Console Wars

Once again, this generation, we have 3 videogame companies in a huge sales war. This time though I feel it is more interesting than ever because there is no CLEARLY better product.
The Wii is much less powerful graphically and has less space to work with, however it have many motion sensing abilities and a new balance board periphrial. It's being marketed to kids, casual gamers, and housewives.


Xbox360 is powerful - but uses DVDs, has a lot of storage space, good online components in xbox live, and some good exclusive content.

PS3 uses Blueray DVDs which are the highest capacity out there, it has plenty of storage space, works online well enough, is region free, can play the blueray movies and outputs 1080 graphics which are the highest definition available currently.

My white PS3 - to match the Wii, haha!

I went for the PS3 because of the blueray, the region free aspect, (I can play European, Japaneses, and American games.) Also some of my favorite series are still on PS3, such as Tekken and Metal Gear.

Recently the gaming industry went through a hiccup with E3, the big videogame expo, they cut it down in size and moved to a new location to try to make it manageable. Without going into the details it was a disaster and this year a lot of companies are not interested in going back. The videogame industry is HUGE pumping out tons of games which often beat the movie industry for money earned by the companies.

I am curious to see what happens in the future. People are saying that the wii is too limited and will die out soon, however sales are still going strong and beating out it's more powerful competators. Xbox360 is in a bit of a bind because Sony has the monopoly on HD discs with its Blueray DVD, as well as the fact that the Microsoft owned company is failing in Japan against the home team Sony.

My hope is that the Wii starts to get better 3rd party games, not just Nintendo owned properties. The controller has been proven to be good by various games and is just waiting for a masterpiece to put it all together. PS3 has had a slow start but they are getting rolling now. Once all the japanese companies like SquareEnix, which usually stay Japan focused start releasing their next gen games, I think we will see that because Japanese people don't care for Xbox360, that the number of games for PS3 will surpass Xbox and the once exclusive Xbox games will be ported to PS3. It seems likely to me, but we'll see.

Living here in Taiwan the gaming industry here hangs on the industry in japan. Most games here are just the japanese originals. Taiwanese who wish to play these games must either learn japanese or go online and download fan translated scripts to go along with it. Quite a hassle.