Back for a E3 review

Despite me taking a sabbatical for a indefinite amount of time, I felt that I should at least comment on my thoughts from the E3 expo that happened a few weeks back. Needless to say, I was interested in what was going to happen because I hold the personal opinion that we’re nearing the ceiling in terms of graphical enhancements. Outside of facial expressions and background details, I don’t think we can get much better than what we’re at now. The only real advancements we can make is to make it easier to make these pretty graphics for the developers. That being said, it’s not come down more on innovation, gameplay and creativeness for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

And it looks like Sony and Microsoft succeeded, and Nintendo fell on its face.

Good job on Black Friday, Microsoft.

Hey Microsoft, I read your press releases on how you outsold the PS3 3:1. Meaning … X-Box sold three X-Boxes for every PS3 sold. That is quite the great feat – especially within 12 hours. But, before I really pat Microsoft on the back, I think it’s only fair to kind of pick away at what really might have happened. And I’m not talking about the rumors that Microsoft is lying about their actual sales …

I’m just going to guess that the majority of their sales on Black Friday was the X-Box Arcade. It’s a super-cheap console … even cheaper than the Wii … at $199. Not a bad deal, right? Well, it kind of losses it’s appeal after you find out that it doesn’t come with a hard drive but a 256MB memory card. So at least you can store your games. Well, then you find out that the mandatory X-Box Live Experience install eats up about … 200MB, severely crippling your space for saving games. If you have about five games, I’d argue that it’s about time to invest in either another hard drive for $100 to install or get another small memory card. Additionally, copying your music, pictures and videos to your X-Box hard drive isn’t as easy as plug-and-play. At least for music, you have to rip it from a CD instead of hooking up a storage device and just copying it over.

Meanwhile, the PS3 owner who shelled out $400 for their console is met with a 80GB hard drive that you can easily copy information to. Plus, the PSN offers a free service as well as a video store – albeit, it’s not as advanced as Microsoft’s Netflix deal. X-Box users would have to pay about $300 to get what the PS3 offers right off the bat.

So I’m saying that while Microsoft is throwing dirt in the face of PS3 by saying they outsold them by 3 to 1 – which is impressive – Microsoft probably made those sales off a cheap version of the console which really restricts the owner until they either come to terms with what very little they have or they pay more money and upgrade.

And, it’s pretty ballsy for the company to taunt their accomplishments when they themselves got outsold 2:1 by a system that’s weaker than the X-Box and more expensive, which of course is the Nintendo Wii. And this is where my aggression comes from.

I hate it when people and companies brag about things that they shouldn’t. After Microsoft threw out their boast, Nintendo could have easily said, “Hey, we outsold all these next-generation, high definition, comes-with-a-hard-drive consoles big time. We outsold Microsoft 2:1 and we obliterated the PS3 in sales.”

It’s just like when Sony said regarding the Wii, “Peh, have fun with the sucky system. The graphics are terrible, there’s no hard drive and we’re going to kick their asses … although they’ve dominated the market for the past year.” Just like Sony still brags that they’ll be the big console winner of this generation. Well, instead of saying what you’re going to do, why not just do it?

Unless you’re on top of the market, you shouldn’t try to kick dirt in the faces of your opponents. PS3’s not the king of the mountain, and neither is X-Box … the king right now is Nintendo – no matter how much it frustrates people. So it’s pretty silly for X-Box to brag about their accomplishments over the PS3 when Nintendo did the same thing to Microsoft.

Are PCs superior to consoles?

This post is a response to an article that was on Digg, 12 reasons why PC gaming is better than consoles. If you decide not to read it, then just realize that outside of a few very small points, all the reasons they give are very pro-PC. So much that it delves into extreme fanboyism. So, instead of me reviewing what they said, I’ll just explain why they are either right or – and they are for the most part – wrong.