Van Hemlock.com

Last time I listed the little niggles that I think are wrong with the PS3. This time I’m going to do the same with the 360 because I’m nothing if not an equal opportunities griper.

1. The first, and biggest, problem is their reliability. I’m not saying that the PS3 is bulletproof, I know it’s not as I’ve had failures myself, but the rate of 360s popping their clogs is staggering. I’ve had two fail, and nearly everybody I know has had one go. Hopefully the current design is stable, but they really need to make a new unit that can get a reputation for being solid as the current design is shot.
2. Xbox Live Arcade is great. There are some staggeringly good games on the service, from classics such as Doom to brand new games made specifically for it. There is one niggling little flaw though. It’s a real pain to find the games I want to play now that I’ve downloaded so many. Search, better categories similar ideas would help but in the short term the ability to favourite games so they’re at the top of the list would be great.
3. The controller isn’t perfect, in fact it’s far from it. Although it doesn’t leave me in pain like the PS3 one (yes, I know I’m a freak) but what excuse do Microsoft have for having the worlds worse d-pad? I can never get the direction I want reliably without hitting one of the others at the same time. Look at the design of the PS3 d-pad, that’s how it should be done with each direction effectively being an individual button instead of an inaccurate rocking button. OK, you get diagonals on the 360 controller, but what’s the use if you can’t reliably hit them? There’s also the matter of those bobbles on the two sticks. You remember them, they wore down in a few days and were gone. Well if you keep playing I’m sure some of you will know that you go further through the rubber on the stick itself and that then splits. You have to be pretty obsessive, but I haven’t noticed that problem with my PS3.
4. Possibly the best feature is the way that when you turn a 360 on you have to double check that it’s actually on because it’s so whisper quiet. Oh wait, the fan sounds like a 747 taking off in my living room. While (amazingly) later units are much quieter than the launch ones they’re still awkwardly loud. A new xbox model should be made to fix that, everybody would upgrade to it (probably)
5. While we’re talking about noise I can’t let the DVD drive slide. The best feature on the console is that one that allows you to copy the contents of the disc to the hard drive because it makes playing some games not sound like you’re playing while under heavy machine gun fire.
6. Games on Demand. This is a brilliant idea, and one that I support 100%. It’s just I can get the games off Amazon cheaper usually. Sure, I need to use a disc which I like, but I’m also running out of disc space on my 360 anyway so a few more 4gb game downloads aren’t practical.
7. The hard drive costs HOW MUCH? The rather strict rules about which hard drives can be used on the 360 which effectively limits you to buying an overpriced driver from MS (yes you can upgrade them yourself for less, but it’s a hassle and the drive has to be the exact right type and you risk a banning for modding). I have a 120gb drive in mine, a quick look at my hardware retailer of choice shows that I can get a 600gb or even a whole terabyte of storage on a 2.5” hard drive now. There’s even a smaller 10k rpm one I notice, that’ll help game loading times. I don’t mind playing a little bit more than the retail price of the drives, but just give me lots more storage than the pitiful amounts available now and don’t make me feel like I’m being abused while paying for it.
8. Xbox Live Indy Game. I think they’re brilliant, anybody can pay $99 or so and release their own games on xbox. Sure, they’re not going to be the new Halo and not going to sell a bazillion copies but it lets the average person who knows a little bit of coding to put something onto the console. Sony started this with special consoles for education, but Microsoft have opened it up to everybody. Nobody told the Marketing people though. Or the Xbox UI people. Put the games front and centre! I MAED A GAME WITH ZOMBIES!!!!111! was the best selling Indy game of last year, where is the big icon on the front page? Why not just link the top 10 games that week on a single menu and let people discover new games that way with a way to get through to the rest of the catalogue. The more people play, the more people will buy and the more people will develop because they make more money.
9. Gold is king, silver users smell. Because we pay for gold, silver get hardly any features because they want to make everything seem worthwhile. No, I don’t mind that. What I do mind though is when Microsoft turn down features because they can’t charge for it. Sounds nuts right, nobody would be that dumb? Well when Microsoft apparently told the BBC that they’d only add iPlayer to the service if it was allowed to be a gold feature, which is at odds with the BBCs access remit, we passed into the territory of cutting off your own nose to spite your face. 8% of BBC iPlayer viewing is via the PS3, I would imagine that there would be a similar number if the Xbox had it, or at least that 8% would split.

You’ll notice that I left off a few things that you might consider a gripe yourself. I don’t mind paying for Live, in fact I’d rather pay and get proactive banning of cheaters and the better service in general than not pay anything and get the PS3 service. Yes, that also means I would pay for PSN if it were made better. MS points instead of cash? Nope, don’t mind that as I know roughly the conversion so I mentally do it in my head anyway now.

Let the flaming commence.