E3--Day One and Two

Well I missed the first day of E3. Thats what you get when you don't have broadband connection. I see Kurticus Maximus hasn't posted about it on his blog. Shame on you! Anyways, E3 has been as exciting as expected. The big news is about the consoles--Wii (the name is sort of growing on me) and the Playstation 3--have been strutting their stuff in front of the populace. The prices for the Playstation 3 are quite scary. $499 for the 20gb model and $599 for the $60 gb model. Even the promised Blu-ray capability will not save them now. Kurticus, it doesn't look good for the Playstation. When you can get the top model of the xbox 360 for $399, boasting (for all practical purposes)the same graphics, playstation 3 is going to be a hard sell.



Wii has also drawn huge amounts of attention and is the talk of the convention. There has been much talk (well at least at CUA) that this time around it isn't going to be a competition between the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the Wii. Instead it will be between the Playstation and the Xbox and many will buy a Wii on the side. Wii is great because of the ability to play old Nintendo games, the games we all grew up with and played to death ( I will take on anyone at Duck Hunt--come on Bring It!) and the other systems are great because of the ability to push the boundaries of graphics and bringing the PC and the console closer together.




If the Final Fantasy dynasty decides to branch out to other consoles (namely Xbox 360) there will not be even any competition. I was on the bandwagon with Xbox when it was only an ugly black box that had one kickass game (Halo of course). Back then Playstation 2 had many more good games than the Xbox but today the tables are turned. Xbox had the early release. Xbox has loads of great games on the market with many more on the way. Xbox has a superb OS that shows that the folks at Microsoft do know how to program. Xbox also looks better (what the hell was Playstation thinking?) and it has a perfect controller (They should come out with a wide model too--for those of us with the big hands). Sony retreated from the boomerang controller at E3 and went back to the original controller. Stealing some features from Wii isn't going to save Sony (you thought of it first right?). Xbox 360 will triumph. Now only if they can make Vista not just a buggy copy of OS X. We can only hope.

May the force be with you.