It's that time... time for some next-gen (current-gen now? This will be easier once all three are out...) thoughts. I'm no newshound... In fact, with facts flying fast and furious as we digest E3, I'm sure I've missed quite a bit. Does lack of information discourage me from ruminating on the latest efforts of the big three? Well, this would be a very short entry if it did, but luckily, it gives me no pause at all.

Microsoft - "We're really trying..."

So many mistakes were made in planning and releasing the 360. A friend of mine calls it the worst launch ever, and I'd have to agree with him. MS's own incompetence ruined the lead time they wanted to get on the market--you can't say you have a year's head start if nobody can actually find your product to buy it for half that year. For some ungodly reason they listened to the marketing department and castrated their own system with a rusty nail-clippers just so they could say that their console starts at only $299. Faulty hardware, buggy software that erased saves, a massive joke of a backwards compatibility feature... MS made a lot of mistakes.

But, you know, they did some things right, too. In playing with the 360, there were a number of things that impressed me about it. Not the games, yet--I'm just not moved by anything currently available, but some of the Live features impressed me. The wireless controller is actually decent (the wired controller, judging by the ones at store kiosks, is a disaster of misdesign), and finally, an option to power the system on from the controller. I know I'll be picking up a 360 once I'm confident that all of those egregious bugs in the hardware and firmware are corrected. And once Dead Rising comes out--that looks fantastic.

The 360 is a solid system that could have been a great one if my humble proposal to launch all the world's marketers into orbit around Neptune had gotten the attention it deserved. ... admit it: you thought I was going to do a Uranus joke there. Too easy.

 Nintendo - "We're a toy company now."

Back in the dark ages of the Great Video Game Crash, analysts thought that developing a new video game console bordered on suicidal. But Nintendo cleverly plugged a gun and a robot into the NES and billed it as an interactive toy. This Trojan horse, video-game-machine-in-toy's-clothing (because at its heart, the NES was a video game console through and through) tactic worked brilliantly, and Nintendo almost single-handedly revived the industry. Now, when video games are more popular than ever, Nintendo has decided to try the same tactic. Hey, it worked for them before, didn't it? True, that was almost the completely opposite situation, but you have to remember that Iwata couldn't lead the way to his own kitchen, much less direct a large, venerable corporation.

So when he finds that he's dug himself into a hole of mediocrity, he breaks out the shovel and decides to dig his way out! The reasoning (if you call it that) seems go like this: Sony and Microsoft have split the majority of the market between them, and (due to similar brilliant leadership over the last couple of generations) there's no chance Nintendo can recover enough to lead the market in just one generation, so the best solution must be... change the competition! If Nintendo can't take MS and Sony, maybe it can take Jakks. Nintendo doesn't want to compete in the video game market any more, it wants to compete in the interactive toy market. It's inexpensive and it's gimmicky, just like the spongebob-shaped "video game system" that Jakks makes.

Honestly, I think the Wii might be a fun toy... for an hour or so. Maybe someday Nintendo will make video games again. Until then, get ready for a couple of obligatory entries from the same tired old franchises Nintendo uses for life-support and a whole lot of "cooking game" and "squashing game."

Sony - "We win."

Honestly, I don't know why everybody gets so down on the PS3's price tag... for $100 more than a 360 you get a more powerful machine, not crippled by a version without a hard drive. Oh, and it can do everything that Nintendo's incredibly stupidly named machine can do (and will probably have more than 5 games released a year), but treats the gimmick as what it is... a gimmick. Not bad for $500. Oh, but wait--you also get a Blu-Ray player (which is more than $500 right there), free online play, and (working) backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games. Add the cost of a PS1, PS2, 360, Wii, and Blu-Ray player together and see if it's anywhere close to $500, then complain to me about the price.

I know that a lot of 360 fans are going to take issue with my opinion, and the Nintendo fanboys will probably burn me in effigy. Yes, I ripped on Nintendo, but only because they provoked it. I have no personal allegiance or onus toward any console manufacturer--I would be as happy to rave about Nintendo as to rail about them, if only they'd give me some cause. In 3-5 years (because I guarantee you that all the talk about an extended lifespan for this gen will be completely forgotten by manufacturers in a few years), if Sony comes up with a complete dungheap of a system and Nintendo releases an awesome, kick-ass, forget-everything-we-did-since-the-SNES system, I will hesitate for not one picosecond before singing the big N's praises and textually tearing Sony a new orifice. Until then, try to get a decent likeness on those effigies, okay?