Worst review EVER.
Can't even be arsed to disect it entirely, however it was pretty obvious The Reg. was incapable of fairly reviewing the 360 - the "Everything PS3" and "Everything Wii" images that have been on just about every Reg page for weeks now, without an equal "Everything 360" link demonstrate where The Reg's biases are.
The Cell is often touted as a masterpiece of hardware when the old 360 vs PS3 debate comes up, and quite honestly yes, the Cell is a masterpiece of hardware, at least, for certain applications - sadly gaming isn't one of them. Cell excels in applications where you know you're going to be using each SPU fully, constantly and for extended periods of time such as if you're doing something heavily brute force like data crunching, however whilst games do have periods of massive data processing requirements, they come in bursts and aren't predicatable. You'll end up with a lot of additional overhead dividing up data to be passed to each SPU in a game, because you need to do this frequently, whereas in say a scientific data crunching role, you can divide the data up once (because you already have the data, it wont change randomly depending on user actions as in a game) and send it on it's way in each SPU as required to be processed away. The multi-processing overhead issue is merely exagerated by the fact that not each SPU is capable of dealing with all data due to their limited role setup. The 360 has 3 cores, capable of dealing with any data, and so is much more suited to the gaming role than the PS3 when it comes to processing, 3 generic cores + one GPU is absolutely the ideal amount of processing units you need for a game. Arguably the best reason for the PS3 to have the Cell processor is for Folding@Home, it's just a shame that a games console be best suited to something other than actually playing games. As with BluRay, the reason the PS3 has Cell, is not for games, but to bring down the price of the technologies to be used elsewhere.
The comparison chart is also heavily flawed in other areas with the GPU being most prominent, I thought after the whole AMD Athlon XP vs PIII/P4 era we were well past the point of believing mhz is the only measure of how capable a piece of hardware is. It is worrying that The Reg would make such a flawed and ignorant comparison and casts serious doubt on the competence of The Reg's hardware reviews or even the reliability of their technical articles in general. It is well documented and has been demonstrated on countless occasions that the capability of the 360 GPU is far above that of the PS3's and for me that's a bitter pill to swallow, because frankly I hate ATI and much prefer nVidia - I'd never purchase or build any kinda of PC/laptop with an ATI card.
Others have covered the other points already here, specifically the controllers. It's often been noted that the lightness of the PS3 controller is actually a major disadvantage, and the reason it is so light is because of lack of rumble features. Rechargeable batteries for the 360 wireless controllers are a mere £9.99, are replaceable unlike the PS3s and also there exists a play and charge kit, which allows you to continue playing and charging at the same time using wires for £12.99.
There are a lot of good points about the review however, the plethora of top games for the 360 is a major advantage over the PS3, and this is going to become even more of an issue upto and including Christmas, the PS3's masterpieces arent out until next year for the most part. There were at least some parts of the review that went in the 360's favour, whether this was an attempt to not seem biased when you quite clearly are or not is a different question, but frankly I agree the wireless adapted not coming with the 360, or at very least with the elite is pretty stupid and furthermore, the cost of the wireless adapter is outright extortionate - there's no excuse for the cost of it. I'd argue that the cost of XBox live gold is too much for what you get, however I prefer the fact that it at least costs something over the PS3's free service if not only because it costing at least something goes a long way to keeping the riff raff out and it is a much better, much more polished service at the end of the day except for the lack of dedicated servers, which should exist for any pay-for service. Frankly, I also think the Elite should've included the HD-DVD drive.
I'm not one to write the PS3 off entirely, I'll likely get one eventually when the price drops to the sub-£300 mark, at which point I'm guessing all the decent games for it will be out too and so suggests that that would be the sweetest time to buy.
The only thing I'd ask is that The Reg in future ensures their reviews are checked over by multiple people with alternative biases and affiliations before being posted, so that we can cut through the outright inaccuracies and actually hope to get some reviews that are fair and sensible?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
