Here's some of my thoughts on the games you've mentioned:

- Demon's Souls - is getting a PC port fairly soon, so you won't need a console if you want to play it.
- Red Dead Redemption - overrated IMO. is fun for about 15 or so hours, until you realize just how limited the "random" world events are and you get tired of repeating the same hunting side quests. good voice acting, but lacks the anarchistic fun of other open world games.
- God of War - great combat, atrocious puzzles that completely destroy flow. interesting universe based on greek mythology. frankly, you only need to play one of these games to get all you need to get out of the series, and it should be the second one, which is on PS2.
- Gears of War - more fun in co-op. like God of War, you only need to play one of the games to really see everything the gameplay has to offer, and the first one is available on PC.
- Dragon's Dogma - I do not know what this is.

Some other games to consider buying a console for:
- Mortal Kombat - this game is absolutely brilliant. it plays a lot like MK2 and 3 and has a huge variety of modes and content. worth every penny.
- Shadow Complex - metroid-style game on XBL. it's really awesome and I tremendously enjoyed hunting down all the hidden items within the game.
- Vanquish - imagine mixing devil may cry with gears of war, and you get vanquish. has hilariously awkward japanese dialog and some absolutely brilliant speed driven gameplay. for my money, it's a far better game than all the uncharteds, gears and halos out there.

I say, make up your own mind :-P

Valkyria Chronicles on PS3, amazing game.

What? Is it not just Dark Souls that is getting ported to the PC, or are they porting both now?

Ah nevermind, I confused them haha, are they really much different anyway?

One problem is that while the PS3 has more exclusives the 3rd party games on it are generally worse versions than on Xbox. For example if you want Red Dead Redemption, which you should, the PS3 versions runs at a lower resolution with a worse framerate and more pop-in. It's up to you how much you care of course.

People always say this but if you hit wikipedia etc and actually look it up it's... about equal all told for xbox and ps3


::edit::
apparently I was wrong...
http://gematsu.com/ps3-360-exclusives
ps3 has less but more out this and last year... not unusual when a replacement is known to be in development really. Also Wikipedia ignores games that also get a PC release (excludes console exclusives)

Xbox 360's exclusives are often available on the PC as well. They're often exclusive only when it comes to consoles.

I've got a library of roughly 60 games (not counting arcade titles), and I think the only 360-exclusive games are
- Gears 1 and 2
- PGR 4
- Perfect Dark Zero
- Crackdown
- Kameo

The rest are available on either PC or PS3 as well. So, when you think about it, the percentage is not that huge. I'll bet that if I had a PS3 and 60 games, I'd have more exclusives than just 10% of my collection.

But of course, when deciding on a console, the most important thing is to see and determine which one has the most interesting games. At the time I purchased Xbox 360 (2007), I thought it had the best library. And I still do. It's just that I can often play those games on the PC as well now that I have a more powerful PC, and more often than not, Xbox 360 games are available for the PC too.

If you count XBLA titles it has a lot more than that. Also Halo and Gears are hardly the only exclusives on retail disk (Culdcept Saga and many quite good RPGs are exclusives, just as a few examples).


Here's a list of exclusives, there's probably some downloadable titles that aren't on it but it should give the OP a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_%28seventh_generation%29#Microsoft_Xbox_360
I'm thinking you don't take as much advantage of the many excellent XBLA (and indie - though those are hard to pick through) titles that are available. Also, there's some really bad-ass retail disk RPGs, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon are two of them.

Obviously, Kinect titles can be really worthwhile too, if you have one and enjoy that style of gaming.

Wii exclusives >>> all.

You know with a Kinect you could use your actual... well, nvm...:)

I'm not saying Xbox 360 doesn't have exclusives - just that PS3 and especially Wii have a lot more. The most interesting (to me) Xbox games can usually be found on the PC as well, but of course a gamer with different interests (like for example those JRPGs you mentioned) might find the Xbox the best choice in this regard.

And sure, when it comes to arcade games the 360 is top notch and many of them are exclusives in their huge library. I was only talking from a retail-point of view since that's what I assumed OP was most interested in. And naturally, there's Kinect that has lots of exclusive games, but I don't own one and most of the games for it are mediocre anyways so I didn't include it.

With all this talk of not enough exclusives on the 360, I'd just point out that two of my favourites this year so far are 360 exclusives: Trials Evolution and FEZ.

(Especially FEZ, brilliant game, but it does seem like the kind of game that, like Braid and Limbo, could be a timed exclusive and come to PC and PS3 later?)

Sure they are very similar, but it's not like you're getting the same game no matter which you pick. I'm no expert in any of them, but even if you just take a superficial look at them, there are some notable differences:

Demon's Souls has a hub area from where you go to each level. Dark Souls takes place in a more connected, seamless world.

Demon's Souls allows you to stack a huge amount of healing items, which makes hard battles much easier as long as you've got the patience to grind a bit. Dark Souls has you carry a finite amount of healing flasks, which in turn makes the game more of a challenge.

Demon's Souls has only the souls to collect. Dark Souls has humanity as well (not entirely sure how important this is - like I said, I'm not deeply into any of these).

These are just some of the differences I noticed from my brief time playing Dark Souls, coming straight from Demon's. In my experience Dark Souls was a bit harder to get into, especially due to the set amount of healing potions.

Humanity is used for a number of things. To kindle fires, which increases the amount of healing flasks you have while using that fire as your check point. Regaining humanity which allows you to summon others, be summoned or invade, be invaded. The more humanity you have the longer it takes to receive particular status effects. It increases your luck. While summoned/invading you can use humanity as a healing item (since you can't use your own flasks outside your own world). Some npc's might like it gifted to them.

I think that's everything.