I had to make the same decision a few weeks back. There was only one unique factor to buy the 360 for me: clandestine gaming. PS3 has not been hacked yet to my knowledge. Still, if online gaming is your thing, then that reason would drop anyway.
The things that made me buy the PS3 in the end: bluray, perfect media player, wireless and Singstar.
Bwuh? The 360 has been out for four years now, what genres is it missing?
It’s not a question of “missing” so much as a question of “underrepresented”.
If I wanted to play FPS run-n-gun games, I could have a library large enough to keep me amused until 2012.
As a JRPG fan, the selection is limited and overall kindof not very good.
Genres outside of FPS/TPS, Racing and Sports don’t seem to have a very good presence in the US game market right now, period.
I have a PS3, here are the basic pros and cons:
+Blu-Ray player. XB360 can’t compete here.
+Includes wireless. XB360 requires a $70 Microsoft adapter. Bastards.
+Good media player. Pictures, music, videos. Doesn’t play all the video formats my 5-year-old Oppo DVD player does though. Not sure how the XB360 media player compares.
+Upgrade your own hard drive, Sony encourages it. You can upgrade your storage on XB360, but it’s more trouble, and there is talk that MS is going to block user-upgraded storage from being recognized in the XB360. That would royally piss me off.
+Web browsing included.
-Web browser sorta sucks. Use Opera or something.
+Free online play.
-XBox Live costs each month, but is considered the better service.
As far as sound and graphics, people compare them endlessly and it seems to be a draw. Some titles are better on PS3, some are better on XB360, but the differences aren’t big.
If all else is equal I’d research the exclusives for both consoles and see if there are any you can’t live without.
Note: A wireless bridge that is perfectly reliable and works for anything with an ethernet port, is $30 at newegg. You don’t have to buy the x-box adapter at all.
I know you didn’t ask, but I’ll just throw it out as a proposal. If you have a reasonably fast computer (basically anything less than 3+ years old and/or very low end), you could turn it into a gaming PC that would run circles around the consoles for considerably less money. There’s an assumption/myth out there that gaming PCs cost thousands of dollars, but it’s bullshit. A $130 video card combined with a pc with a reasonable amount of ram and a mid-range CPU will outperform either game console by a huge margin.
Here we go again.
Look. If he wanted a gaming PC, he could have said “I’d like a gaming PC” but he didn’t, so presumably he has considered the situation and made a decision.
I never agreed with your magic math that had people someone getting PCs that could run recent releases for under $300 anyway.
I made a very nice one for 600 the other day for someone. If there were some existing parts, I could have trimmed maybe two hundred off it.
Not that the OP even seems to still be here, but a PC is much different than a console. Console games just work, PC games often take some fiddling and configuring to get running.
Personally I think a console is a better fit for the living room, especially if you have company and just want things to work.
“Some assembly required” 
The OP never mentions PC’s and Senor Beef mentions the fact in his post. It’s possible the Op might not have thought that a $130 video card can get him setup for PC gaming. Or maybe he did and ruled it out. I’m guessing if the former is true he now has another option he might consider, if the latter is true, I’m going out ona limb here and guess that reading a short post about it isn’t going to melt his eyeballs or give him a heart attack. He’ll just move on to the next post, which unfortunately is one of you whining.
And what’s wrong with his math anyhow? IF the op has a fairly recent PC a $130 video card upgrade would put him WAY ahead of the consoles in terms of graphics and computing hardware. I’m not sure how you can dispute that.
No, all assembly required. But it’s less difficult than a model of a fighter jet, all things considered.
The idea that putting a $130 vidcard into a “fairly recent PC” turns it into some sort of magical gaming device is a fallacy. It turns it into whatever it was before plus a decent graphics card, which in and of itself, doesn’t really let you play much you couldn’t play before because you’ve still got less RAM than you should, a mediocre processor, and a power supply that might or might even be able to feed that updated video card.
Most people in this school of thought grossly overestimate the quality of the average recent PC, particularly one that was purchased with the intent of “I just want to browse the internet and maybe run MS Word.” End-user PC vendors these days are far more likely to say, give you a free flatscreen monitor than they are to give you enough RAM to play Dragon Age or something without throttling it back to the stone age.
That’s how I dispute that.
Yeah because RAM is sooo expensive now a days. Why I had to sell my left arm to afford another 2 gigs… oh wait, no it actually cost me $25 to do so.
Also most modern machines will come with 2 gigs of RAM, which is enough for a game like dragon Age. Your dispute is lacking, friend.
I made a suggestion for an option he might consider. I didn’t come in here saying HAHA YOU CONSOLE RETARD BUY A PC INSTEAD. You are the one that is attempting to start an argument, not me.
He wants a gaming machine and he might not have known a gaming PC may be in his price range, because there are a lot of myths surrounding how much gaming PCs cost.
There’s no magic math. If he happens to have some low/mid range computer that he’s using right now - let’s say 2gb of ram and a 2 ghz core 2 duo processor, which is not at all unreasonable, then a $130 video card will indeed turn it into a gaming machine with much more power (and library of games) than a ps3 or xbox 360. I don’t know where you’re getting “magical gaming device from”, I’m just saying it’ll be better than the low/mid range 2004 technology in the consoles.
I was just offering a suggestion that I thought would be relevant to the OP. I didn’t bash anything. You are attempting to instigate.
Beefy, your endless number crunching make the fantasy football threads very fun. But the only way you can make the PC have a bigger games library than the Xbox 360 or PS3 (but especially the 360) is if you count all those cheesy match-3 puzzle games that are all over the Internet and every PC game released in the last ten years. Which is cheating just a bit.
uhm, the PC has over a decade of titles to choose from man. Take off those console goggles for a sec.
And thanks to places like GOG.com a lot of the great classics are back and guaranteed to run on modern systems.
How bout we wait for him to come back?
Windows 98 is not Windows ME is not Windows XP is not Windows 7. Games designed for one will not always work in your new PC without a little bit of finagling.
And if you count all those older PC games, you also have to count the Xbox library (which is compatible with the 360). Once again rendering the argument moot.
Agreed. Because of GOG I can play Rise of the Triad to my hearts content. They can do no wrong in my book.
Actually Win ME is effectively 98 with a few self destructive add ons. The underlying processes are all the same.
And Windows is a a thousand times more backward compatible than the 360 whose backward compatibility could best be described as “spotty”.