PS3 / Xbox 360 Appreciation and Collecting Thread - Are They Retro Yet?

I agree with the blacks. It’s the only console I own where I always have to adjust the in-game slider to get the brightness levels right. Apart from that though I’ve been lucky although I must also agree on the poor D-pad. That thing is awful. I use a Hori Joystick for all digitally controlled games though so it doesn’t bother me that much these days.
The biggest worry I have about the 360 is my HDD dieing. I know it will happen one day. Is there a SSD solution I wonder?

I believe you can use USB storage on any 360? So you could use one two 64 or 128GB thumb drives. Depending on how much software you have, that might work.

You can use USB sticks but they are limited to 32gb each and only up to two sticks. I actually already use two 32gb sticks on the 360 for the Xbox live stuff.

You can use up to 2tb with xbox 360. It’s just the windows formatter refuses to go above 32gb for fat32 so you need to use a different tool.

I currently have all my download games running off a 200gb microsd card in a tiny usb adapter.

Wait, you can run 360 games off a microsd card?=O

Wow, really? I never knew that. I have a class 10 64gb SD card sitting here doing nothing because it was too slow for 4k video recording. What formatting tool do you recommend?

This is news to me too. figured it was only modded consoles that could do that. This is a cheap fix to get a used hdd-less console and add an HDD to it.

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I only had time to play the tutorial mode of Tokyo Jungle last night but it seems interesting. I wish you could rotate the camera though. I keep jumping trying to rotate the camera (jumping is the right analog stick). It’s super cheap for a disc version (basically a download key), with Fat Princess, Sound Shapes, and When Vikings Attack right now too. I haven’t checked them out yet.


Hot take: Resonance of Fate battle gameplay is the most impressive looking boring gameplay: make triangle, run, jump, scratch damage, direct (?) damage, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. I picked it up years ago after everyone on gaf kept going on about it. I still see it recommended frequently on era as well with the remaster out. It’s so boring.

Looks like Microsoft have updated the USB situation on the 360 without telling anyone. You can now use up to 2TB USB sticks and be able to use 2 of them. So that’s 4TB of. Storage. That’s well enough.

https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox-360/accessories/using-usb-flash-drive

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That’s awesome

They did this a few years ago. It didn’t really make a splash cause the XB1 was already out.

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This makes it really easy to pick up a cheap late model console and not have to worry about the HDD size.

But at this point if I ever got another MS box I would just get the X for the killer BC options.

It’s nice for download games but a few things don’t work with usb storage.

Some games that have installs specifically check for the hard drive, mostly older stuff like the Oblivion expansion packs. You don’t get Xbox original backwards compatibility if you care about that.

it was a solid, elongated gen and please believe i am just waiting for when gamestop finally dumps their stock for both libraries - i got so many ps2 and GC greats for less than a dollar each yeas back when they did it last time

I’ve been repurchasing some multiplatform games I had on PS3 after getting a 360 two months back and the improvements in some case are pretty massive. Like Armored Core 4: both versions run at 60 FPS, but while a lot of the missions chugs like it’s a 3DO game on PS3, on the 360 it’s pretty much smooth all the way through. Or Iron Man (yeah I like that game, shut up), which is 30 FPS on PS3 but 60 FPS on 360!

Well said. Xbox 360 was ultimately the better console in my humble opinion, despite its flaws. The worst part about the PS3 was the lack of a modern resolution scaler. That means it has a bigger chance of input lagging and looking jaggier on your display than an Xbox 360 port of the same game, even if those games are otherwise at complete parity. I have no idea how Sony - the kings of image processing - managed to so completely fuck this up and never even rectify it in hardware revisions.

Even when 3rd party developers figured out how to squeeze the PS3 architecture to get it at parity (or better than parity) with the Xbox 360, the Xbox 360 versions of the games are still the way to go in my humble opinion. Not only do you eliminate the potential for input lag, but you also may have the ability to run the same game at better specs on Xbox One X, and have greater assurance against the game being taken offline.

Sony just kills online functionality in their games far more often than Microsoft does. And it’s a shame for the retro scene.

On the other hand, PS3 is a much better media player. And my Super Slim is whisper quiet when no disc is inserted. And it has a better controller (subjectiveky) for all non-shooter type games. And it has a more diverse library of 1st and 2nd party games (subjectively) when all is said and done. So yea, I need both.

That said, the Wii was still the console I enjoyed most that gen. It had none of the above, its games were taken offline earliest, and its graphics and 3rd party support are the poorest. And yet, for that console, none of it mattered. Motion controls were so killer in games that used them well. And Nintendo made that hardware sing on SD and ED native sets. It’s the console that made me realize that tech doesn’t matter all that much in the end of the day. And if it weren’t for the Wii’s lack of graphical emphasis, I may never have even learned to appreciate retro games/hardware as much as I do.

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I’d like to see some numbers to back that up.

From my experience the scaler in my TV going from 720p or 1080p to 4k is very, very quick, with 720p in particular looking quite nice due to the simple 3x scale.

It totally depends on the set. My 1080p HDTV (a several-year-old Sony KDL) is slower at sub-native games. I can personally feel the difference. But most sets should be fine.

Here’s a list of modern sets in how much they lag on various resolutions/modes. As you can see, there are differences, although usually negligible:

For example, the Sony X900F in that list processes 1080p at 40.9 ms and 4k at 24.2 ms.

Most other sets have a far smaller disparity. So ymmv. Some of Sony HDTV’s are the biggest offenders here. Ironic considering that they didn’t include a scaler in the PS3 and the PS4 slim can’t scale to 4k iirc.

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Most of 4K TVs seem to have a disparity between sub-1ms to single digit ms between 1080p and 4k. Weird that Sony’s so bad a this.

Definitely agree on the Wii. Still a very underrated console, and it proved how little hardware mean in the grand scheme of things. My favorite modern console.