I used to own a Wii, and I was quite happy with the purchase until Nintendo jumped off its own wagon and started its resell campaign. Remember when the Wii first came out? The promise of 1:1 control over your games, manipulated by the physical motion? Well, it took a few years before they began to repackage that one to sell us all over again. The first batch of games weren't all that impressive, either. Zelda was essentially a GameCube release plus motion control, and neither Metroid Prime 3 and Super Smash Bros.: Brawl offered a definitive leap beyond what already existed in the franchises. Super Mario Galaxy was fun, and to the N's credit, that's what it should be about. However, something was severely missing from the equasion.
This year's E3, the entire purpose behind starting the blog, was a complete loss for Nintendo. They didn't offer up anything new on the interactivity front and they allowed each of their competitors with more powerful systems to announce the same thing, if not better, than what Nintendo's entire selling point was. Sure, they brought out the new Metroid, but that only went to show that they needed another developer to handle their own franchise to keep themselves relevant. I was not excited for Super Mario Galaxy 2 in the least, because that was probably the only true-Nintendo announcement that promised anything new. While we've seen it work in the past, for some reason this new Mario game didn't work the same magic that it used to. It used to be, "we're having a lazy here, so here's a new Mario!" and it would work every time. This time, not so much.
Even delving into what was coming up for the system, I was hard pressed to find anything that would provide enough Viagra for the Wii to keep it relevant. They didn't make any third-party coups, which is something Microsoft seems to be doing every other month, and the best I could come up with is that they were getting No More Heroes 2 and The Conduit, both titles should make you roll your eyes more than anything. The Conduit looks like any other shooter out there, and a boring one at that, but it seemed to be a game that got the control scheme right. Beyond that, I play five-year-old PC shooters that look better than that. The announcement of No More Heroes 2 was immediately followed by this little gem by series creator Goichi Suda, which basically says, "we're so ditching the Wii after this game". Ouch.
So I jumped off the train immediately, and that's saying something, since I managed to get through this without wanting to shoot the system through a cannon in the direction of Redmond.
Enter the PS3.
Don't get me wrong, I was quite aware that Microsoft's console had better variety than this brick of a system, but at least it is a brick in the noun sense, as in "my PS3 looks like a brick" rather than a verb, as in "my Xbox 360 likes to brick itself".
It makes sense to buy into Sony now, or at least when their rumored price drop happens, because the system is starting to show that at least it is reliable and truly next-gen, even if no one has really figured out how to make games that truly take advantage of what's under the hood. That doesn't mean I have nothing bad to say about Sony, because it's on the verge of doing something extremely rare, which is both a good and bad thing all at the same time.
The Saturn sums this up. On paper, it should have dominated the Playstation. It wasn't superior in every way, but the up-side was supposed to be better than the PlayStation by a long shot. Turns out that nobody knew what to do with all of the junk in the Saturn. I figured that Sony would have learned from this and adjusted themselves, and to be honest, they are damned lucky to still be alive. The PS3 is capable of a lot more than we're seeing right now, and the only reason why we're not seeing it is because nobody is capable of it yet. There isn't a company out there that will sink millions more into a project of that size until the methods become easier. EA won't do it. Square won't do it.
On the plus side, the PS3 is not known for being difficult to program for, meaning that anything a 360 can run, a PS3 can run too and the translation from one to the other isn't terribly difficult. It was a huge gamble to send their system out, overpriced and overpowered, and hope that once developers became more comfortable with the system that there would be titles of better quality than the 360. Unfortunately, I think that they were a little optimistic on when this was going to happen. Right now it just isn't happening, and by the time that developers do figure out how to tap into that potential, Microsoft will probably have their answer planned and ready to go. Sony took a huge gamble on the namesake and trust that Sony offers, and if they manage to stand their ground for another year they'll pull it off. I slammed the PS3 for this in the beginning, and I still hold the same opinion, but you simply have to cut a corner somewhere to avoid having a $600 price tag as your launch price.
So that's why I got it. If the system didn't die this year then it was going to be alright. It also has Blu-Ray and didn't shoot itself in the head when Resident Evil 5 came out (ahem, Microsoft...).
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