Well, it's done.  The next generation is upon us and the consoles are all off and running in the great market-share race.  Across the globe people are weighing choices, listing pros and cons, and investigating 2nd mortgages to help them make their decisions.  Cut through all that deliberation, though, through all the features comparisons, launch lineups and brand loyalty, and they're all asking themselves one simple question: what does Pete think?  Well, I'd hate to leave all those people up in the air, so I jotted down my updated impressions of the contestants.  The world can breathe easy.

Wii:  My only experience with the Wii was playing Wii sports for a while, so it would be precipitous to say that my predictions about the Wii were completely accurate.  I can say, though, that Wii Sports itself is exactly what I predecited for the console in general.  It's novel, kind of fun for a little bit, but was already wearing thin after a half-hour of play.

I am, surprisingly, much more open to the concept of the Wii than I was previously (I had an eye-opening experience with an unrelated controller that reimagines the gamer/game interface... more on that later), but I'm still concerned about the implementation.  For one thing, gesture commands need to be used correctly--which means sparingly.  The tracking technology in the wii controller is really nifty, so why do games ignore it and instead have you make gestural commands, which are in effect no different than button presses?  These gesture commands are fine if, like puns, used infrequently and with great care, but also like puns, they'll fall flat if used incorrectly. 

I hope that the abundant use of gesture commands are a learning-curve issue, and as developers grow more comfortable with the Wii, they will either really use the motion-tracking features well or just have the player press a button.  I'm concerned about how completely Nintendo has staked the Wii on the controller, though... at this point they really can't afford not to force as much use of motion-sensing as they can into Wii games, since they've declared that traditional controllers are dead for anything other than classic games.

Still, if they can strike the right balance with the controller, I might actually pick up a Wii.  This is a staggering statement if you consider my attitude towards the Wii even a month ago.  Still, and a lot of Nintendophiles will absolutely splutter at this, I think the Wii is overpriced.

PS3: I have little to say about the PS3, because I've had less playtime with it than with the Wii.  Every time I've spotted a PS3 display unit except for the one in the Sony Style store in some mall in Southern CA, it's been frozen.  Not encouraging.  Admittedly, those display kiosks could be better designed... they have the PS3 cramed down in a little, poorly ventilated box (the one under the glass is just for show), but that's something Sony might have thought about before they shipped them all across the country.

I at least got to get a closer look at the controller at those broken-down displays.  I'm very serious about my controllers, and unhesitatingly back the Dual Shock 1/2 as the finest first-party controllers (well, Neo-Geo's sticks are awesome, too, but you get the point) out there.  When I saw that they had kept the same basic design for the PS3, I breathed a sigh of relief, because there's little room to make the design any better (trust me, you do not want to get into the left-analog placement issue with me here).  However, I'm not wild about some of the tweaks they did make.

A while ago MAILER_DAEMON posted impressions of the sixaxis in the VU, and said that the triggers felt weird and the analog sticks were too loose.  I dismissed him as a Sony hater and put it out of my mind completely... until I held the sixaxis.  I have to admit that he was right.  The triggers feel weird, like Sony couldn't decide which way they should move.  When they're fully depressed they become flush with the housing, which could cause fingers to slip out of position.  However, despite the loose feel of the analog sticks and the weird motion of the triggers, I'm reserving final judgement for gameplay.  It could be that the controller will feel entirely natural in actual gameplay... Sony has done right by me before in the controller department.

Xbox 360:  I don't have a lot to say here.  Still a little thin on the killer titles, but that's not unusual for this point in a console's life.  Dead Rising rocked my resolve not to buy one before Halo 3 pretty hard, and when I saw Gears of War, I almost caved.  Only continued reliability concerns are keeping me from running out and buying one right now.  This will probably still be my first current-gen system, but probably not for a while yet.