MadFanboy Forum

Nevertheless, for console owners with the luxury of choosing between the two SKUs, it's got to be the PlayStation 3 game that gets the nod. Both versions have somewhat variable performance, but on the Sony platform you get a few extra FPS in taxing situations and there is some extra zing to the controls. While the disc-swapping situation on 360 is hardly a massive bother, it's annoying that there is any at all when you have the game fully installed onto HDD, and the fact this is eliminated completely with the extra storage space of the Blu-ray on PS3 can only be a good thing.

If you own both machines and are wondering which to buy, it's a tough one to call overall but in my view, the v-sync implementation has to give the PS3 version the edge.
If there's one regret about this game it comes down to the lack of a PC version. While there's no doubting the quality of what we have on console, both sets of performance analysis prove pretty conclusively that the advanced rendering techniques Platinum employs can really tax the architecture of both platforms. At times, frame-rate can be an issue. A PC port with the opportunity for a sustained 1080p60 really would be something very, very special

Almost. While on paper the disc-swapping situation might play to the PS3's advantage, the fact is that a single, momentary pause in gameplay isn't going to upset anyone: it is a complete non-issue. More relevant is the audio. Dead Space 2 is a game that benefits hugely from playing with surround sound, and while the Xbox 360's Dolby Digital mix in the game is simply wonderful, the option to play with 5.1 and 7.1 uncompressed audio with PlayStation 3 is a factor that shouldn't be overlooked. And a freebie Move-enabled Dead Space: Extraction on top of that? Yes please...

Returning to the topic at hand, the main takeaway from this piece is uniformly good news for all concerned: the two console versions are essentially identical, with just deeper gamma and some minor, additional blur differentiating the 360 release from the PS3 version which looks cleaner but seems to feature less effective anti-aliasing. From a performance and gameplay perspective, the two SKUs are mostly identical. In fact, the two console versions are perhaps too much of a match - we would have really liked the blurry, grainy FMVs to be improved for the PS3 where disc space is plentiful. The notion of low-quality FMVs on PC titles continues to rankle - why not offer higher-quality 1080p versions as downloads if publishers are having trouble crunching everything onto DVD?