Online Play: Which Is Better?

Hello gamers,
I was thinking of doing a review of Transformer for the Wii, but I wanted to take a little more time with playing before I do. In that case, I will share what I think about the 360’s online game play VS the Wii’s online game play. After I’ve played both systems online games for a while now, I believe it’s time to give the good and bad for each.

Communication:
With the Wii, you don’t get a lot of options with how you talk to your friends. In fact, the only way you can really talk to them is by sending a pre-written response that isn’t always going to really work in the situation. For example, when playing Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 on the Wii, when you and a teammate are sneaking up on an enemy, you don’t really know what the other teammate is doing. You can say “Enemy spotted”, but that doesn’t help any if you can’t tell them where he is. Or if you die and the other player doesn’t know, what are you going to be able to do? Sure, you could send a message that says “retreat”, but a lot of gamers send random messages and the person probably won’t listen to it. All of that to say that Nintendo needs to add some sort of voice communication, or typing communication so that we can enjoy playing with friends online. As for the 360, I think they pretty much did a perfect job of being able to talk to your friends online. If I had one complaint, it would be that they needed to add group chat instead of just talking to one person in a chat. Overall, the 360 is the champ for communication.

Benefits:
As for benefits, I believe the Wii did a great job. What I mean by benefits is what the system offers for online play or downloads for your system. With the Wii, Nintendo added some great channels that allow you to send Mii’s, preview games, download games and even store photos. Not only that, it’s completely free! No outrageous fees for something that should be free or a very low price. As for the 360, it may have some great things download wise, but the price and the lack of things to download makes it very low with benefits compared to the Wii. First of all, everything worth downloading has a price. Weather it be a map for a game, or a gamer picture, you need to shell out some cash in order to fully enjoy the entire experience of the Xbox Live Gold Membership. Sure, sometimes the maps can become free after a couple of months, but by that time you could already be out of time on your Membership, which can add up quite quickly. That’s one other thing that bothers me about the 360. When you think Microsoft has enough money, they make you pay for online play when it could be free. I had the hardest time trying to get online play. For most people who own the 360, they just simply plug their Ethernet Cable into the router and play. For me, since I don’t have a router next to my 360, I had to buy a $100 wireless connection plug in order to play. Oh, and to top it all off, I had to pay another $25 for the three month Gold Membership. To me, it’s such a rip off. However, the Gamercard, which is what allows you to make your own profile with your own settings and pictures and bio, is a pretty nice little thing Microsoft let the gamers do. All in all though, I think the Wii has a much better time with benefits than the 360 does.

Setting it up:
Since I’m no tech savvy gamer, I have a hard time getting any computer thing to set up correctly. However, I found that the Wii was something really easy, set up wise, to understand (it let an idiot like me set it up). In fact, I don’t even remember having to set it up at all. The Wii kind of did it itself. Now, when it came to the 360, I had a harder time. It does let you have a little more control on how you want to set it up, but since Microsoft is a huge computer software company, they made it a little hard for me to understand. With a little time and patience, however, I got it up and running. I would say the Wii is a lot easier to set up than the 360.

Connection:
Here is a really important thing about online gaming. Not only do you have to be able to know how to set it up, you have to sometimes deal with lag (when the game has trouble connecting to a game). To be perfectly honest, the Wii handles lag a lot better than the 360. When I’m playing on the Wii, I’ve never had any really big lag problems. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because Microsoft has many more online games than Nintendo, all I know is that only Halo 3, I’ve had many problems with lag. I’m going to say that connection wise, Nintendo wins.

Overall, I think the Wii has some amazing things about online game play, and the 360 has some amazing things about its online play as well. If you’re a gamer who really cares a lot about making parties and having friends play with you all the time, I would say go with the 360. If you’re a gamer that just wants to have a little bit of time online and play some random online matches, then go with the Wii.

Well, that's all for now,

HANG TIGHT GAMERS!!