360 Brilliant & Crappy

Something really well executed by Microsoft is the XBOX Live Service. It's really a well designed portal to a ton of content for the 360.

Playable game demo's, Videos, Songs, Movie Trailers, Downloadable games, etc, it totally dwarfs Sony's offering. Of course, this is due to the headstart that Microsoft enjoys in the next-gen console market, but even so, it really is a huge positive. You can download and play most games on the shelves in stores today and evaluate them before buying the retail game. Considering that the game are averaging R500 a pop, its useful. Of course downloading 500 meg or 1 gig demo's in SA is just a not feasible with our capped & slow internet, so I took my xbox to a friends office where they have an uncapped Internet line which is unused over weekends. I hooked up the Xbox, got an Ip address and was stunned to find out that it did not support proxy servers. For this stupid lack of functionality to exist almost 2 years after the console launch is unforgivable. I can't believe that you can't do this. It made the whole exercise of carting my xbox around a waste of time and effort.

On the other hand, I am happy to report that the PS3 will HAPPILY work with a proxy server and even supports authentication over proxy. When you consider that the PS3 also ships with wireless support with several authentication and security protocols built-in, you realise that its not a bad system when it comes to networking.

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