Do you use your console to its full potential?

[The Curmudgeon]

Remember in the good old days when a games console was just that? A console that you played games on? Those were simpler times; if you wanted to listen to music, you put a CD on your CD player. If you wanted to take pictures, you took them with a camera and put the photos in a book. And if you wanted to send torturous, tedious messages to one and other, well, hell - that's what that new-fangled internet was for.

Until now. Now, your PS3, your Wii and your 360 all want to do pretty much everything for you. Store and listen to music - on your console. Store your pics, send messages, go online, make breakfast - all on your console.

The thing is, I don't do ANY of these things. I'm still pretty much the guy from the first paragraph. I don't want to put music on my games console. Why the fuck would I? Or pictures. Or any of the other hundred and twenty nine things it can do. I just want to play games on the damn thing.

And yet, when I scroll down the menu's that I've never used, and look at the sheer scope that my PS3 has, with the volume of things it's primed and ready for that I just never attempt, I feel like I'm somehow wasting the machine.

So is it just me? Does anyone else use their next-gen consoles as multi-task machines? Or do you just play games on it as God intended?

[trashcanman]

You can put music on your consoles and create custom soundtracks for your games. I used to do this a lot. For example, the UFC game has fucking Hollywood Undead on it's soundtrack. I will not listen to that shit 100 more times. I have a playlist entitled "music for killing stuff". I put that baby on and it's Slipknot, Slayer, Ministry, and all the shit I actually like instead. I can stream HD Netflix on my 360 and I occasionally do, plus downloading and playing free demos from Xbox Live is hours of frugal fun and a good way to see if certain games are good enough to buy. Plus, it's nice to have a back-up DVD player. You don't buy blu-ray discs to play on your PS3? All this stuff is just bells and whistles, but it's cool to have them there if I want them.