Yes, you read that right. I'm a happy PS3 owner but am chaffing a bit at the lack of PS2 comparability, which would open up a number of really good games (presently intrigued by GTA: San Andraes and Bully). But buying a 360 would open up even more games (original Saints Row and Gears Of War... fuck Halo).

PS2 pro: 100 bucks and tiny.
PS2 cons: can't play X-Box exclusives.

360 pro: more games choices.
360 cons: 300 bucks, high failure rates.

Anywho, what are some of the Xbox exclusives that might tip the scales that way. Mostly I hit the FPS and sandbox games.

I wouldn't mess with a PS2 except as just a novelty because it's so cheap.

XBox 360 would be a legit addition to your gaming life. I have PS3 and Wii, so I'm used to getting exclusives from more than one system. I've considered also getting an XBox 360, but the exclusives just aren't there for me. If an XBox 360 was also a Blu-ray player, I'd probably justify getting one on that basis.

Am a bit disappointed by the number of issues I see for xbox backwards compatability (lots of freezing issues). So this would suck for any old GTA games or Dead Red Revolver.

So far Saints Row is the one exclusive that makes me want a 360. The sequel is just tons of fun.

The other alternative is buying the Windows versions of some of these games... but I'm kind of done with PC gaming.

I love my PS2. It's the only system I really play. Although truthfully, I'd probably rather own a 360 if I had the money.

Do you plan to play online at all? The Xbox is pretty awesome for that.

Also - failure rates are pretty much nonexistent with the new slim model.

Looking through the list of X-Box (original) games I'd want to play, there's really only two.

First one is GTA: San Andreas, which sounds like it has all the crazy shit I was hoping would be in GTA 4... but a couple of things caught my eye when doing a bit of research. Seems Saints Row is the first game of its kind to use GPS... and remembering what a pain in the ass it was to navigate the city in GTA 1 & 2 using the physical maps, that's close to a deal breaker. Second thing is learning that you're expected to eat right and work out, so it looks like Rockstar was already starting to throw in what I'd consider non-fun sim material.

Second one is Red Dead Revolver, the game in which Red Dead Redemption is the pseudo-sequel... and I wouldn't mind playing it, but it's by no means essential.

Which means that I can opt for the $200 version with the 4GB flash memory and no hard drive... and the various X-Box exclusives make that extra hundred dollars not too bad. Although I still need to figure out if going hard-drive less is a pain in the ass.

Not really, since you can now plug in up to 2 gb USB flash drives or partitioned hard drives for storage. Just label them for each game and use the 4 gb internal for OS stuff.

If you don't feel like swapping so much, just spend the extra $100.

Keep in mind that backward compatible xbox games can no longer be played online.

I don't know what you mean by GPS, but I feel like you're wrong by that. Vice City had a map of the city and a minimap on the HUD, and even GTA III had a minimap (although it lacked a full city map, something it really could have used), and both of those predate San Andreas.

Oh, I just looked it up, yeah GTA III and its sequels don't have GPSs, but they do have minimaps and in the case of the latter games in game maps of the city, which serve the same basic function, albeit not quite as well. Trust me, it's really not a deal breaker, totally functional and more than easy enough to use.

I've been getting a little bit more disappointment with every release of GTA since the first one. The GPS-less mini-map pretty much killed my interest in GTA III right out of the gate. But if there's one I'd like, it would probably be San Andreas... but it's no longer a game that will sway my decision one way or the other.

Well, it's on both the PS2 and XBox, and is a backwards compatible game that runs reasonably well on the 360 (so I hear), so I'm not sure why it's even in the mix in the first place.



Some games that deserve to be in the mix:

Shadow of the Colossus
Resident Evil 4
Silent Hill 2 (technically playable on 360, but pretty buggy, so I hear)

I took the 360 with the hard-drive off the table since there's really only two games I wanted to play from X-Box classic. And the 4GB flash drive version can't do X-Box emulation (since the games utilized the hard-drive so much). Neither of the two games is worth the $100 extra bucks.

Giving really serious thought the to 4GB one, which has just enough that I want to check out to warrant the $200 price tag.

Have you any thumb drives or USB hard drives you could use if necessary?

San Andreas is available for the Xbox 360 via download.
Plus GTA4 has 2 Xbox exclusive extension packs. Ditto with Saint's Row.

As far as I can tell, just did some quick Googling, neither of these things is true.

Anymore, anyway. The extra content for GTAIV was exclusive for a while, but it has since been released as DLC and as a separate disc for the PS3, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Row ... te_Warfare

OK so it's not exclusive. I remember before it came out they said it might be

Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Row ... le_content

The problem with playing Xbox games on a 360 is now that original Xbox Live is gone, you can't get the DLC anymore unless you get a Game of the Year edition or an expansion disc.

I personally would go for the PS2, it's a lot cheaper and there are precious few games on the 360 that can't be played on either the PS3 or the PS2, so it's not really worth extra few hundred bucks in your case.

Both of them are available for the 360.