Planning To Late Adopt PS3 or Xbox 360 Consoles and Games? Buyer Beware!

Fanboys yelling at each other on message boards, delayed launch titles, and console shortages during Christmas. Yeah, it’s console release time. With the release of Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles, the 8^th console generation is officially here. With this comes a great time for late adopters, collectors, and cheapskates. Consoles and games from the 7^th generation are about to become very affordable, and the deals will become quite enticing, but all isn’t health packs and blue koopa shells.

The biggest concern one should have is the dependence so many titles have on online patches. This is the first instance we’ve had where some console games have needed downloadable patches to properly function. This means a percentage of titles simply won’t function correctly if at all. Also, at some point all of those titles you heard folks talking about playing online wouldn’t be possible. This isn’t unique to just consoles, but it is definitely not as easy to work around on consoles.

Another problem lies with the consoles themselves. For all intents and purposes, the 7^th console generation saw a fail rate the likes of which many modern gamers have ever seen before. The Red Ring of Death was a nightmare for the Xbox 360, with many gamers going through several consoles before giving up on Microsoft’s console. Sony had several problems of their own with Playstation 3 consoles being affected by console failure errors indicated by a yellow light. The led to a lot of console gamers either giving up completely or venturing into PC gaming. With the dependability of PC gaming and its graphics superiority (if you have the right components), More and more gamers became console expatriates.

Any gamer worth their salt knows how to find great deals on treasures they missed earlier on at the end of a console’s life. The conundrum lies in whether all the intangibles involved in dealing with online dependency of some games in this generation have made it a tough row to hoe for some. Will “retro hunting” for the 7^th generation even be as fun as it is for previous generations, or is it pretty much a bust? Maybe some of you will find great deals on collector’s editions for the price of a budget title. Will we see a sad pile of First Person Shooters and Sports games in the corner of a local Gamestop? Hopefully the need to have everything online won’t make this entire console generation landfill fodder within the next 5 years.