Oh XMB, when will you ever grow up?

There was a time, long ago, when the XMB was much better than the dashboard. It was easier to use, everything was displayed right in front of you, and you didn't have to go hunting for what you wanted like the blades system. With the arrival of the new dashboard however, The XMB became increasingly obsolete and frustrating to use. When they finally added in game XMB to the functionality of it, PS3 fans were so overwhelmed with joy that not many people bothered to complain about how frustratingly slow it was. As Sterling said, the object was to preferably check on your trophies at a loading screen during a game, but by the time the XMB is finished loading everything your game has already finished loading.

I feel like talking about party support and cross game chat has been beaten to death and will probably only happen if people start catapulting themselves into Sony's offices worldwide, so I wont even bother to address that glaring issue. But things that I take for granted when I play my 360 are such a hassle on my PS3. I tried to play Borderlands with my friend, who had his own save file on his PS3, so I had the brilliant idea of "Oh just bring it over and we'll copy it onto my PS3" Which I had to do because XMB only supports having one person be logged in at a time. Did that work? Of course not. It thought I was trying to use that save to play over my own account, and disabled trophies and everything else. Yes I know it said that, but I thought it was for the file that was copied over. I'm not even sure when the log in feature was implemented into the 360, because I didn't even have one whenever it was put in. If it was since launch, then holy hell this is worse than I thought. When you turn on a second controller, there are no prompts to sign in (unless your playing Little Big Planet, and if they can have it in that game...) and it makes me question what the people are doing. The last update was to add facebook. Now I love publishing my stuff to facebook on PS3 much more so than the silly 360 application, but was that really what they needed to be working on at the moment?



That's not even bothering to talk about custom soundtracks. In an earlier article I talked about how being given the option was necessary whether or not it was being used, and even though its not used often, I still feel that getting some time in Borderlands with some good music can lead to a great time when you have to do the single player mode. Sony has begrudgingly applied the feature to the PS3, but they count on developers to support it. This has lead to almost no games actually using the blasted thing. Granted I have a separate problem with the 360 not being able to copy music from a USB stick, but at least they give me the option to play it during games.

Even the most basic things for the 360 are unheard of concepts on the PS3. When i'm downloading something on my 360, and I say to myself, "Gee its 3:30 am and i'm tired of this absurd chain fight of Big Daddy-Big Daddy-Big Sister another friggin Big Daddy, I want to go to go to sleep..." I turn off my system and guess what happens? The System turns off. Oh wait! No it doesn't! It's still downloading... in the background. I guess people aren't clamoring for this, but thats because we are so apathetic to getting cross game chat and a party system that nobody has time to worry about these things. The PS3 uses a lot of electricity when its on. I'd like it to use less electricity when all i'm doing is downloading something, or charging the controller. Why is this so difficult? It's 2010 now, they've had plenty of time to do this, but they've been working on things like "dynamic avatars" which have caught on like the N-Gage.

Yes, there are several things I'd like from my 360 as well. Bluetooth would be nice, and the rechargeable batteries are worse than using AA's on the Wii, and just like everyone i'd like to pay much less or none for live, but as odd as it is to say this, I feel like with the 360 my money is actually going somewhere. Yeah the console still sounds like a lawnmower when you turn it on, and sounds like a lawnmower going through a blender when you turn it on, but at least the interface functions and responds like any normal machine made within the past 10 years should. I love my PS3 and use it much more than my 360 because thats where my favorite games are, but I hope that sometime soon the XMB gets the makeover that it sorely needed 2 years ago.