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Duking It Out for a Houseful of Smiles

PICKING out a home video game system should be easy this holiday season because for most consumers the decision ought to come down to only three choices — including one that is easily dismissed.

STANDING OUT For serious gamers, there is much to like about the Xbox 360.

If you or your loved ones are even halfway-serious gamers who want to experience world-class high-definition graphics and an online gaming service populated with millions of other players, go buy the top version of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 ($399).

On the other hand, if you do not really care about the latest graphics and want instead a riotously fun experience that can be shared by the entire family, including the nongamers who usually flee from a joystick, try to get your hands on Nintendo’s new Wii ($249).

It is really that simple. Though aimed at different markets, the 360 and the Wii provide excellent entertainment for the dollar and are each capable of filling your home with smiles for years to come.

But what about Sony’s new PlayStation 3?

By now, you have probably heard about folks who camped out for days to buy the PS3. You have heard about some of those people getting mugged while shivering in line a few weeks ago. You have heard about the four-figure prices the console has been fetching on eBay. And you may have heard, quite correctly, that it will be all but impossible for many consumers to buy one at retail for the rest of the year.

No problem. In fact, if you are anything other than a complete Sony fanboy (that’s Internet lingo for an obsessed, myopic groupie) go ahead and forget about the PlayStation 3 this year. Even if you find one, the overhyped PS3 does not deliver an entertainment experience commensurate with its cost ($599 for the top version, not including special cables to connect to a high-definition TV), and falls short of its main competition in important ways.

The big picture is that Microsoft and Sony are duking it out for dominance at the top end of the video game business while Nintendo has essentially carved out the less hard-core, more budget-sensitive swath of the market for itself. The Wii (pronounced “we”) is a mass-market entertainment device. The 360 and PS3, by contrast, are each trying to be the world’s best top-end video game system and also high-powered living room media hubs.

The big problem for Sony is that the 360 performs those functions better right now, and for less money, than the PS3. Sony may get the PS3’s act together in the future, but right now there is basically no rational reason to buy a PlayStation 3 instead of an Xbox 360.

Here are some reasons:

GAME SELECTION: 360 by a lot. There are more than 100 games currently available for the 360. The PS3 is scheduled to have fewer than two dozen games available by the end of the year, and most are available on the 360 anyway. With the notable exception of Resistance: Fall of Man, the PS3-exclusive games have been nothing to write home about.

ONLINE SERVICE: A slam-dunk for Microsoft, which is not surprising considering the two companies’ histories. Microsoft’s Xbox Live offers easily downloadable games, TV shows and full movies, not to mention one of the world’s most fervent Internet gaming communities. The PlayStation Network is slow, clunky and makes it hard to keep track of your friends online.

OVERALL EASE OF USE: 360. Incredibly, perhaps, for a Microsoft product, the 360 is intuitive and relatively easy to navigate. Just as incredible, considering Sony’s past ergonomic mastery, the PS3 feels more like a specialized computer, so get ready to break out a separate U.S.B. keyboard.

GRAPHICS: An overall tie. The PS3 has more pure silicon horsepower under the hood than the 360, but some experts say it is actually more difficult to program the PS3 because of the system’s design. The bottom line is that the same games (like the Madden NFL series) look almost identical on the two systems, and the best-looking 360-only games, like the new Gears of War, look better than anything on the PS3 at the moment.

FILM PLAYBACK: A wash. The PlayStation 3 comes out of the box ready to play Blu-ray high-definition movie discs. The 360 can play HD-DVD high-definition discs only with an add-on ($199). The top version of the 360, however, includes a separate living room-style remote control for watching those movies, while watching films on the PS3 requires using a two-handed controller. (Sony says a separate PS3 movie remote will be available soon.)

There are all kinds of questions swirling around the industry about whether Sony will stage a comeback next year, but for now the 360 is the superior machine. Most telling, perhaps, Sony has lost many of its exclusive relationships with game publishers who were once willing to make their games work only on PlayStations. Two of next year’s most-anticipated games, Grand Theft Auto IV and Assassin’s Creed, are scheduled to come out on both systems.

But what if carjackings and Crusade-era stabbings are just not your style? What if you do not want to hear about all the bells and whistles, do not want to spend as much as you would on a low-end PC and just want to have fun (with your children, possibly). In that case, the Wii is for you.

Its main innovation is a TV-remote-style controller that can merely be tilted and waved to produce in-game action, rather than having to master combinations of buttons and triggers.

The Wii comes with a collection of minigames called Wii Sports — baseball, bowling, boxing, golf and tennis — that demonstrate the appeal of the new controller masterly. (The Microsoft and Sony systems generally do not come with any games.) In Wii tennis, for example, users merely swing their arms as if holding rackets to make their characters swing on the screen. It is a system so intuitive that game-phobic adults often find themselves playing and laughing in minutes.

With two excellent systems on the market, consumers should not go wrong this holiday. Happy gaming.