HANDS ON GUIDE

Online gaming

The 360's online service, Xbox Live, is considered its crowning glory. Your Gamercard records the games you've played most recently, along with your Gamerscore. Every 360 game has a certain number of achievements that yield a number of points. In Call of Duty 4, these are based around completing the missions, but in other games, the achievments are more creative. Guitar Hero 3 has one called Tone Deaf, which you get for 'beating any song on expert difficulty with the game's sound turned down to zero'. Xbox Live tracks your progress, and your friends' progress, so in Geometry Wars, for instance, you can see a leaderboard with your friends' scores. When your friends are online, you're notified. You can chat with people using the headset, or send audio, video or text messages, and it's easy to send invitations to friends to play specific games. However, in some games, this requires a subscription to the premium, Gold version of Xbox Live, which costs £39.99 a year. As well as better friend management (a chillingly Orwellian phrase), the ability to be matched to other players based on skill, Gold gives you early access to demos content. This meant that until we paid for Gold, we couldn't get hold of the new Burnout Paradise demo - until we switched on the PS3, that is, as Sony doesn't charge for online services.

While PS3 owners may gloat at this, it's a good job Sony doesn't charge, as it does a lot less. Some players have complained that the quality of the PS3 online is patchy; while Microsoft runs all the Xbox Live servers, Sony requires each game company to support their own games' servers. We didn't have any reliability problems though, with only one dropped game in a month. Technical issues aside, in terms of features, the PS3's online mode seems half-finished. Sony has admitted as much, as it's working on a Second Life-style 3D community exploration program called Home. For now, there's only a rudimentary friends list that shows whether or not they're playing a game, and simple text and voice messaging.

The Wii features a Nintendo-organised online experience that's consciously simpler and more limited than what Xbox Live sets out to do. The use of friend codes can be a pain, but if you want to play online against your real-life friends, swapping codes with them is fairly easy. Wii multiplayer allowed us to easily hook up and play Guitar Hero 3 in co-op mode online.

Again, we were more interested to see how the consoles compared with the PC than with each other. Little of what we've described so far will strike PC players as revolutionary, although in part, this is because the PC's best online gaming service, Steam, takes some design cues from Xbox Live. Skype and Teamspeak make chatting easy, while for sending messages, there's email, forums, MSN, Facebook - hundreds of choices, in fact. Many games feature their own communication systems and server browsers, but while the PC's flexibility is its strength, its lack of unity is also a problem. By default, Vista includes only MSN, so keeping every piece of software up-to-date can be very time-consuming, not to mention the piles of log-ins required.

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