The American companies have always screwed Europe.

The UK citizens may not have experienced that much of screwing by the Americans, but I have never been given a chance to download songs from the iTunes Store, buy games at PlayStation Network or play games via Xbox Live. Yeah, even XBL is not officially available in Poland.
Thus, when I refer to “Europe” here, I generally mean “the UK”.

Microsoft is planning to boost the number of movies available for download on its Xbox Live Marketplace for Ireland [and the UK] from the present 30 or 40 films to up to 400 movies, in line with the US.

Over two years after the release of Xbox 360, someone has finally realised that people across the pond do use the Xbox Live Marketplace and they do want to be able to download the latest films.
More than a million of XBL subscribers live in the UK and Ireland, and I bet at least half a million all over the Europe. Of course, Microsoft is a US-based company, but how the hell could you forget where the Pilgrims came from?
People do watch the same movies here as the US-ers do (maybe except the French, but that’s a different story).
Obviously I’m glad that I’ll finally be able to rent a film other than the 300 from the XBLM, but isn’t that a bit too late?
From what I’ve seen during the past two years, Microsoft has been trying to make people understand they don’t need any CDs/DVDs/HD DVDs to watch their movies, all they need is a TV. And the 360, of course. Despite the spectacular success of their console all over the world, they - and many of the American companies - have been supporting one of the continents (guess which!) much more than the other ones.

I can understand delaying the releases of games that need to be translated, or even the retail ones as they have to be regionalised for the PAL system, but why the hell do we have to wait two weeks (often even longer) for a demo to come out in Europe? Is it more profitable to release the games in Europe a month later than in the US?
When we get the games, the Americans aren’t playing them anymore, because they got bored with them already.

The Xbox Live Marketplace has always been one of the major advantages of the 360. However, all the hyping reviews I’ve read before buying my 360 were probably written by Americans, because our Marketplace consists of three demos and four movies, two of which are the Dead or Alive Xtreme trailers.

Screwing Chechnya? Okay, I can live with that. Screwing Madagascar? That’s understandable. But screwing a whole continent?
Nah, Microsoft, you’d better get working on it. Because just as I’m not going to buy the Gold subscription to play on slowly working servers, I’m not going to use the Marketplace to watch 300 for the umpteenth time.
Dead or Alive trailers are fine, though.

Loading. The inevitable part of any gamer’s life. There are many different ways of fighting it – some developers decide to limit the number of textures and objects to load, others try making two-dimensional backgrounds, and Sony doubles the internal memory of their PlayStation Portable. But why do some games need much more time to load than others with similar graphics? The answer is: code optimisation.

The wannabe developers often release games that require twice as much RAM or CPU power as they would if they were produced by, let’s say, Activision. They usually don’t optimise their code as much as the experienced developers would. Thus, you don’t see many games that take ages to load published on the 360, because it is extremely difficult to pack a game into one DVD disc and developers are forced to make their code as compact as possible.

PC gaming, however, isn’t limited by the capacity of a disc. Not only do the unexperienced developers fail to produce optimised games – it often happens to such giants as EA. Have you ever played Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on your computer? I could easily make myself a cup of tea while a new level was loading. There are THOUSANDS of other games with such a poor performance, but complaining about their efficiency is pointless; you will always hear the “get a better PC” argument as an answer. Of course, you can go to the shop and buy yourself a new graphic card, but wouldn’t it be better to spend this money on new games?

Obviously, it would. I don’t really like to see the new DirectX being implemented in computer games, I don’t really want my PC game to have outrageously great graphics, I don’t really want to be forced to change the game’s graphic details level to the minimum. I want my games to be working as fast as they were on the E3 demo when they were announced. And that’s why I value the next-gen consoles much more than the modern personal computers.

I do realise that this rant probably won’t convince the die-hard PC gamers to change their mind, but just think of how much cash you spend on new processors, graphic cards and RAM memory and how many games you could buy for it. In my opinion, PC gaming will eventually die, and now is the best time to abandon the sinking ship of hardware upgrades and join the gaming community with the brightest future.
Just get yourself a console.

Games are being taken too seriously. We hear about people killing themselves as a result of losing in a game; we hear of people dying because they’ve been playing for too long. We read articles that are just grave. Reading IGN or GameSpot makes you feel bored after about 15 minutes. Games are fun; so we can figure out that articles about games should also be funny - they have to make you laugh, they have to be written as if the author was talking to a friend, not to a ‘reader’, and - first of all - they have to be humourous. Life without sarcasm would be totally boring - and that’s why The Sarcastic Gamer was created by Doc Adams.

It’s completely different from other gaming websites, it’s interesting. It’s written… well, not only is it written - it’s also sung! “How To Kill Your Brand” (also known as “The PS3 Song") watched by nearly 2 million people, is the most popular of Doc’s songs.
It reminds me of many Weird Al Yankovic’s songs, which are also full of sarcastic barbed remarks. That’s why it appears on my iPod’s Top Rated playlist.

The Sarcastic Gamer isn’t just about parodying and laughing at everything - it’s a gaming news centre, in the full meaning of this phrase, even though it gives the news in a… erm… very uncommon way. It even - despite being just three-week-old - is launching its own podcast (tomorrow, to be exact).

The Sarcastic Gamer is really a perfect gaming news website for me - it has up-to-date information from console gaming market with a huge dose of humour. Check it out at SarcasticGamer.com.

Below is a YouTube video by the Sarcastic Gamer about Microsoft Surface and its uselessness (although Doc Adams says he’d like to have one, but he just can’t afford it, so he parodied it).

Since the third PlayStation was released in the US (November 11, 2006) and later in Europe (March 23, 2007) every console gamer in the world has been arguing which console is the best. I’ve browsed and searched the whole Internet to find the technical specifications, descriptions and opinions on the best next-gen game consoles: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3

According to the old rule “first things first", I will give reasons why I will compare only Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, without Wii:

• Wii has a 729 MHz processor with 243 MHz clock speed. My laptop’s better than that.
• It doesn’t support HDTV-resolutions (just 480p) and HDMI.
• It has only 64 MB of (GDDR3) RAM.
• It doesn’t support DVD!
• It has no hard drive.
• “Wii” sound like “wee".

I hope it’s enough. And here’s a proof I’m not lying.

Now, let’s get to the main point of this article.

Hardware comparison

PS3 is said to have a more powerful processing power - it’s  b u l l s h i t . It’s true that PS3 has a 3.2 GHz Cell processor with 7 cores, whereas Xbox 360 has a 3.2 GHz unit with 3 cores only, but: 1) 360’s cores are dual-threaded, PlayStation has single-threaded cores and 2) these processors aren’t directly comparable - you can find out more in IGN’s article. It says:

When you break down the numbers, Xbox 360 has provably more performance than PS3. Keep in mind that Sony has a track record of over promising and under delivering on technical performance. The truth is that both systems pack a lot of power for high definition games and entertainment.
 
However, hardware performance, while important, is only a third of the puzzle. Xbox 360 is a fusion of hardware, software and services. Without the software and services to power it, even the most powerful hardware becomes inconsequential. Xbox 360 games — by leveraging cutting-edge hardware, software, and services — will outperform the PlayStation 3.

Moreover, Xbox 360 has 512 MB GDDR3 of system video RAM (at 700 MHz) plus 10 MB embedded DRAM (eDRAM) frame buffer, whereas PS3 has only 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM (at 700MHz). It’s said that PS3 has higher-quality textures while X360 has better light effects, but the graphic processors comparison shows that Xbox will be able to display more graphic marvels in the future.

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