Gadgetory

in the last round of the console wars we looked a design and functionality of the user interfaces and in this round we'll continue with the online features of the you is the PlayStation Network versus Xbox Live is up next so get ready for some heavyweight game console action its LP from TechnoBuffalo and welcome to the next installment of the console world to start off this comparison I thought I show you a clip of Xbox Live's Get Connected advert and pay specific attention to the music entertainment of Xbox Live you can try games before you buy them and extend yeah if the music sounds familiar that's because it's the theme song from ps3s exclusive hit LittleBigPlanet interesting choice of music for the xbox live women both parties are responsible for copying and sealing the others Thunder so hey that's business you can't invent the wheel for a second time so in the last round the ps3 took a slight edge because from the standpoint of functionality it's less clustered with content and it's a mo logically laid out interface that appeals to the offline single-player gamer in me but and this is a big button and I don't mean figuratively the online component of the interface which we did not cover is equal is important if not even more important than just the basic functionality of interface so in this round we'll be taking a look at the online services how they're integrated into the interface how well they're implemented into the gaming experience and how well it all works let's start off this comparison with finance I come from a PC gaming background I played a lot of games online starting from the old quake days and the notion of paying for the opportunity to play with my friends at first is preposterous why would I want to pay for something I've done for years on my PC for free while the PlayStation Network service is currently free the Xbox Live Gold account will cost you up to 60 bucks a year so what am I getting for my 60 bucks a year well I do get to play online with my friends I can create a party and chatted with my buddies online I get some exclusive content like getting some game demo earlier and I get a lot of interesting online services but most of these features you get for free on the ps3 so again why would I want to pay for this well there's a single reason why Xbox Live might be worth 60 years a year and the reason is that it works I've been a PSN user since the very beginning and truthfully I've had a lot of issues with PSN for example the first two days of the launch of modern warfare 2 a lot of issues the servers were randomly down and friend advice didn't work at all I've never had this happen using xbox live live is not flawless but it definitely works better than PSN everything eventually gets patched up to work on the ps3 but it can be a bit annoying but a couple of weeks ago I heard that Sony has recently hinted at a paid service coming this year to the ps3 giving somewhat similar exclusive access to content that you can expect on Xbox Live an unconfirmed perk to the PSN premium service will be free access to old PlayStation titles which is actually a great idea but if I have to start paying for the PSN premium service I expect it to work better don't get me wrong the PSN works great most of the time but there can be some random issues that I never experienced on Xbox Live however an annoying thing about the Xbox Live service is that you pay for the subscription but you have to pay for it pretty much everything inside the service as well there are some random themes and stuff that are free but saw not much real content that you'd actually want in the first place and they get it for the UI is the fact that most icons on the interface leads to more paid content and it almost seems like the consumer aspect super sees the gamer aspect of the interface which really affected the result of the previous round overall while I'm not doing the happy dance for having to pay for the online service I am willing to pay it if I get a guarantee of everything working and up until now the stability and lack of issues with Xbox Live service is starting to justify the price tag but I'll leave the final determination to whether Xbox Live is worth your hard-earned bottlecaps after we've covered all the features I mentioned in the previous round that Xbox Live is quite seamlessly integrated into the new Xbox experience in fact without the features of live it wouldn't be much of an experience at all most of the nxe channels are directly integrated into Xbox Live in the spotlight channel you find featured content in the different tabs of the spotlight channel you find gaming related news interesting new features and the most interesting new content found in the Xbox Live Marketplace the spotlight channel is the section that will be opened on default once you start up the Xbox 360 on the PlayStation 3 you have a keenly similar section which is also the first thing you see when you fire up your ps3 in terms of featured content it's pretty much the same as the spotlight channel on the 360 with the exception with ps3 having links to websites that launched the ps3 web browser which I'll get to later in this comparison while I enjoyed the speed and functionality of the PS Reis cross media bar I would have liked to see some more integration to the online features most of the online features are basically icons that launch different applications rather than being integrated into the experience itself the store icon launches the store application and the home icon launches the PlayStation home application and so forth while in the new Xbox experience most of the online features work all as a part of the same interface okay next we're going to be comparing the Xbox Live Marketplace to the PSN store I'm usually interested in game demos and that's really the content I want to get to an Xbox Live provides a nicely integrated route to the content browsing content in the Xbox Live Marketplace is fast and large box art icons really work well here it couldn't be much simpler than this while the PSN store is a separate application with a more classical approach it also works very well it's fast and logical and it can change the way to view content to suit your liking content why the stores are quite similar on both systems you find extra Maps classical games arcade games extras for games such as costume for your characters and on both systems you find a selection of original and creative content from independent developers the content inside the stores differed bent depending on the region but both stores have great content and are easy to navigate Sony has the edge though on movie content with the agreement Sony has in place with the major movie distributors the video store has a broad selection of very good titles available to buy or to rent unfortunately the movie content is not available in every corner of the world including this one there's more ps3's in Europe than any other region but still most countries have limited PSN services and i got'em it I'm pissed off about this I just can't imagine what the holdup is Xbox Live now has the Zune Marketplace with some good movie titles that are available from most corners of the world including remote places such as from Finland there are some pretty good titles in the Zune Marketplace but I would like to see some more aggressive pricing and speaking of pricing one of the weak points of Xbox Live are Microsoft Points which act as a currency of Xbox Live to buy or rent content you first have to buy soft points which usually don't even correlate to the currency here using for example I just bought 2100 Microsoft Points for 19 euros which correlates to what 90 94 cents per every 100 points and the craziest thing is that the prices differ depending on the place you purchase them luckily Sony took the direct route and you can buy content from the PSN store with actual money but I have to compliment how the Xbox Live Marketplace is also very nicely integrated into the gaming experience you can access specific game related content from inside the game you're playing and while I do not agree with all the content inside the store it all feels connected which gives the whole experience a much more unified field while the PSN store is very versatile and navigation wise a bit simpler it can compete with the deep integration of the marketplace both consoles have services that are region specific for example both the Xbox 360 and ps3 have Netflix services that are only available in the United States and for example the vids own service is available in Europe and the Pacific region I can't cover the Netflix services because over here in Finland there's no such thing bid zone has gone a bit under the radar it's a very cool music video application with a nice collection of content spanning from Metallica to the sticks in mid zone you can create your own playlists or for example play and shuffle up the videos from a specific genre and best of all vids own is a free service there actually is some bids own content on the Xbox Live Marketplace as well but there's no dedicated interface like on the ps3 playstation home was initially titled to be a new way of experiencing gaming online in home you could have space where you can launch games and hang out with your friends and interact with fellow PSN users and have all kinds of content that is seamlessly streamed into the experience it kind of does what it promises except the seamless part there's just a lot of tedious loading times that really put off enjoying the experience why in the world would I want to launch a game from a place where it takes me five minutes to get to the answer is I wouldn't beyond the novelties of the virtual world I think home doesn't add too much value to the experience Microsoft kind of created the avatars to compete with home and they actually managed to successfully integrate the avatars into the actual interface and that's pretty much what I expected home to do when I first heard about it Microsoft recently announced that they will be introducing a new game room to the nxe where you can use your avatar to interact with your friends and play classic arcade games like centipede and asteroids sounds kind of cool but some will see with the last major nxe update the Xbox received Twitter and Facebook applications as separate applications they are in fact very good but I would have liked to see the applications integrated into the dashboard in a way that does not require you to launch the specific application every time you want to post a single tweet the ps3 also has Facebook integration you can set your ps3 to share trophy purchase and game event info to your Facebook feed there is no dedicated application for the Facebook feed but you can use the web browser to access your Facebook account and it works okay as Facebook is designed to be used in a web browser and speaking of the web browsers this is one of ps3s advantages it does in fact have a web browser while the Xbox 360 does not it's not at all a perfect browser but if you want to keep ad web browsing ain't actually half bad but some with the Twitter and Facebook applications the Xbox 360 has better social network integration however I would like to see the applications integrated in the similar way as the messenger app tapping on the 360 controllers menu button gives you fast access to the messaging application messaging on the Xbox 360 relies on Microsoft Live service which integrates the Xbox 360 messenger through Windows Live account so all your contacts and your Windows Live Messenger account will be the contacts on your Xbox so on your Xbox 360 you can chat with people who don't even own an Xbox and this I think is a welcomed integration the basic messaging functions on both systems are about the same you can send and receive single messages to your friends who are online or offline and you can also create an audio or video chat on both systems but a major and significant benefit to the Xbox 360 messaging system is the cross game voice chat which makes it possible to talk with your buddies while playing different games so basically you can be playing the single-player campaign of Gears of War 2 and talk to your buddy who's playing the newest Hannah Montana game in-game voice chat is possible on the ps3 but not between different games and audio communication in game is dependent on the games own infrastructure a very nicely devised element to the xbox live is the party system the party system allows you to create or join a party and talk to your friends anywhere on xbox live from inside the party you can easily launch you the same games and even watch a rented movie together the Xbox 360 party system is excellent and it's a system that I'm dearly missing on the ps3 because on the ps3 there isn't much that motivates you to stay connected with your buddies while it seems Xbox Live is all about staying connected and interacting with your friends and overall I'd say the messaging and communication are superior on Xbox Live both consoles have an accomplishment tracking system that are linked to the online service you can basically keep track of what games you played and compare your accomplishments against your buddies you have trophies for the ps3 and achievements on xbox 360 trophies were introduced to the ps3 in July of 2008 some games were updated with trophy support long after the release so people who bought the ps3 and games early on got screwed sure would have been nice to get trophies from games like Warhawk uncharted and GTA 4 but since I play the game pretty close to their launch dates I got nothing there are four different types of trophies bronze silver gold and platinum bronze being the easiest to achieve while the platinum trophy requires you to hunt down every trophy in the game every trophy increases your experience level and the more valuable the trophy the more experience you gain on the level system I have to admit it took me some time to figure out how much each trophy was worth I actually had to google it and search a forum which makes the trophy system unnecessarily complicated the Xbox 360 achievement points are a bit more straightforward and simple the smallest achievement is 5 points and the highest is 500 points which all accumulate into your gamer score there is no level system but it's really not needed and you don't need any mathematical equations to calculate anything and the gamer score is a nice measure of how accomplished a gamer you are in short the Xbox 360 achievement points and gamer score are superior so to wrap up round seven is xbox live worth 60 bucks a year the answer is yes if that's what it takes to have everything work as well as they do on Xbox Live I'm willing to pay and this goes for the upcoming PSN premium service as well I am willing to pay for the service but Sony's going to have to up the ante because as is now almost every aspect of the online service is better on the Xbox 360 while I do prefer the cross media bar is an offline gaming experience taking into account the online components in all the complexity I have to say that the new Xbox experience is overall a better more thought-out interface with excellent online integration but most importantly Xbox Live works and earns the Xbox 360 appointing this round tying up this matchup stay tuned for the next run where we'll be taking a look at the media playback features and I have a feeling that solely might have something of its lead for the next round LP signing out