Which PlayStation 3 To Buy?

Much to my disbelief, the amount of money I've earned for the PlayStation 3 goes up just about every day. I'm already to $163.70 after just over two weeks worth of work. Not bad at all. If I can keep up this pace, I'll be playing Resistance: Fall of Man by the end of September.

Of course, that's because I've decided to get the 60GB version of the PS3 over the 80GB one. Why did I do that? Believe it or not, the reason isn't the price. If I can make $500 plus tax online, I can surely come up with the other $100 I'd need. The real reason is because I want a PlayStation 3 that comes with the Emotion Engine chip.

What's the big deal with this chip? The EE chip is what allows hardware based backwards compatibility. With the 80GB PS3s, Sony removed the chip and implemented software based emulation for backwards compatibility. But still, what's the big deal? Simply put, with the EE chip, every PS2 game I want to play with play just fine (in theory). Without it, I have to hope that the software emulator that has been built for this particular game is a decent one.

Basically, the XBox 360 uses software based backwards compatibility. They really didn't have any choice since they switch processors types (Intel vs. Power PC) and graphics manufacturers (NVidia vs ATI). I haven't had many problems with this on my XBox 360, but all of my old XBox games still don't play on the 360. That's why hardware based compatibility is so cool.