He’s made his decision, so let’s help him, okay?
X-Box: Knights of the Old Republic is a great game. So is Crimson Skies. Halo 2, of course. What else? He likes driving games, what was that cel-shade one? Burnout 3, also.
No, he has not made his decision.
He is asking for input, try reading the OP.
If you want to buy an Xbox, please go ahead.
If you don’t want to buy a PS2 because you hate Sony or some other reason, fine too.
Just don’t do it because somebody told you that the PS2 is the worst system.
It just isn’t.
I don’t want to turn this into a fanboy-discussion, I just want to give him the full facts.
Here’s my props for Gamecube and Nintendo in house software.
While Mario and Zelda games have the surface appearance “kiddie” games they have lots of advantages-
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They are solid, perfected games, that have no glitches and have been thouroghly tested and perfected by Nintendo.
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I have yet to pick up an owners manual for a Mario or Zelda game to figure out how to play it. The games, while complex, have a way of self tutoring the player so they gradually learn the controls and features by playing the game. It’s no fun to get a new game and have to read a 50 page book to figure out what your doing.
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The games are a hell of a lot of fun. Mario Sunshine, Zelda-Wind Waker, Paper Mario, Mario Kart, Mario Party. No, they aren’t simulated street racing or technical espionage warfare, just really fun to play.
(Disclaimer: I design video games for Sony.)
Whoa, there! Not so fast.
Yes, PS2 is slightly less powerful than XBox. But they’re both from the same generation of consoles and there’s not a huge difference in quality between them.
The biggest advantage of going with PS2 is the large number of good games available for it compared to the other systems. As someone else pointed out, there’s a reason that Playstation 2 is the top-selling console.
I own every console from the last ten years but the XBox. (On occasions when I need to play XBox games for research I borrow one from work. But I haven’t gotten excited enough about any XBox title to justify shelling out for one of my own.)
If you like racing games and you’re intrigued by the commercial for Mercenaries, you’d love Grand Theft Auto 3 and its sequels Vice City and San Andreas. They’re all about stealing cars (and motorcycles, and buses, and firetrucks, and ambulances) and racing them through the streets of a city.
Actually, there is one objective advantage for the PS2. Online play. Generally, online play for the PS2 is either free, or the specific game charges you. The Tony Hawk series, for example, is free to play online. Some sports games may charge, I’m not sure.
The GameCube has fairly limited online capabilities.
The X-Box requires a flat fee and account before you can get online. So if you want to play against a living opponent, and don’t have someone willing to schlep their X-Box and TV over to your house, you’re out of luck without some serious annoyances.
Also, the PS2 is the home of, like Katamatari Danci, generally weird stuff that the other consoles don’t have.
The Gamecube’s games, what there are of them, are mostly A++ games. But the theme and selection are limited.
And of the X-Box’s games, there have been only three I was tempted to buy an X-Box for. Buffy, Halo, and KOTOR. Halo and Knights of the Old Republic are available for PC. Better resolution and graphics, patches for game crashes, and downloadable content. Score.
Is the X-Box better than the PS2 for graphic quality? Yeaaaah. A bit. Maybe a whole three months newer hardware in it. Compared to a PC, they’re both sucking hind tit, though. The difference between the systems is less than the difference between programmers. Two excellent games, one for PS2, one for X-Box? The X-Box one will look slightly better. But only slightly. Two mediocre games? Won’t be able to tell. Mediocre game on the X-Box will look worse than an excellent game on the PS2.
And there’s more seriously kick-ass games for the PS2.
We have a PS2, GameCube, and XBox (and if you want to get technical, N64, Gameboy advance, DS, Mac and PC).
The PS2 gets more gameplay than the rest combined. The graphics aren’t as great but they’re not far behind. The selection and prices are better, and the gameplay (how well the game plays, how responsive the controls are, etc) seems to be better for the PS2, I suspect because companies have had more experience working with it.
Don’t write it off just yet.
You can’t beat the PS2 for best bang for your buck. With only the PS2 and keeping an eye on this website, you can clean up.
A few months ago I picked up around 15 good (but older) games for around $130. FFX-2 for $10 bucks, baby! Of course I kicked myself, because I missed a quick sale for $4.99, but you can’t win em all.
Slugfest is one of the best. The 2005 version has a top-notch dynasty mode where you take over the management of a team for several seasons. If the Xtreme aspect isn’t your cup of tea, you can turn parts (or all) of it off and just play pure baseball the way it was meant to be. I leave the Xtreme bit on except for the trick pitches.
From the Xbox perspective, I’d say your point is a plus for the Xbox and a minus for the PS2. Think about it for a second. Let’s say you find a new, cool game for the PS2. Now you want to play online. After playing it enough to realize you like it, now you get to figure out what service you need to connect to, and how much it costs. So you pay for it, sign up, make your account, and log on. Hopefully, this will be a pretty popular game, and will have a bunch of people on the servers. A couple weeks later you find another cool game, let’s say it’s a baseball game. You play it, dig it, identify which service you need for this game to play online, sign up, make your account, and hope there’s a lot of people playing. Now you play awhile, and hear from someone that there’s a much better baseball game for online, so you go and pick that game up, sign up for an account, etc…
How many different names and passwords do you have at this point? How many charges on your credit card?
Now to the Xbox model. You decide one day that you want to play online. You sign up, make your account, and now you can play every game Xbox offers in whatever online capacity they support. That means you can play games online even if you only rent them. Can you play rented PS2 games online? No. You have to buy them, and then subscribe to some other service. Sounds like a big pain in the ass to me. Better to just sign up and be already activated to play any potential future game that ever gets released.
The real difference, when you get right down to it? The first time you play any given game on a Xbox, you can jump right into online with no hassle or headache whatsoever. With PS2? The amount of hassle to play your first online match is undefined, but in every case it’s more hassle than Xbox, if only because you have to come up with a unique user name (and password?) for those servers.
I don’t know why you think you need to lug a second Xbox and tv to a buddy’s house. I play weekly multiplayer gaming at a buddy’s house with 3 or 4 people total. We use a single Xbox. Of note is that when we used to play PS2, we had to actually buy a controller splitter just to be able to plug in more than 2 controllers. Xbox comes with 4 ports right out of the box. Most games offer splitscreen and shared-screen functionality. All sports games simply use a shared screen. Virtually all driving games and first person shooters offer splitscreen support. We used to play Gran Turismo 3, but only 2 people could play at the same time. Now we play RalliSport Challenge 2, and it easily handles 4 (and 3) person splitscreen, as do both Halo versions. PS2 was designed for 2 players, while the Xbox was designed for 4, so most Xbox titles support 4 players pretty nicely.
Also, the Xbox graphics aren’t much better than the PS2. That’s not the reason to get an Xbox. The hard drive is a good reason. No memory card required to save your games. If the OP bought a brand new PS2 right now, does it finally come with a hard drive, or is the memory card still one of the long list of extra things you have to buy? (Online service for individual games, controller splitter to handle 4 players, memory card to save games, they nickel and dime you to death over at Sony.)
It’s just nice that the moment you unwrap and fire up a new game on Xbox, you can immediately jump into online play simply buy selecting “Xbox Live” from the main menu of that game. Good luck doing that on PS2. And to be able to test out every game’s online component by renting the game is a major bonus.
Now if they’s just offer spltscreen multiplayer locally while playing online, all would be well. Both Project Gotham 2 and Halo 2 support this, and it’s way fun. RalliSport Challenge 2 is annoying in that it only supports singleplayer online mode. Top Spin is quite fun when there’s only two of us. We hop onto Xbox Live and play doubles against online opponents.
As far as I’m aware, the GameCube does not offer online play in any capacity for any of its games.
I have not yet made the decision. I think I was prematurely swayed by some PS2-haters 
. Given PS2’s wide game selection, it is back in the running. It may be what I end up buying, though I’m not done thinking.
Nah. For some reason, gang crime is not very appealing, even though Mercenaries is probably far more violent. For racing, I meant something more straightforward, like NASCAR, or MarioKart, which has already been talked about.
Hey, Ellis Dee, I’m not going to be playing online. I can’t spend all of my time on the internet wasting it .
My thoughts on the Xbox vs PS2 come down to this: I have a very limited ammount of time to play video games. Therefore the sheer number of games available on PS2 don’t matter to me, as long as there are a few each year I can play and enjoy thats al I need. (Right now its Halo 2, and I wish I had time for GR2, this year’
s Madden and a few others). I own an XBox now, but a previous roommate had a PS2, so I’m not a complete fanboy. I’d rather have edge in graphics, load time, out of the box functionality and not having to buy any add-ons.
Its also important if youre going to play with friends, which systems they have. As for games, Id recommend Halo, the SSX series(whichever system you get, its super fast and easy), the Madden series (again any system) and something from Oddworld, a humorous and fun Mario-style game.