I have no racing wheel or anything of the like. Are these games available under both platforms? If so, is there any image quality difference between the two?
As mentioned before, GT5 Prologue, WipeOut and MotorStorm 2 are PS3 exclusives. GT5 Prologue and MotorStorm 2 are some of the best looking games ever, I think.
For the multiplatform games, Burnout looks a tiny bit better on PS3, but it's practically a wash. The other games tend to look slightly better on 360 or have slightly better framerates, but in the case of the games mentioned the differences are fairly small.
It's true that there are many more racing games (Dirt, Sega Rally, etc.), but this is why I stuck with mentioning this years titles. Forza was pretty good when it was released, and you may still like it - it's a pretty competent game, but it felt flawed to me and it looks dated now. I basically bought the 360 for this game but was disappointed. PGR4 is a very good game, although for me ruined by the Motorbikes and the HDR being dropped (I loved that effect in PGR3, but that game looks crap these days otherwise because it is so heavily upscaled).
I've been a serious Q3 player for a long time, and I enjoy Crysis and the like on the PC, but have no time to play at the office where my powerfull setup is. From your post it seemed the X360 might be a better choice for FPS. Are any of the good games (from what I've heard) like Gears of War or Call of Duty available for the PS3?
It sounds to me you might even enjoy Far Cry 2 more than either of those. Call of Duty 4 (and 5) are available on both platform and runs well on both systems. Gears of War is only available on the 360, but it's not really a first person shooter, but a third person shooter. In this genre, the PS3 has an absolutely beautiful game (as patsu mentioned) called Uncharted, which I think probably has some of the best ever graphics, but which also has a look and feel that is more suitable to most female audiences - it has a very good and well presented story. Gears of War has very good co-op play, but that's only going to benefit you if you think your wife can stand its violent machisma (or if you will play the game without her
- but I hated the game myself, whereas I finished Uncharted and look forward to part 2 - but in the English speaking world, I'm very likely to be in the minority). Both the first Gears of War and Uncharted are available as budget titles now, Gears of War 2 has just been released and Uncharted 2 has just been announced.
I only plan on using online if the service is really good, but perhaps more oriented to the extra content rather than multiplayer, as I know that requires time to get into it, and I don't have much.
People will sometimes claim that the 360 has a better online service, but this strongly depends on individual games. Despite being a payed for service, most exclusive 360 games still rely fully on p2p networking, where the big PS3 titles all support server based hosting, often next to client side hosting, and often also have good UPNP support. Examples are Warhawk, supporting lag-free 32 player games with plenty of Sony provided servers available as well as excellent client side hosting. Resistance is another example, where the first game supported lag-free 40 player games from Sony servers, and Resistance 2 even up to 60 players. GT5 Prologue also supports 16 cars server side hosting, but in all fairness doesn't support custom games yet. On the other hand, using Forza 2 and PGR was a big hassle on the 360 for me because they require the correct ports to be open to connect with all players in the online game, which is also limited to only 8 cars. When I bought the 360 I expected a lot more than that from a pay-for service, and I was very disappointed.
This is not to say that this is typical - PSN has a worse reputation for online gaming particularly because early third party games had worse online support in general, and to this day often stuff like managing your friends isn't nearly as fully featured and coherent as it is on the 360. But other than that, there are few problems left, and as said for first party games, online support on the PS3 is generally excellent.
I will not be able to use it a lot (work+university really doesn't leave that much time left), so I want it to be simple to use, and a long-term inversion.
If you mean long-time investment, then I think the PS3 will pay off certainly. You will be able to go online always without worrying about your Live subcription and the longer you use the PS3, the more the annual fee counts (I've been a Live member for 5 years now, and it has cost me 300 euros).
I have a very good 5.1 sound system, I would like to get the most of it with the console through a digital out to my A/V receiver
Both systems have excellent sound, but the PS3 definitely has the edge here, both because BluRay allows games more space for sound (you see this also in language options on disc - some games support many combinations of spoken language and subtitles), and because the sound output system seems to be slightly better and supports more options. You also need a special cable on the 360 to allow for digital out in the first place. And of course, the PS3 is and has always been quieter than the 360, which is important if sound means something to you other than just putting it up really, really loud. Also, several PS3 games have groundbreaking sound quality (MGS4, Uncharted, most Insomniac titles) with up to and including 7.1 support.
Could someone expand a little bit on this? I'm not too familiar with these services.
The NXE is the new version of the 360's user interface. It rearranged the user interface of the system in a bit more flexible manner, and offers more options for customisation, avatars, and the option to install all (except 2-3) of your 360 games onto the harddrive. For most games this helps a bit with load-times and it definitely helps bringing the noise that the 360 makes down a bit.
If the Euro value you meantion below means you live in Europe, you can forget about Netflix, but it is a popular movie content streaming service also available on PC and some other types of boxes.
Which accesories should I consider as "important"? On the same topic, is the HD so important if games are the main concern of the console (not that I'm not interested in the other features)?
I find the harddrive to be essential in both systems. Any downloadable content, software updates and full games, the hdd install options, the media features, many of them rely on the harddrive. If you think about games like Warhawk and Burnout, there are lots of feature updates (it has added new cars, bikes, day-night cycles, soon will add a whole island, etc.) that require an update of the software or the download of additional content. FPS games offer new maps for download. Music games offer songs for download (and they can amount to quite a lot, I know people with 2GB of Rock Band songs, and Singstar songs in SD quality already amount to 70MB on average because they include the full video). I probably own 30 extra downloaded songs for that game, do the math! Also you can buy several games online on both systems, some of which are really good and will fill up space on your system really quickly. On the 360, automatic caching to the harddrive happens even for games that don't require one, so without the HDD load times will suffer. And a lot of games have free downloadable demos, and a single demo can already run over 1GB.
I can imagine there will be some people who can live without a HDD on the 360, but I'm willing to bet that for nearly everyeone, the additional price of the HDD is more than worth it.
What type of information would you need? To me is very important that my girlfriend gets into the console, as it is much easier to justify 400€ well spent than 200€ in an useless box.
My wife likes the excellent DVD and BluRay playback (try watching Wall-E or Ratatouille with her, or Planet Earth), but also really likes to show off motion based games, Buzz and SingStar, and recently, she likes Home a lot too (for its social features). She also hates wires with a vengeance.
The browser counts for something too - it's not perfect, but it allows her to read her forums when in the livingroom if she can't do it in the study for some reason (our kid, or whatever). Also, the user interface is still better and more consistent in my experience - this may be personal preference though, but even the NXE I feel clutters in too much commercials, online store features and so on. The basis for the PS3 is Settings - Music - Pictures - Video - Games - Network, and that's something most people can get to grips with fairly easily. We use the picture and video options on hte PS3 to show visitors our pictures and such quite a bit, and the DNLA support to stream those off your PC or Mac is a good and useful addition as well. And she loves the PS Eye, even stupid little 'interactive screensaver' type things like Mesmerize she loves to show off to friends and family, and they are always a lot of fun, and viewing back bits of your performance in SingStar is a big laugh.
I've never had any problems with justifying the price of my PS3 to my wife as the machine gets a *lot* of extremely varied use, and bear in mind I bought the machine at launch for 599€. Depending on where you live in Europe. For me personally, the PS3 has more different games from the PC, which is for me the biggest plus - there are so many things on there totally unlike what you get on the PC.
In your position I would probably get an 80GB PS3 bundled with Singstar and MotorStorm 2 (make sure to test motion controls in this game), a second controller, and get Uncharted platinum, adding Buzz, a PS Eye and buy or rent Planet Earth (the multi disc BBC series, not the 90 minute movie), Ratatouille or Wall-E on BluRay, and make sure store owners don't rip you off on expensive HDMI cables
(you can get one for a few bucks online if you can't find it cheap in a store) and then get some of the smaller games off PSN (like Flow and the PS Eye games - including Creature Feature). That should give you an excellent basis from which you can move on, either through downloadable games or online reviews, or further recommendations on this forum. There are really many excellent smaller and bigger titles up for grabs on PSN for pleasantly small prices, some of them have demos, other don't (this is an advantage of the 360, there are always demos). I'm fairly sure you won't regret it and it will last you a long time.
