Playstation 2 vs Xbox

We’ve owned an Xbox for several years, and recently bought a Playstation 2, partly to play Katamari Damacy, and partly because there really aren’t many Xbox games that are good for kids under 12 or so.

Both devices have been out for years, so there’s really no point in reviewing them, but I have a couple quick impressions that I’d like to pass on. First, the newest incarnation of the PS2 is tiny. It’s about the size of a mid-sized trade paperback. It’s about as thick as my laptop, but it has under half of the footprint. Volume-wise, I think the console is smaller then two controllers, the power brick, and the video cable. Compared to the PS2, the Xbox is huge–it takes up at least 10 times the volume of the PS2. On the other hand, the Xbox’s DVD drive is front-loading, while the new PS2’s drive is top-loading, which means that you can’t stack anything on top of it. In many ways, the PS2 is actually too small–our 2-year-old stepped on one of the controller wires and sent the PS2 flying out of our entertainment center. The Xbox just won’t do that.

All in all, I think I like the Xbox’s hardware (especially the controllers) better, but the PS2 is a nice addition to the household. I’m looking forward to playing some of the more interesting games that haven’t made it to the Xbox, once I finish with Katamari.

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:02:00 GMT

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Comments

  1. Bryce about 8 hours later:

    The break-away cables on the Xbox controllers are pure genius. Get the Logitech wireless controllers for the PS2, they neatly solve the flying PS2 problem and are much better than the stock DualShocks.

  2. Bud 4 months later:

    It’s better for the PS2 to fly out of an entertainment center than an Xbox maiming a small child (sometimes those breakaway cables don’t work to a full advantage I’d know :)

  3. Bill 8 months later:

    The Xbox hardware is not superior to the PS2 hardware - it’s just easier to program for. The Xbox’s CPU is basically a slow Celeron 733, and they’ve got a Nvidia Geforce3 for the GPU. The PS2 however has a 300 MHz Emotion Engine capable of 6.2 GFLOPS (8x that of the Celeron 733) and the Graphics Synthesiser (GPU) has 16 pipelines vs the Nvida’s 4.

    Technically, the PS2 has more power. Programmers, save for a few, just aren’t smart enough to program.

  4. jeff 11 months later:

    about the ps2 having more power i dont know what kind of drugs you are doing cause last time i checked all the games on xbox that ps2 have have alot better graphics then the ps2