it for a sequel to a terrible game, which has every reason to suck just as much. On top of which, the system would then sit there collecting dust while I don't buy any other games for it.

Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would get a PS3, period, but for KZ2? Why not get a Wii for Hannah Montana while you're at it? Oh and toss me a few hundred dollars/pounds/euros since you clearly have money to waste.

Ok here we go...

First, I didn't say that Sony WOULD concede the market (although I certainly do wish they would), only that I thought they SHOULD. Let's get that straight.

Second, about the Xbox (not the 360), the original Xbox was Microsoft's first foray into console gaming. They had never made a console before. They EXPECTED the Xbox to fail. They had no intention of beating the Playstation 2; they just wanted their foot in the door. Think Zune vs iPod (although in that case, the iPod has proven itself a far more formidable foe).

Most consoles (the Wii is a notable exception) sell at a loss (it's called a loss-leader). There's a reason for this: the expectation is that the loss would be covered by software sales. It's the razor and blades strategy: sell the razors (the consoles) at a loss, and make up for it by selling a whole lot more razor blades (games) for a profit (and you MUST buy the blades, as the razor would be useless otherwise). So, if you slash the price of your razor a lot, and so the vast majority of people buy your brand of razor, then by extension they have to buy your blades too, and you rake in the profits. If the PS3 had the largest marketshare, the game sales would have easily made up for the loss of selling a $800 console at $600.

Here's the problem: they're not making back that money. Why? Simple, not enough people are buying their games. The best way to get more people to buy your games is to get more people to buy your consoles. But you can only get away with price cuts if you are already financially comfortable enough that you can absorb the hit. Remember: the Xbox 360 right now is breaking even; they COULD cut its price more to gain even more market share but they won't because that wouldn't make sense. The PS3, on the other hand, is STILL selling at a loss, and STILL ISN'T SELLING.

The pricing strategy has failed, for sure. And the fact the PS3 isn't selling games a high enough clip to offset the deficit incurred by the loss-leading strategy means that either the PS3 needs a killer app game on the level of Halo 3 that would sell so well that it would near-instantly put the console back in the black, or else bow out and admit defeat. There is of course a third option: one very close to bowing out, which would be to abandon the PS3 as a failed platform and try to push out the PS4 earlier (think Microsoft with Windows Vista, which they're all but abandoning for Windows 7). If they choose that route, I'm all for it as long as the PS4 doesn't repeat the horrible mistakes of the PS3. Make it cost $250 - $300, drop the stupid Blu-Ray, and I'd pick it up instantly.

By that definition, Mario's an RPG too. I mean, you DO take the role of Mario right? That said, NOT every RPG is D&D either. My definition for an RPG is: heavy focus on character development and storyline, sometimes even at the cost of fighting or graphics. When the game's being hyped for an awesome story, as opposed to graphics or multiplayer shooting people in their faces, that's an RPG.

The biggest problem with Mass Effect is that it TRIES to be an RPG, you can tell it really tries so hard. But since it needs to appeal to the Halo kiddies who have a 1 nano-second attention span, we need to have OMG AWESOME GRAPHX!!11!one. Also, because everything needs a shooting system, they felt the need to make the majority of the game a shooter, and the minority the actual story. Now, if they had gone in the complete opposite direction, took out the awful "let's galavant around the universe, going to visually identical planets and doing fetch quests" and just had five or six locations packed with unique quests, which could really develop your Commander Shepherd, THAT would be an RPG.

Fallout 3 I hated, mainly because it suffered from the Oblivion-effect. Massive world with very little personality. Like I keep saying, we haven't gotten to the point yet where we can have a massive world the size of Oblivion that has the personality of smaller worlds. In my opinion, if they'd make the Fallout world less than half its size, but spent all that extra effort on making what remained personalized, so that there are unique characters throughout, Fallout 3 MIGHT have been a better game.

Now all this said, I don't actually think there are any real RPGs left. Like I said a dozen times over, the "true" RPG, as a genre, is almost dead. The Halo Kiddies and Graphics Nuts have killed it.