sorry for the wall of text but I am sitting in a hospital room with nothing better to do
I imagined it being narrated it in Morgan Freeman’s voice while proofreading and it enhanced the experience significantly
This is a relatively recent issue that is fairly unique to the current generation of consoles, and as such it has not been completely resolved yet.
In previous generations (especially the xbox/ps2 era) the choice of console was usually pretty clear. ps2 had more fighting games, ps2 had a larger user base, almost all the fighting game controllers and arcade sticks were made for ps2, and hardly anyone preferred the xbox controller (especially before they redesigned it). ps2 was simply the obvious choice for almost everything. The only games that were played on other systems were games that had no ps2 release or games that had a clearly superior version (Dreamcast MvC2).
When the current generation started, the community still leaned toward PS3 because it was easy to get adapters for the old PS2 gear that everyone still used and because Evo adopted a PS3 standard after a lot of free consoles were donated to them (also the 360 was at the height of its infamous failure rate issues and nobody wanted to deal with consoles dying mid-tournament)
Over time, the community opinion started to shift a bit. Many people have stated that they find the xbox version of some games to run more smoothly, and that xbox Live tends to give them better connections. It is also easier (for various reasons) in some places to round up xbox consoles for tournaments than it is to get ps3s (I think this is the case here in Indianapolis and probably the reason why T3 was on 360)
Normally this would not be a huge deal, as most tournament players use an arcade stick and can switch back and forth easily. However, there seem to be a lot more pad players around now than there used to be, especially after the recent influx of games like SF4, BlazBlue, and MvC3. In the previous console generation the player could just acquire the necessary converter and everything would be fine. Unfortunately, it’s not quite so simple now, as Microsoft has encrypted the Xbox 360 controllers so that getting them to run on another console (or vice versa) is more complicated than simply routing the button signals, and as a result converters are more expensive, harder to find, and it took a lot longer for reliable ones to appear on the market (if they even have, I don’t actually know)
that is a brief and hopefully coherent history of console/controller preference in the SRK and general fighting game community and the issues you should be aware of if you play on a stock console controller. Some people avoid this by playing on the madcatz SF4 fightpads as they are generally identical between consoles and they are relatively cheap so buying two is not a major problem.
