• 14Mar 07

  The Next Generation View

  Well, now that the next generation is upon us, its time for a diehard gamer to really put their thoughts out there. First off, I have been gaming for 17 years, so I have pretty much seen and played every console from 1986 onwards as well as a few Atari systems and a Colecovision. This is an indepth analysis of all 3 consoles of this gaming generation and my overall thoughts on the situation right now.

  Nintendo Wii - having played and now an owner of this console, I can safely say that it has so much potential. Right now the games are not phenominal, Wii Sports, Wario Ware and Zelda are probably my top 3 titles for the console that I really enjoy, which isnt much sadly. The graphics on most 3rd party games is half assed and looks like some games from early last gen which is really sad that developers are not spending much time to make the games look good, this also can be applied to 3rd party games with the control mechanics. Once again developers wound up ruining the control schemes and instead rushed out games like Red Steel and Call of Duty. I can see so much potential for the Wii so long as developers bother to take the time and perfect the controls and graphics of the games.

  Sony Playstation 3 - The big kahuna of all consoles, with a pricepoint of over 600 dollars, right now I dont see a huge reason to buy it. While I intend on getting one, it will be after April, as the coming few months looks like there will be some great titles coming out, games that came out on the PC or 360 a few months ago plus a few interesting exclusives like Heavenly Sword and Lair which look good. The downside to the PS3 is that development times for games that this point are long since its a completely new learning curve for programmers. Blu Ray is going to lead next gen games in terms of quality and size, the potential for games over 100 hours in length or just pure mass in size of environments in racing games and such can be a great experience. The games are late and far few inbetween right now, however I am hopeful for the future that the PS3 will be successful.

  Xbox 360 - The 360 is a fairly decent console, however the lack of variety in terms of genres is really hard for some gamers to absorb, myself especially. Xbox Live, while a decent system, shouldnt cost people money seeing as how gamers are already spending 50+ dollars on games and the other required hardware to play the system. The 20 GB hard drive is junky, 100 dollars for a HDD that only has 20 GB's of space is pretty much a rip off seeing as how PC internal HDD's are a minimum 80 GB's and cost less then 60 dollars. The 360 seems to have reached a peak now graphics wise, which is far too early for consoles, however we shall see what happens in the future.

  Overall, all 3 consoles have potential to be great, but none of them is individually the best right now seeing as how they all really have not done anything spectacular. This gen is going to be a lot closer sales wise seeing as how most fanboys wont jump ship unless they really dont want to pay for a specific console.

  • Posted Mar 14, 2007 4:30 pm PT
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