Hi,

After about a year and half posting every so often I've decided to try my hand at blogging on my own. No specific reason really. Just a bunch of things added up until I wasI decided to move on. First I loved gamespot's old reviews system as it was accurate and informing, but it was done away with in favor of something the advertisers wanted. Then they changed the blog editor and this thing is horrendous. I understand the need for a profanity censor, but the one used here is retardly buggy. This site is slow to get news, as I was looking up topics to cover I found that the crap that hits gamespots front page is a couple of days old else where on the net. Finally I wanted to try to monetize my effort rather than helping a site that fires employees because they tell the truth. Anyway check me out on my new blog over at www.hornymelon.com

Don't forget to try out these two videogame social book marking sites www.N4G.com and www.gamehuddle.com. Thanks to everyone that would come here to read my posts.

Good thing I don't have a job meeting deadlines, cause damn......this ones late.

Run up to the Wii:

After the Gamecube nintendo was in trouble. It placed 3rd two console wars in a row. This can be attributed to several things. Bad hardware choices, lack of third party support, lack of quality first party titles, lack of games in general, etc. Nintendo knew it wasn't going to be able to keep up with Sony and Microsoft in the hardware war. It had to do something new not so much for the desire to do something new, but to find another way to compete. Nintendo has always been into weird control schemes, from the robot that shipped with the original NES, to the power glove, to the U-Force, etc. For nintendo to include the Wii remote is nothing that surprising.

One stream of money nintendo was making (not sure if anyone else noticed) was of licensing thier games out to the 150 in 1 cheap console makers......c'mon everyone's seen them. Kiosks in the mall....maybe on the boardwalk at a beach somewhere. It's been going on for a while and I'm sure nintendo has been making a decent chunk of change. In fact I think that the virtual console was the biggest feature nintendo wanted to put into the Wii aside from the controller.

Nintendo decided that they would go after the casual player. This is mostly due to the popularity of the DS and titles like Nintendogs, brain training games, etc. With the virtual console they'd also be able to snag the legacy gamer. The guys and girls that want to play old favorites ranging from pac-man to Mario64.

The launch:

Wii's disappeared instantly and were going for as high as $1000 on ebay. At $250 during christmas it was practically an impulse buy. The last gen consoles were showing thier age and for the same price as a PS2 you could have something new and different. For parents it was a must have gift for little johnny and susie. Hey it's better to buy the brats...errr children a $250 console they're begging for now, so you can shoot them down when they ask for the $600 ps3.

Reguardless Nintendo hit a homerun (in fact the ball still hasn't landed yet). The system had innovative remote, could play last gen games, and also had virtual console for older titles. Many publishers and developers decided to skip on the Wii and got caught with thier pants down. I imagine because of the consoles lack of power and the gimmicky control scheme.

A year later:

A year later and the console is still selling strong. It's been hard finding it through the year and has been another must have gift for a second christmas in a row. It has over taken the 360's hardware units shipped. In fact Nintendo has sold itself short a projected 1.6 billion dollars because of it's inability to meet demand. However it hasn't been without it's problems.

Nintendo seems to be having a few hardware regrets like microsoft. Nothing major but I've read a couple of articles stating that the Nintendo should have had HD resolution. Another problem has cropped up for nintendo....crappy 3rd party support. Once again there is a nintendo console out that lacks quality titles. Since the console sells well it also has some good selling titles Mario Galaxy comes to mind as does Cooking Mama. But there is almost a total lack of quality titles that would intrest the gamer enthusiast. My Wii has been waiting here for a new game since launch..........sure I bought some older titles on the virtual console, but I have yet to walk into a store and buy a game. my girlfriend picked up Resident Evil chronicles, rampage, DDR and Dewy's adventur. While these titles range from cute to cool there is just nothing compelling out right now.

Nintendos score as it stands:

For 08 there are a couple must haves comming out Mariokart being but one. We will also see if Nintendo improves third party relations (not likely )Being that it makes money off of every console sold, is good for nintendo. If it were to die right now Nintendo would be no worse off for it. If it has another year like 2007 when it comes to quality games it just might However Nintendo isn't going to be able to ride the wave as long as the 360 and PS3. While Nintendo is probably already working on it's next console I doubt we will hear anything about it until the Wii starts doing poorly.

This was suppose to be a threee part series leading up to the new year......but it didn't work out that way. I decided to be unproffesional and go have fun instead...riggghht.

Run up to the release of the PS3:

If anybody remembers correctly Sony began talking about the PS3 the same time Microsoft began talking about their next console. Sony had originaly expected it to be released in 2007. As Sony began spec-ing the system Microsoft replied with many "us too" specs. Two I specificly remember is the multicore proccessor the second the HD content. Microsoft announced thier console 2 years before the PS3 release. While Sony knew that Microsoft had essentially bought it's way into the console market...it did have a fan base and the wildly popular Halo. Sony fast tracked the PS3 shaving a year off it's intended release.

The origional PS3 was going to have all kinds of features....audio outs, two HDMI ports for two player gaming, memory card slots, the works. As cost creep began they started shaving off features. The one they ended up keeping is actually the most useless. The memory card ports.....why bother. Whaterever uses the memory cards can be plugged into a USB jack.....if they were going to keep any of those features it should have been the audio outputs. Running two HDTVs would have been cool but I don't think it was realistic. Sony claimed the CELL was extremely powerful and aparently it is.....we'll see if it outpaces the 360 or not. I remember Sony stating that the PS3 would have the CELL running everything and have 8 PPU's...then Sony added a graphics chip and shaves off a PPU.

Sony was indeed caught with thier pants down when Microsoft gave the 360 a release date two years before the release of the PS3. There's a couple things that makes me positive the PS3 was shoved out the door early.....the lack of quality titles. There was not an origional quality PS3 title from launch to the following september. The other thing is how the developers responded to the PS3 it seems like Sony had just created this amazing ppiece of hardware but had none of the tools developed for it.

The Launch:

The PS3 launched at an outragouse $599 for the 60gig and $499 for the...uhhh I think a 20gig. I was an idiot and bought one...In the end I'm glad because I got hardware emulation for old titles. It also launched with only one real decent title........Resistance fall of man.....it wouldn't be until Spiderman 3 that anything buyable came out. This was followed with Oblivion....which luckily was enough of a distraction from the lack of titles. Sony was very arrogant during launch and turned a lot of people off when it came to justifying the price This was aided by massive internet backlash and a Microsoft viral marketing campaign. Sony honestly thought they were releasing the must have piece of electronic hardware......but hit the price barrier hard.

The PS3 is the perfect example of how a piece of electronics can be on the path to Ipodness and then get derailed. The aim of a media center is to put all forms of media, media servering, progrmas, games, sound, etc into one device. The PS3 didn't do this so it isn't a media center....it's yet one more box on your shelf. Two things prevented it from becomming a single all inclusive device. It's lack of audio outputs required me to keep my reciever. It's horrendous OS was the second. My PC died and I was forced to rely on the PS3 for two months for my computer needs.......I still wake up screaming in a cold sweat. Sure the PS3 allowed linux to be installed on the system but it was slow and did not have access to the graphics chip. So the PS3 ended up not replacing my computer. And my DVD player had already been replaced by my PS2. So in the end Sony marketed to me this device that was going to replace all my media harware with one device. All it ended up doing was replacing my PS2 Comming up how Sony could have crushed Microsofts PC gamming monopoly, but paranoia prevented it.

If Sony had just made the PS3's OS linux based in the first place and came up with tools for both Linux PS3 and Linux PC it would have been on par with the 360's XNA development tools, which was one of the 360's biggest buisness selling points. This would have done more than just make porting from the PS3 to the PC cheaper. It would have crushed the microsoft pc gaming. After all what PC gamer doesn't want to drop the windows tax. Hell that's 2gig more ram or a significantly better graphics card. This was the biggest failure of Sony this console generation.

Sony had heard the statistics of how the PS2 excellerated the DVD hardware adoption. It was developing it's own optical disc technology....hell I can remember when Sony bought the Blue LED technology off of some small japanese company. I remember reading an interview of it's inventor. Anyway Sony has always tried to push it's own format. But why not look how much money CD and DVD have made for it's investors. In this Sony succeeded...it would from the get go.....anybody telling you any different was paid or fooled.

A year later:

Nothing makes me think the PS3 was rushed than it's first year....literally nothing happened with the console. Not one quality exclusive since launch, bad ports, nothing. finally around august september some decent games came out and by xmas the PS3 would have a good selection of titles under it's belt. However plenty of titles were pushed back to '08. Ps3 sales stagnated early on and Sony was forced to price cut the PS3 twice. This seems to have solved the price complaint. Sony said it's consoles were constantly selling out but it wasn't true. The console was only hard to find until after christmas and were always on the shelves.

To Sony's credit it has put out a quality machine, it's had nowhere near the hardware problems of the 360. Apparently the PS3 really is powerful...with some developers saying they've only tapped about 30% of the PS3's power...so the CELL really is all it says it is.

Sony's score as it stands:

The PS3 is finally being put in a positive light. People are beginning to see the reason behind including both a harddrive and a HD format. Developers are beginning to come around to it's hardware. There are also plenty of titles in the works for '08 many of them must have. This fact lends credit to the fact the PS3 was a year early. Imagine The PS3 being launched with a more polished Resistance, Oblivion/Shivering Isles, Orange Box, Unreal. How good would have been Lair or Heavenly sword? Then to follow up that launch with the '08 lineup...........They are already starting to say that '08 will be the year of the PS3....the bumps are past the PS3, now begins the endurance race.