Okay, so i’ve now played all of the latest consoles several times. I’m gonna have to stick to my Xbox 360. No PS3 or Wii in my immediate future. As many problems as people have had with the 360, I love mine. It works perfectly. Of course now that I’ve said that, it’ll probably break tomorrow.

I’ve excluded the Wii from the running and decided to stick with true next generation consoles here. After I saw demo after demo with cartoon-esque graphics, lack of HD support (480p doesn’t count guys), and those super gimmicky controllers, I was sure that i’d never own a Wii. Sorry Nintendo, i’d have easily tossed you another $50 or so for a better GPU. Oh, and yes, I played Wii Sports, it’s fun and all, but I rarely have people over to my house and Zelda isn’t my thing. Red Steel was an indicator that i’d never really enjoy long hours of shooters with that controller. Gears of War on the 360 reminded me of what you could do with horsepower if you’ve got a powerhouse like Epic writing code.

Between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, it boils down to a few things in my opinion.

• Price – Can anyone actually afford to get ALL of the consoles anymore? Xbox 360 Premium at $399 and PS3 at *gasp* $599, then toss in a Wii at $249? No way i’m putting out that much just to have the entire set. In the previous generation of consoles, I had a Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox. Of course, I waited until the PS2 & Xbox were all $199 each, and the DC was $99. So, for $500, I had them all. My “Gaming Experience” was top notch.
• HD media support – PS3 gives me the Blu-Ray drive. Pfffffffffffffffft. So what? I’m not buying anything HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they come out with a standard or an affordable dual mode player. No offense kids, i’ve been down the early adopter road way too many times. Xbox 360 has the addon HD-DVD drive. Not buying that either for the time being. In the end, I want to PLAY GAMES with the thing.
• 1080p support – Both consoles do it. My TV upscales everything to 1080p anyway, so I personally can’t tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p. The only reason I notice 720p is because of the bars. *Attention fanboys* Xbox 360 DOES do 1080p over the component outputs… trying to get an HDTV that does 1080p over component, that’s another story. You can thank the industry for persuading TV manufacturers into gimping their TVs to not support 1080p over anything but DVI or HDMI. There is enough bandwidth to run 1080p over component outputs. It’s just not digital.
• Controllers – The PS3 controller has motion sensing… but no rumble? What the? Yes yes, I know. Sony and Immersion. I recently heard that they settled that and will be giving us a new controller with rumble. Thanks for not listening to what the customers really want and being bitchy about a few million bones to Immersion. Hint to Sony… JUST PAY THEM OFF! YOU MADE ENOUGH FROM PS1 and PS2… GET OVER IT AND GIVE ME MY RUMBLE. In the Microsoft arena, it’s more of the same, but somebody in Redmond listened. The controller is better sized this time, has better button placement, and it’s wireless! I love the wireless guys, it works quite well. Not to mention, being able to turn the console on and off from the controller ROCKS. Thanks again guys.
• Titles – In the glory days of the PS2, the other 3 (DC, GC, Xbox) competing consoles couldn’t keep up with the exclusive title rampage that was the PS2. Looks like those days are over. I think Sony just learned a hard lesson here. The cell is neat and all if I want to do Folding@Home or run a crazy Linux machine, but most people really don’t give a crap. I already have a Linux machine! (with a lot more peripherals I might add) I want to PLAY GAMES. I need titles to do that. Come back to me in a year when you’ve got the titles that the Xbox 360 has and then we’ll talk. Oh, and drop that price some too. $599 and you’re still losing money on each console sold? That’s got to be hurting right now. What the hell though… right? All of these years of proprietary formats must have paid off by now…. right? Betamax! No wait, that didn’t work. Mini-Disc! Nope… UMD! Oh crap, another flop. Well, hopefully somebody saved all of that cash from the millions and millions of PS1 and PS2 consoles that were sold.
• Online – MS continues to impress me with their improvements to Xbox Live for the 360. It’s so different from the old days. I’m very happy with it as it stands now and look forward to the next upgrade. Not to mention, it seems like every time I hit the marketplace, there’s more and more there for me to download. I love that.

Long live Xbox 360. Now let’s see if Sony can pull a rabbit out of their hat and give us what we want next time. It certainly appears as those Nintendo and Microsoft figured something out after their last attempts.

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