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Oh, it's on.
The console wars officially re-opened last week with brutal salvos from Microsoft and Sony followed by a promise from scary Reggie at Nintendo to “mess you bitches up…at some undetermined point in the future!” The mysterious and likely fictional Phantom, which was actually playable at last year’s show, has once again faded into insubstantial ectoplasm. It looks to be the same three-way struggle we’ve endured for the last five years.
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Yes, it's THAT big! |
So what are GR’s thoughts on the matter? Well, if there’s one thing we took away from this year’s E3 gaming infomercial, it was that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are all building the same machine. Sure, you can throw some numbers around, but you can use numbers to lie about anything. Just ask my wife.
At their core, all three companies plan to build rigs with the same essential set of features: online functionality right out of the box, wireless controllers, backwards-compatibility, actual hard drives and guts crammed to the gills with whiz-bang, cutting-edge silicon innards. The differences in the graphical quality between the three will most likely be invisible to the human eye. You’d need one of those Lee Majors bionic ones.
It used to be different. The Saturn placed its bet on 2D graphics, which was the first step down a very bad road for Sega. The forward-thinking (and victorious) Playstation had a 3D chip along with the versatile and cheap CD format. The N64, the system with the most visual punch, could only qualify for the Special Olympics thanks to its outdated, expensive cartridges and diabolically stupid three-handed controller.
The current generation is similarly differentiated. The PS2 and Xbox both play DVDs, while the Gamecube cannot. The oversized Xbox also has a built-in network adapter and hard drive, which arguably makes it the technically superior system of the three, or at least the most powerful - at the expense of crowding everything else out of your entertainment center. The Gamecube? Nice graphics, but a good selection of colors is not actually a feature. Props to Nintendo’s Wavebird, though, the only first-party wireless controller. Too bad it wasn’t standard issue. Not that it would have mattered much - the Playstation 2’s handy USB ports and backwards-compatibility turned out to be the killer-apps this time around.
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But can it slice a tomato? |
However, in this next generation, nobody is trying anything new. All three companies are just taking the features from previous systems that everyone liked and slapping them together under a fatter video card. Sure, there are minor differences: the Nintendo Revolution will be smaller, the Xbox 360 will let you buy upgrades online and the PS3 can do the most FLOPs. What FLOPs are and why I would want them next to my TV is another matter.
So understand this: Unless one of the Big Three manages to strap a blender to the top of their machine, no system is going to have any important features the others lack.
That being said, I would like to chart a course for peace in the console wars with the consumer and the gamer in mind. I would like to steer things in a bold new direction, at least for video games, because other products have been doing it for years. It’s not a revolutionary concept - Ben even touched on this back in 2001 at the start of the last console war - but it’s one that bears incessant repeating:
I would like to see a single, universal platform for which everyone can freely develop. And no, I don’t mean the Indrema.
