I don’t know if there’s an option to pay monthly for Live, only yearly.
The two lists of exclusives are listed above. They appear to be about the same length. Going through and making a tally of games that I would be interested in playing (about as unscientific a poll there ever was), there are 10 each on either side. :shrug:
Sure, any 7-11 or Target or what-have you will have one month or three month cards for Live. You can still buy things without paying for the full (gold) membership, I think you just need Gold for multiplayer games and maybe Netflix. (Yes, you can stream movies to your xbox with netflix.)
HDMI cables cost a pittance now. I don’t think anyone is falling for Best Buy’s “You simply MUST have the pure gold cables for best reception” bullshit anymore.
Oh, they most certainly do. Hang out in the cable section of Best Buy next time you’re there, and you’ll see someone pick up one and head to the register. It’s amazing.
God, it IS. It’s like an order of magnitude difference: $120.00 at Best Buy vs $12.00 at WalMart. Why it’s not treated as a scam is a mystery to me.
Speaking of a rash of dumb…
The point isn’t that upscaling and true 1080P are identical, the point is that for many people and in many hardware configurations the extra pixels (data) a 1080P source provides are essentially invisible. See here. With a 50" plasma at 8 feet away a person with 20/20 vision can only discern 672 lines of resolution. Even 720P is wasted on most peoples’ living rooms. I’m guessing a very small percentage of people who sing the praises of Blu-Ray have 20/20 vision and a 50" 1080P plasma or bigger.
The argument is, if the OP doesn’t have a 1080P TV of at least 50" which he intends to sit about 5 feet from, then using the inclusion of a Blu-Ray player as a litmus test is pretty foolish.
Every time I see one of these reports (complete with official terms like “using trigonometry”, “arcminute” and “acuity”!), I wonder why no one posts how close you have to sit to your 23" Panasonic CRT to get the full benefit from its 480i resolution before you start getting a dropoff.
If there were a slew of marketing terms describing the 23" CRT to justify it’s 4 figure price tag you probably would.
Well I’m 2 for 3 failures so far, so I’ve experienced a 66% failure rate. 
A more recent survey from GameInformer pegged it at 54%.
And as one who works in the industry, that is, I’m dealing with copious Xboxes (and other systems) day and night, this figure seems dead-on. Right now, we have a stack of 4 Xboxes ready to be shipped off for repair (out of 8 total), and none of them are Red Ring virgins. In addition, almost every single 360 owner I know (that is, 30+) has sent theirs back for repair at some point.
The console, up until recently (and even then we don’t know the long-term reliably) was a shoddily slapped together piece of hardware. There’s no two ways about it–you look at it wrong and it dies. I still like the system–I own one (and it too has died on me), but unless you’ve seen a larger sample size than me, then these figures are almost certainly within the ballpark of the actual figure.
I own both but tend to use my Xbox for games more. I really like the achievements and they cross-over to my favourite gaming platform, the PC. I’ve been playing through the RPGs on the Xbox 360 and having a lot of fun. Is there a single non-action RPG on the PS3?
I even bought GTA4 again for the Xbox, even though I already owned it on the PS3, just for the achievements. I think it looks a lot better on the Xbox too, without the annoying blurring distance fog on the PS3 version.
I’ve never experienced a game crash on the PS3, it’s happened quite often on the Xbox. I also notice reduced FPS on the Xbox more than the PS3.
My PS3 is mostly used for DVD/BluRay now. I don’t regret the purchase but If I could own only one it would be the 360, every time. Please note that this is mainly because I like RPGs and the achievement system. Without them I would probably play all my games on the PC.
Rather the opposite; They haven’t made a backwards compatible PS3 in years.
jeredc1983 - As a fairly recent PS3 owner, I say…get the facts and pick the system that fits your wants better.
That’s really all there is too it. What are you after? Reliability? Variety of games? Peripheral support? Networking? What must you have, and what can you do without? What sacrifices are you willing to make to get what you’re after?
In my judgment, the XBox 360 is by far the superior system in every category I care about…except one. Better variety of games, much better peripheral availability, better 3rd party support, better add-ons, you name it. But reliability is a category I will not, WILL NOT budge on, and the chance of a total system failure going from “extremely likely” to “somewhat unlikely for the most part” wasn’t enough to sway me. The horror stories I’ve read about Microsoft’s repair service don’t help either. Microsoft, try as they might, just cannot seem to break out of their computer mentality, where releasing unreliable products is perfectly fine as long as they make an effort to fix it. Eventually. Also, I don’t want to pay 50 bucks extra every month for online support, and I’ve always wanted a Blu-ray player but don’t feel like shelling out another $100 for one. Add it all up and the PS3 was a natural choice.
That’s all there is to it. Get the specs, testimonials, reviews, all the info you can. The final decision is up to you.
A year. 50 bucks a year.
Oh, okay, thanks. Still a fair amount of cash if you’re thinking of keeping the system for a while (likely, as there isn’t a whole lot higher to go technologically).
You can usually find sales at online retailers for discounted 1 year xbox live cards for somewhere in the $3/month range if it’s a big deal.
And so incredibly worth it.
60 gig (new, not refurb) X-Box 360 $229 on sellout.woot.com today. Rechargable batteries for the controllers on woot.com today.