Something else I meant to say in my last post... Proprietary games will nearly always look better than multiplatform games. When a developer can take the time to really get the power and abilities out of a console they can achieve some amazing results, but when they have to put the same game on multiple platforms they have to make conessions, especially if they want a simultaneous release...which also often leads to a lot of issues that need to be patched later. Lucas Arts has stated that they now develop for the PS3 first, ID has said they prefer to develop for the 360 (likely because they are used to developing for PCs), and EA wants to get them all done at once. But, if you take a game like Little Big Planet for example, it looks and plays incredibly, but if they were to have released it on both the 360 and the PS3 together there would have been at least another year of development and it likely wouldn't have been as robust of an experience. Another good example is Viva Pinata on the 360, looks incredible and is an overall great experience, but if it were to have been developed for both platforms it would be a similar situation to LBP. One of my favorite examples of this though is Metroid Prime for the GameCube, it look and played incredibly and arguably looked better than a lot of Xbox and PS2 games and the GC was nowhere nearly as powerful. Most developer these days saddly cannot afford to develop games for only one console now, games just cost too much to make now especially if you are throwing all of your efforts into one console. Nintendo, Sony, and MS can afford to do this type of development of course but you take companies like SquareEnix and Konami, they even say now they have to consider developing for each console so they don't sink themselves in development costs.

The 360 has marginally better graphics in some shots but some of the inital appearance of some of the PS3 shots look better to me. When it comes to the bottom line there is so little arguable difference now that it pretty much comes down to proprietary games and hardware. I loved my 360(s) when I had it (them) but in my case I went through 5 of them because of poor hardware and finally got tired of it. I now own only my PS3, Wii, and computers (aside from handhelds) and couldn't be happier. There are a handful of games that I would like to play on 360 but nothing I can't live without. At this point, the question of which console has better graphics abilities (360 or PS3) isn't really that much of a deciding factor (or at least shouldn't be) for most. Bottom line, if you buy a 360 make sure you get an extended warranty and if you want to a PS3 you are going to pay a little more. If you do the research the reason the 360 "seems" better is because of the rushed production and the shoddy job they did releasing the retail version knowing they were putting potentially faulty hardware in the consoles and it has cost them millions to TRY and fix that problem. And yeah the freakin' thing is loud and very unpleasant while playing anything that requires a disc, PS3 definitely has an advantage there....although that should never be considered an advantage.