Taking a quick look at what we know of the “next-gen” consoles now:
XBox 360: The hardware seems fine, but there’s still not enough titles out for it that appeal to me to get my interest high enough yet. MS is now just being boring instead of evil…
PlayStation 3: A number of important things were just revealed at the E3 conference: 1) They’ve ditched the ‘boomerang’ and the controller’s back to the old PS2 form, but the rumble has been replaced with gyroscopes, 2) it’ll be split into two separate versions like the 360, with the cheaper one being rather pointless and non-upgradeable (no HDMI video, wireless, or memory cards) and 3) the price is obscene, with the upper end model probably ending up around $650-700 CDN. It’s all somewhat underwhelming, so far.
Revolution: Well, it’s not the Revolution anymore. Now Nintendo is calling it the Wii, and I don’t think I’ve stopped snickering since the announcement. A stupid name won’t affect its capabilities or how fun the games are, but it’s still slightly embarrassing. The hardware is still much weaker compared to the others, but speculation is that it’ll probably at least be far cheaper. It’s also unclear if it’ll have enough interesting titles, since my DS already satisfies my Daily Recommended Allowance of Mario, but it’s supposed to be backwards compatible with the Gamecube and emulate even older systems, for a bigger library at least.
Maybe it’s just me, but between the prominent negative factors of stupid-high prices, horribly designed and uncomfortable controller options, poor title selection, and visuals-over-playability style games, I’m thinking even if I could afford one of these consoles I wouldn’t even bother.
Think I’ll go dust off my Sega Genesis. I never did finish Warriors of the Eternal Sun…
I’ll probably just do the same thing as I did with the PS2, and wait three or four years, and then pick one up at a much lower price with a wide selection of titles.
And maybe I’ll have finished off all of my PS2 games by then… :P