Volitions Advocate on 25/11/2010 at 08:55

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I managed to get a good deal on all my current gen consoles.

My ps2 was given to me by a friend who managed to get a ps2 compatible ps3, lucky bastard.

my wii was bought from a co-worker of my wifes for a decent deal. I love it for all the classic console games available on it. They even have commodore games on it now.

The Ps3 was also my wifes idea, bought it using some weird lifestyle bonus she got from a previous job, one year we got bicycles, the 2nd year we got a ps3. We needed a bluray player and she thought little big planet was cool looking.

My xbox i grabbed from my dads place. He got an arcade for free with his big TV, but he never played it. so i stole it and bought a harddrive for it. I use it mostly for playing Halo with my friends when they come over (their copies, I dont own it) and for XBLA games like shadow complex and perfect dark.

of the 3 the PS3 is my favorite. it functions most like a computer and I get the feeling that sony trusts us to be smart enough to use it. Plus the online aspect is free, and the online community they've built for it is better than anything else I've seen. It's just not that populated. your avatar is so much more than a picture, it's actually something you play and walk around in thiis small city that they've made. Its like a mmorpg where your quests are going to a specific place to take part in a new contest or see some exclusive broadcasts with special guests or get fancy unlock codes for stuff. I only ever play PSone games and system exclusives like killzone and MGS on it. But I use it for netflix and streaming media from my PC. Its great in every aspect except the dick things sony did like gimp the other OS function and then eventually removing it completely.

Mr.Duck on 25/11/2010 at 16:29

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I know you're just poking for the Hell of it, but, tut, I have time to poke back: I have that base covered. Current Gen only. You want to talk about your PSX, be my guest!

But it's not a poll option as was clearly stated on the thread's title.

Carry on :D

catbarf on 28/11/2010 at 00:51

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Their servers are involved in matchmaking and game setup, it's just that most games don't use a dedicated server, so Microsoft isn't paying for dedicated servers for you to play the game on.

Fafhrd on 28/11/2010 at 04:45

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Actually, a lot of Xbox LIVE games use their own dedicated servers to manage matchmaking playlists, etc. The server software itself all uses Xbox LIVE APIs to work, and is required to actually connect to Microsoft's main Xbox LIVE servers in a bunch of different ways (invites and leaderboards and such), so there's really no point where Microsoft's servers are out of the loop when playing Xbox LIVE multiplayer.

Fafhrd on 30/11/2010 at 06:40

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And there are the servers that store player data (gamertags, friends lists, achievements, etc), and the marketplace servers, and the PartnerNet servers (internal Xbox LIVE servers for publishers and developers to test on), and the CertNet servers (Internal Xbox LIVE servers for Microsoft to test submitted content on), and back-ups and etc to minimize the chance of outages, and the costs start to add up. I'm still not sure how Valve manages it with Steam (at a guess I'd say the Steam Store brings in a lot more money to Valve than anyone realizes, and that it's more than the Xbox LIVE Marketplace brings in for MS, but until they start releasing their sales numbers and profit sharing scheme, there's no way for anyone to verify that), but there are obviously kinks in Steam that don't exist to the same degree with Xbox LIVE. I can practically guarantee that the Steam Store is going to go down several times when Portal 2 comes out. Xbox LIVE doesn't collapse when the new CoD hits (though occasionally some games don't have their servers configured right on day one and that specific game has some issues playing on LIVE).