Rant: Hardware Failure A-Go-Go

Last week my 360's DVD drive died on me. Just stopped reading discs overnight. And yeah, I'm out of warranty. I had two options: buy a new one, or send it off to MS, pay them $99, and wait god knows how long to get my system back. I was in the middle of a Mass Effect binge, and didn't much feel like waiting months to get my system back, so, I bought a new Arcade system. That ran me $279, $219 counting the $60 Gamestop gave me for a broken system.

So, I get this new system home, but the controller that came with it won't charge with my play and charge kit. I get Gamestop to replace it, and the new one is working fine.

While my 360 playing was on hiatus, however, I picked up Warhawk for the PS3. The first PS3 title since Uncharted that seems to be worth a damn. I'm actually having fun playing (despite the fact that I can't seem to join a competent team to save my life. FLAG DEFENSE, you silly fuckers)
when, lo and behold...

My PS3 shuts itself off randomly. Yeah. Just turns itself off. I figure it was probably a fluke. But it's happened 4 times now, always while playing Warhawk. My god damn ridiculously expensive "lol, Xbox has RROD lol" PS3 is BORKED. And it's borked when I FINALLY was starting to feel good about it as a game platform. The irony is not lost on me.

Alas, I bought it more than 30 days ago, so I can't take it back to the store. I knew there was a reason I should have waited until there were some games out for it. If there had actually been any titles to play on it, I would have realized this system had a major hardware issue before the two month mark. I tried calling Sony, but their hotline just said "yeah, call back another time."
This was at 10am on a Saturday. This not a good sign.

I've heard both good and bad things about Sony's hardware replacement. From Sony fanboys, I've heard you get your new system so fast it'll be there before you realize your old one is broken. I've also heard a horror story from a non-partisan sounding type. Sony told him they couldn't repair his system, because it was too dusty. Yeah. I guess we'll see.

While I'm on the subject of the PS3... no, I'm sorry, it's just not a better system than the 360 in any way. Not from my experience, in any case. It's game selection is inferior. It's online system, is a pale imitation of Xbox Live. And yes, fanboys, it's free. But I guess you get what you pay for.
You can do pretty much everything that Live let's you do... download games and demos (what few there are), talk to friends, buddy lists, a rudimentary email system, all that good stuff. But that's where it starts to break down. What you CAN'T do on the PS3 really stands out.
You can't, for example, see if your friends are online while playing a game. The PS3 neither alerts you to them coming online, nor allows you to see who's online without backing out to the main PS3 screen. Once you're in the game, you're locked in. Sony seems to have left it up to the developers to implement functions like friends lists, and etc in their game. Yeah, good move, jackasses.

Frankly, in the department of communicating with your friends and setting up a game, the 360 kills the PS3. Maybe I've been spoiled by the 360, maybe I'm expecting too much.

Oh, wait, no I'm not. The thing cost me $600. Everyone and their brother keeps telling me it's BETTER. Well, hey, guess what? It's not. Maybe next year, it will be, but right now, the PS3 SUCKS. And it wouldn't suck if it didn't cost so much damn money. If it was about the same price, it just wouldn't be as good. But to be less useful and more expensive? There's no other word for that than sucks.