I was excited to play Fallout 3 and with good reason, in a lot of ways its incredibly awesome.  The game itself is awesome, but the PS3 port is just horrific.  I mean seriously, it is REALLY bad.  A quick rundown

  Every time a friend signs on, which is all the damn time for me, it freezes.

   The R2 and L2 button don't work half the time, you have to start and restart your controller.  Of course R2 uses the targeting system and lets you set weapon hot keys so you need it all the damn time.

   There are no trophies months after trophies were enabled.  That takes what?  10 minutes of coding time to just transfer over the achievements from the PC version?  I mean come on, how hard can it be?  a ton of other games friggin did it RETROACTIVELY even.  

   The game chugs and hicups from time to time which is really inexcusable.  I mean why in the world does their game run worse on a superior machine?  Sloppy coding in the extreme.  Kojima needs to start a community college class on PS3 programing these clowns can attend.

   It has a game stopping bug periodically within the first 20 minutes of game play.  Do they have no QA department at all?  Maybe a day one patch after all the review copies obviously had it?

   Luckily I decided to rent before I buy so I think I'll return it to Blockbuster today for store credit and download the PC version (which is 10 dollars less anyway).  Seriously though, they can rot in hell for doing such a horrific job on porting.  It's EA's Madden 08 all over again, but this time we KNOW they can do it right (the PS3 oblivion was actually superior to the 360 version in graphics, draw distance...everything).  

    I hate to say it, since i love the PS3, but get it on the PC if you can.  I downloaded it before posting this, started it up, and played a few hours, loads better if your PC is decent at all.

   Whats with all the special Ed PS3 ports?  Is the way EA now makes most of their gaming money off the PS3 (thanks largely to Europe) not enough of a carrot to get them to code right?

   The one bright point, no mandatory install and semi short load times.  Plus, obviously, the PS3 controller is a lot better then the 360 when it works (though both are inferior to the mouse/keyboard combo) and the game is awesome despite the faults.

I don't want to sound biased, but I haven't heard any big problems with the 360 version. *hides behind a rock*

    Basically what Sony did is provide a powerful scaleable system with no net.  There are very few presets and a lot of the code has to be custom.  That means no, devs can't just plug in the stuff they were using when they were making games that run on one pentiun 2 back in 1995 and expect it to work well.  Very complex processes like parallel processing need to be encompased to get good performance and a quality title.

   On the other hand the 360 is more or less like porting a game to a PC with inferior hardware (not the WORST hardware like an EeePC or something, more like what was current about 4 or 5 years ago at the high end).  The 360 was designed with that in mind in fact.  It uses the same direct X architecture and the same shortcuts that come with it.  It doesn't take a whole bunch of custom coding and there isn't a lot to dealing with the processors.

   At first it seems like MS made the right choice, but there are a few big advantages to Open GL and giving the developer more control.

   The first is that, while it makes it harder for bad code made by unskilled programing teams (back to the no net point) because you can't just slog through it and get something decent like you can with Direct X, there is a big gain to capacity and performance for those who know what they're doing.  If a dev team actually uses the full 8 processors in parallel effectively they can create graphics and game enviornments on par with much more current PCs.  A great example of this is Metal Gear solid where the 8 cores were used very effectively and the results were amazing.  It is unlikely that MGS4 is anywhere near the peak, when you have 8 processors the only real limitations is how efficient your code is.

   Another advantage is in customization.  While not having a lot of options is great for reaching a consistantly decent level of performance it is at the same time a cap on whats possible.

   Yes the PS3 being more complex does lead to some bad ports, but it also leads to games that would be more or less impossible on the 360, largely due to the more complex (and more powerful) PS3 architecture.  It's all in the developers ability level and whether they choose to get more familiar with the hardware.

   The system though, is not very good for porting things, Ill admit that freely.  It works FAR better when the PS3 is the primary console for the game since so many decisions (as to the games scale, the games code ect) are dependent on that.  Knowing MGS4 was PS3 only freed Kojima from a lot of considerations that have bogged down releases like GTA4 (limited draw distance, worse textures ect) when they decided to go multiplat.