The Best Video Game Console: Playstation 3 or Xbox 360?

A console comparison between the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, highlighting each console's strengths and weaknesses.

Individuals considering buying a new video game console have two choice for hardcore gaming: the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3 (PS3). Gamers unsure about what they want from a gaming console should first seek to answer that question. Because the 360 and PS3 are in direct competition with each other, a point-by-point console comparison will be the most helpful.

Price Comparison
Many people, especially new gamers, will think price is the most important criteria. Both consoles have multiple packages at different price points. Each iteration comes packaged with different accessories, varying sized hard drives, and certain games (the selection of games packaged with consoles constantly changes, even across retailers; shop around for a package with appealing games).

The 360 is the cheapest console with a current price range of $199.99 USD (Arcade bundle) to $299.99 USD (Elite bundle). Xbox occasionally releases special edition Elite consoles concurrently with games that are expected to be popular; these versions typically cost more than the standard Elite package.

The PS3 ranges from $299.99 USD (120 GB version) to $349.99 USD (250 GB version).

The above prices are quoted from Xbox and Playstation’s official websites.

Graphics Comparison
The question of graphics is ultimately subjective. Both consoles have impressive graphics engines; the better graphics are in the eye of the beholder. Direct screenshot comparisons are common, as in this Gamespot article by James Yu and Sarju Shah, which enables gamers to decide for themselves. Opinions about which console wins the graphics battle vary from game to game.

Game Selection: The Importance of Exclusive Game Titles
This will be the deciding factor for most gamers. While many games are made to be cross-platform, certain titles are exclusive to a particular console. Unfortunately, listing games exclusive to each console is beyond the scope of this article. Some examples of popular exclusive Xbox 360 games include: the Halo series, Gears of War series, and Mass Effect series. Popular exclusive Playstation 3 games include: the God of War series, LittleBigPlanet, and Uncharted series.

Ultimately, many games are available on both consoles. However, gamers should do some research into exclusive titles, either online or by talking to a sales associate. Any gamers with a particular game or series in mind should check to see if it’s exclusive, especially if playing the game in question is the main motivation behind the console purchase.

Online Console Gaming: Xbox Live Versus Playstation Network
Both consoles feature online services: Xbox Live (XBL) and the Playstation Network (PSN). Gamers must pay a subscription for full functionality with XBL; PSN is free. As discussed in a direct feature comparison in the onAxis blog, XBL was far superior to PSN at launch. Xbox Live featured a smoother interface and online chat, more features such as achievements, and fast streamlined download of game updates. Playstation has added some features since, but industry writers – such as Chelsea Doyle for Starpulse and Carl Nelson for Hardcoreware – still consider XBL superior and worth the subscription fee. The fact that PSN is free may explain why it’s less polished than XBL.

A final consideration: the PS3 features integrated Wi-fi for simple wireless connection to a home network. The 360 does not have integrated Wi-fi. Gamers can connect to the Internet via an Ethernet cord or can purchase a wireless adapter.

Miscellaneous Considerations
Many PS3 titles require mandatory installation onto the hard drive. This eats up hard drive space and does not reduce load times. The 360 does not require hard drive installation, but gamers can choose to do so.

The PS3 does not support backwards compatibility for Playstation 2 games, but does support selected games for the original Playstation. The 360 supports backwards compatibility for the majority of original Xbox games.

Buying a Video Game Console
Neither of these consoles are better. It depends on personal preference, perception, and gaming needs. A gamer primarily interested in playing online will probably be happiest with the Xbox 360. If the Playstation 3’s exclusive titles are must-haves, get a PS3. If price is a consideration, the Xbox 360 will be the easiest on the wallet.

Halo Reach Review

Let me start by just getting this out of the way right now. If you are a fan of the Halo franchise, if you own or have played the previous entries, if you know the history of the Halo universe, then Halo: Reach is a “must own” for you.

When Bungie first introduced us to the Halo franchise as an Xbox exclusive back in ’02, Microsoft knew it had a hit. There is a very real argument to be made for the fact that Halo: Combat Evolved actually saved the Xbox. Microsoft could have grudgingly afforded to take the hit and simply declared its console to be a lost cause, but Halo: CE gave the system enough life to justify the Xbox 360, which in turn put Microsoft on equal footing with Sony in the gaming world.  In short, it was a big deal.

So when Bungie announced that it would be leaving the Halo franchise for good, and their final entry into the series would be a prequel, Microsoft decided to let them roll with it. Prequels are inherently tricky beasts that run the risk of alienating fans by altering their own imagination-drenched views of the events (the Star Wars prequels are an easy example). On paper, there is very little upside to going backwards and milking the recesses of a story rather than expanding and continuing it. It is tricky when they do it in movies or TV shows, and it is no less so than in video games.



In a game, you obviously play more for the gameplay than the story. Although a good plot is crucial to the expansion of a franchise, prequels by nature require you to be somewhat invested in the story to appreciate the setting. It is a risky venture to create a prequel, and only the biggest franchises- the Metal Gear Solids, the Metroids- can muster the faith from a publisher to get away with it. With Halo: Reach, that faith has been rewarded in spades.

Halo: Reach is an amazing game, and a fitting, even slightly bittersweet finale for Bungie, who are moving on to greener cross-platform pastures. The Halo franchise will live on at Microsoft, but for Bungie, Halo: Reach is a goodbye to a property that has occupied them for over a decade, and turned them from a game developer for Macs, into one of the most respected developers in the industry.

The Story
This will be a mostly spoiler-free review, but if you have seen the trailers – or even if you simply read the back of the game box, you have a fairly good idea of the plot. The planet Reach is under assault by the Covenant forces, and a small band of Spartans make their last stand on the doomed planet. In the Halo timeline, Reach takes place shortly before the events of the original game, Halo: CE.

In the 26th century, humanity has begun to colonize distant planets thanks to the discovery of “slipstream” travel. Soon tensions between the outer and the inner colonies escalated to the point of civil war, and in response, the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) created the Spartans, a group of humans taken as children and augmented to become elite supersoldiers designed to quell the dissension.



In the year 2525, an alien alliance of religious zealots called the Covenant attacks the human colony known as Harvest. The theocratic Covenant consists of several races under the control of the Triumvirate, who have declared humanity an affront to their gods, the Forerunners. Over the next 27 years, Earth continues to lose ground to the more technologically sophisticated aliens, but the vastness of space has kept Earth – and its location- safe. The Spartans prove to be an effective force, but the overwhelming superiority of the Covenant prove to much.  Humanity is losing, and losing badly.

Of all the interstellar colonies, the planet Reach stands alone at the top. The primary interstellar hub of the UNSC, the fully colonized planet is inhabited by 700 million humans. Reach is the last line of defense for Earth, and if it falls, humanity is facing extinction. As the Covenant surround the planet and begin an orbital bombardment, the thriving cities are destroyed, the military bases are shattered, and the planet becomes a futuristic Alamo that will live on as a rallying cry to humankind. And that is where the game begins.

Alienware Review

The M11x certainly has its share of swoopy curves -- if you squint just right, the front end looks almost exactly like a Camaro -- but it's actually boxier overall than you'd expect, with flat sides and hard edges around the rest of the case. We'd almost say the effect is somewhat businesslike, but no one's going to confuse a laptop with this many LED lighting options for a business machine. We just wish Alienware had used the soft-touch matte finish found on top of the keyboard deck all over the machine, rather than glossy black paint; the combination of the finish and the flat surfaces looks a hair cheaper than you'd expect.

Around the sides you'll find a healthy array of ports: VGA, a powered USB port for charging other devices, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, a card reader and a four-pin FireWire jack line the left side, while the right sports a mic jack, dual heaphone ports, two more USB ports, and a vast expanse of glossy black plastic. Only a power port graces the back, but on the bottom you'll find a fairly large fan, a battery meter, and a little Alienware plaque commemorating your purchase. The M11x is also quite heavy for a smaller machine at 4.5 pounds -- that's as much as, say, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and you can certainly feel its heft when you hold it.

Keyboard, touchpad and screen


No chiclet keyboard here -- instead there's a relatively flat backlit unit with a tweaked layout designed for gaming. We'd be totally remiss if we didn't spend some more time talking about the crazy AlienFX LED lighting effects -- you can set the keyboard backlight, Alienware logo, power button, speakers, and even status indicators to be nearly any color you want, have them fade between two colors, or just blink incessantly. It's totally unnecessary, and incredibly fun -- we spent 30 minutes tricking out our tester in an Elvis-inspired hot pink-and-blue motif before settling into more aggressive red and orange scheme. Sure, it's old news to anyone who's bought a larger Alienware machine, but it's fairly wild to see such a feature in a laptop that starts at $799.

We could have lived without the dedicated menu key and a smaller right Shift if that had meant a larger arrow layout, but overall the keyboard is quite nice, and you can certainly pull off WASD when it's time to game. The trackpad is similarly nice: no mulititouch here, but we've always like textured touchpads, and tracking was nice and accurate. We just wish the buttons were a bit bigger -- we found ourselves clicking dead plastic at the lip of the machine quite often.

We've been harping on crappy displays in cheaper laptops for a while now, but the M11x is the rare low-end machine in a company's lineup that doesn't compromise on the LCD. The 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display is bright, sharp and has terrific horizontal viewing angles. The vertical viewing angle is a little narrower, but it's easy to find the sweet spot -- kudos to Alienware for using a good panel here instead of trying to lower the price with a substandard display. We just wish it wasn't so, so glossy.

Performance, graphics and battery life

So do the 1.3GHz SU7300 Core 2 Duo and switchable NVIDIA GT335M GPU have the horsepower to make the M11x a credible gaming machine? The numbers tell the story: with the GT335M switched off, the M11x performed like pretty much any other ULV laptop with integrated GMA graphics, notching a PCMarkVantage3 score of 2698, and a 3DMark06 score of just 654. But turning on the GT335M had a pretty dramatic impact, boosting the PCMarkVantage3 score to 3141 and the 3DMark06 score to 5593. That's significantly lower than the "over 6,100" Alienware claims, but real-world, Batman: Arkham Asylum ran at an easy 25-28fps running at native res with a peak of 42fps and Portal went at 130-200fps -- not bad at all. Our man Joe Kelly also found that Crysis running at native res with 2x anti-aliasing cranked out 8fps in Very High, around 15fps in High, and 20-30fps in Medium, and it wasn't playable with 4x AA in Very High. BioShock at maxed settings produced a peak of 120fps, although that fell to 55fps during scenes with water or lots of action. So not too shabby overall, but your face is probably going to remain un-melted.

The M11x certainly has its share of swoopy curves -- if you squint just right, the front end looks almost exactly like a Camaro -- but it's actually boxier overall than you'd expect, with flat sides and hard edges around the rest of the case. We'd almost say the effect is somewhat businesslike, but no one's going to confuse a laptop with this many LED lighting options for a business machine. We just wish Alienware had used the soft-touch matte finish found on top of the keyboard deck all over the machine, rather than glossy black paint; the combination of the finish and the flat surfaces looks a hair cheaper than you'd expect.

Around the sides you'll find a healthy array of ports: VGA, a powered USB port for charging other devices, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, a card reader and a four-pin FireWire jack line the left side, while the right sports a mic jack, dual heaphone ports, two more USB ports, and a vast expanse of glossy black plastic. Only a power port graces the back, but on the bottom you'll find a fairly large fan, a battery meter, and a little Alienware plaque commemorating your purchase. The M11x is also quite heavy for a smaller machine at 4.5 pounds -- that's as much as, say, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and you can certainly feel its heft when you hold it.

Keyboard, touchpad and screen


No chiclet keyboard here -- instead there's a relatively flat backlit unit with a tweaked layout designed for gaming. We'd be totally remiss if we didn't spend some more time talking about the crazy AlienFX LED lighting effects -- you can set the keyboard backlight, Alienware logo, power button, speakers, and even status indicators to be nearly any color you want, have them fade between two colors, or just blink incessantly. It's totally unnecessary, and incredibly fun -- we spent 30 minutes tricking out our tester in an Elvis-inspired hot pink-and-blue motif before settling into more aggressive red and orange scheme. Sure, it's old news to anyone who's bought a larger Alienware machine, but it's fairly wild to see such a feature in a laptop that starts at $799.

We could have lived without the dedicated menu key and a smaller right Shift if that had meant a larger arrow layout, but overall the keyboard is quite nice, and you can certainly pull off WASD when it's time to game. The trackpad is similarly nice: no mulititouch here, but we've always like textured touchpads, and tracking was nice and accurate. We just wish the buttons were a bit bigger -- we found ourselves clicking dead plastic at the lip of the machine quite often.

We've been harping on crappy displays in cheaper laptops for a while now, but the M11x is the rare low-end machine in a company's lineup that doesn't compromise on the LCD. The 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display is bright, sharp and has terrific horizontal viewing angles. The vertical viewing angle is a little narrower, but it's easy to find the sweet spot -- kudos to Alienware for using a good panel here instead of trying to lower the price with a substandard display. We just wish it wasn't so, so glossy.

Performance, graphics and battery life

So do the 1.3GHz SU7300 Core 2 Duo and switchable NVIDIA GT335M GPU have the horsepower to make the M11x a credible gaming machine? The numbers tell the story: with the GT335M switched off, the M11x performed like pretty much any other ULV laptop with integrated GMA graphics, notching a PCMarkVantage3 score of 2698, and a 3DMark06 score of just 654. But turning on the GT335M had a pretty dramatic impact, boosting the PCMarkVantage3 score to 3141 and the 3DMark06 score to 5593. That's significantly lower than the "over 6,100" Alienware claims, but real-world, Batman: Arkham Asylum ran at an easy 25-28fps running at native res with a peak of 42fps and Portal went at 130-200fps -- not bad at all. Our man Joe Kelly also found that Crysis running at native res with 2x anti-aliasing cranked out 8fps in Very High, around 15fps in High, and 20-30fps in Medium, and it wasn't playable with 4x AA in Very High. BioShock at maxed settings produced a peak of 120fps, although that fell to 55fps during scenes with water or lots of action. So not too shabby overall, but your face is probably going to remain un-melted.

MyPadMedia (iPad)

MyPadMedia is an extensive new iPad service allowing users to access thousands of novels, newspapers, comic books, and more from one source. The bright, straightforward and user-friendly site lets users download unlimited multimedia with one simple touch.

==> Click Here to Download iPad iBooks Instantly!

What will My PAD Media can provide you?
unlimited eBooks for the iPAD
download any books directly to your iPAD
access to the fastest iPAD download on the net
members have unlimited access, no restriction
unlimited free novels, comics, newspaper and more
free 24 hours technical support
huge media selection
no monthly fee, no pay per download fee
no delay, no P2P filesharing
Free digital satellite TV, watch over 3,500 HD channels right on your PC

Ibooks is so cool, it uses epub format unlike Amazon's Kindle. I was totally impressed with safari web brower and ibooks. But the real thing is that, you have to pay almost $13 for each book you download from ibookstore which costs you quite a lot, if you would like to fill your ibookshelf with all your favorites .

Rather than having to face the inconvenience of paying per download book, MY PAD Media will allow user to access to all types of eBooks such as novels in a wide range of genres such as bestsellers, classics, mystery, thriller, crime and romance. This site will also shows members how they can download hundreds of superhero action, manga, anime and comedy books which can be read on their very own IPAD device.

It doesn't matter what computer system you are using at the moment. It works with PC, MAC, LINUX and all operating system. As long as you have your own IPAD and an internet connection and your very own computer, you can easily download any iBook you like directly into your new IPAD.

The quick downloads make this site particularly appealing as there will be no frustrating waits when you are desperate to read the next novel in a series! The site is clearly laid out with simple instructions on how to download, anyone, even the least tech-savvy bookworm, can use myPadMedia. So you have to look no further than myPadMedia where an endless library awaits every reader.

Upcoming Gears of War 3

Gears of War 3 is an upcoming third-person shooter video game developed by Epic Games, published by Microsoft Games Studios and is a Xbox 360 exclusive. Originally due for an April 2011 release, the release was pushed back to Q3/Q4 2011. A second date of September 20, 2011 was announced in February 2011.It will be the third and final installment of the Gears of War series.

Gears of War 3 will feature a four-player co-op mode and the introduction of three playable female characters: Samantha Byrne, Anya Stroud, and Bernadette Mataki (a character from the novels by Karen Traviss). Another new playable character is Jace Stratton, a battle-hardened soldier who appears in the comic series and is mentioned in the second game.



Some of the features which Microsoft revealed for Gears of War 3 in a press release on few day back are shown below:

* An enthralling cinematic story that captivates players in an intimately intense action game
* Five-on-five multiplayer experience as well as four player campaign co-op experience
* New multiplayer game modes including ‘Beast Mode’ – offering a new twist to the game where you take on the role of the locust horde and their assorted variations!
* New maps including: Trenches which features an impressive sand storm that reduces your visibility, as well as Overpass, Mercy, Checkout, and Thrashball
* New weapons including: The Bayonet Charge, The Retro Lancer, The Sawed-off Shotgun, The OneShot – a heavy sniper rifle that shoots through shields or cover for a surprise one shot kill, The Incendiary Grenade, The Digger Launcher and a few subtle tweaks to old favourites Hammerburst and The Classic Lancer. Don’t forget that each weapon now has its own execution move!

Halo 3

Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for Xbox 360. The game is the third title in the Halo franchise and concludes the story arc that began in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2.[6] The game was released on September 25, 2007 in Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand, North America, and Singapore;[3] September 26, 2007 in Europe; and September 27, 2007 in Japan. On the day before its official release, 4.2 million units of Halo 3 were in retail outlets.[7]

Halo 3's story centers on the interstellar war between 26th century humanity, led by the United Nations Space Command, and a collection of alien races known as the Covenant. The player assumes the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier, as he wages war in defense of humanity. The game features vehicles, weapons, and gameplay not present in previous titles of the series, as well as the addition of saved gameplay films, file sharing, and the Forge map editor—a utility which allows the player to perform modifications to multiplayer levels.

Halo 3 grossed US$300 million in its first week.[8] More than one million people played Halo 3 on Xbox Live in the first twenty hours.[9] As of January 3, 2008, Halo 3 has sold 8.1 million copies,[10] and was the best-selling video game of 2007 in the U.S.[11] Overall, the game was very well-received by critics, with the Forge and multiplayer offerings singled out as strong features. By March 2009 more than one billion online matches had been played.[12] A prequel to the game, Halo 3: ODST, was released worldwide on September 22, 2009.