The PlayStation 3, nearly three full years after its ballyhooed release, continues to languish in third place in the great console race of the back half of this decade. It occupies this station despite having arguably the best array of virtues of the three: one of the finest Blu-Ray players on the market, Cell technology, built-in WiFi, free online gaming, significantly lower failure rate than the 360, etc., so forth and so on.

Two of the great impediments to its success have been somewhat rectified: the price has dropped substantially in conjunction with a nifty hardware redesign, and the once-paltry library of "killer exclusives" has been fleshed out a bit. Two years ago, you might've plopped down $500+ to get a bulky PS3 and play a bug-addled PS3-only title like "Lair." Now you can get your hands on a sleeker device, an exceptional title like Metal Gear Solid 4, and still relish the Blu-Ray experience for a more acceptable sum.

But all of this will only serve to keep Sony in the proverbial hunt, rather than allow it to gain critical ground. What anyone with a lick of sense can see is that the monolith needs a killer app to drive hardware sales this winter and with God of War III still being a few months off, all the eggs are being put squarely in the Naughty Dog basket as "Uncharted 2: Among Thieves" releases within a week.

Sony has made a lot of ill-advised gambles during the PS3's short life cycle. They gambled on a new format, on a fledgling processor technology, and on being able to parlay goodwill from the PS2's insanely successful run as the last generation's bellcow. They gambled on releasing a year later than Microsoft did and on being able to marginalize the Wii as a sort of curious plaything rather than a serious gaming device. They gambled on having a more polished library of exclusive titles and on bettering the competition with cross-platform offerings.

On virtually all of these wagers, they tanked. Sometimes hard.

But maybe all this stubborn bravado is about to pay off. The buzz surrounding UC2 began building early in the year, and it has now reached a deafening crescendo with the critical mass being so incredible, even hyperbolic. It was a calculated risk to put so much weight behind a relatively new franchise that debuted very impressively in late 2007, but also found itself competing furiously against banner titles like CoD4: Modern Warfare, the original Rock Band, Assassin's Creed, and Mass Effect. Drake's Fortune was a real gem and it sold remarkably well, all things considered, but it's arguable as to whether it became anything close to a system seller or flagship franchise.

So it was a bit of a risk to stake so much on the sequel, which promised maximizing the Cell's capability and the addition of new game modes to sweeten the deal. Yet Sony seems to have played its cards extraordinarily--some would say atypically--well. For example, it was an adroit but mostly unpublicized maneuver to offer UC2 multiplayer beta invites to those who pre-ordered InFamous, another well-received Sony exclusive. It was an obvious, but nonetheless commendable decision to tease the new game during the telecast of the VGAs. Hell, it even appears that the decision to make the Fortune Hunter Edition of the game a true, honest-to-goodness collector's item was a stroke of genius.

And keep in mind that all of this takes place against a very welcoming backdrop, what with the PS3 Slim selling quite well and the spectre of other holiday releases still being a few short weeks away. The game's early reviews have been so spectacular that G4's Adam Sessler is giving it an unprecedented distinction ("greatest single-player experience ever") and that one European publication actually bestowed a "21" score on the game in a glowing departure from its normal 20-point scale. Now there's even a clever and aggressive marketing campaign surrounding UC2, which to be frank has been one of Sony's greatest failings during the entire lifespan of this console.

The game releases in six days. The critics' acclaim is universal. The console is smaller, cheaper, and far more marketable now than it has ever been. Sony and Naughty Dog, in essence, have the better part of October to themselves in an effort to get a jump on the other big-name releases that are upcoming. This is, at the risk of being over-the-top, Sony's Waterloo moment.

Let the games begin.

Quite the kerfluffle was caused on Gamespot when Brenden Sinclair posted a story about Robert Kotick's comments at the Deutsche Bank (does anyone else see this phrase and just naturally pronounce it "doosh bonk"?) Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco. Without belaboring the idiotic observations Kotick made, let's instead focus on the loose justifications that certain commenters were giving in defense of his remarks:

1. Kotick was just being sarcastic. Look, I understand the compulsion to assert this time-honored defense, but let's be real honest: corporate bigwigs do not use investor symposia to wax smartass, okay? In fact, these forums are generally very sterile and calculating, meaning that you can pretty much accept what the talking head says at face value. When he said he is running Activision according to a certain ideology, I think you can safely assume that he means it.

2. Kotick did not mean that he was taking the fun out of video games themselves; he was just affirming that the process needs to be businesslike. If you go out of your way to make a statement about "taking the fun out of" anything, you are doing yourself no great favor from a public relations standpoint. Everyone naturally assumes that a CEO has designs on profits and maximizing his labor force; it's an understood and accepted premise of capitalism, for God's sake. But to say it openly reeks of a certain smugness or arrogance of which his employees certainly can't be too fond. Let's be realistic--if your boss is out there talking about bottom lines and stripping away the enjoyment of work, does that give you much faith in his leadership? Single-mindedness has torpedoed many an enterprise before.

3. The untethered Guitar Hero idea is a good one. Consoles aren't going anywhere. Competition is too great, production costs are dropping, and programming gets progressively easier. So why abandon that to take an aging concept into a new, dangerous realm with uncertain production costs? Kotick's views on the untethered Guitar Hero concept are fine in theory but flawed in practice. Three years ago he might've been hailed as an innovator; now he simply looks like yet another CEO who does not have his finger on the pulse of what's popular and what's relevant.

4. Being gung-ho about profits is the right business model. You can't force profits, folks. Simple economics says that you cannot hope to thrive if your sole focus is on the bottom line, neglectful of those line items that get you to that point. Taking coffee out of the break room is a short-term Band-Aid for a greater problem. Maybe Activision can still thrive with the likes of Infinity Ward producing excellent Call of Duty games, but the well eventually runs dry on gaming franchises and contracts with developers. You can talk ad nauseam about the need to trim fat, but humans still comprise the business and still expect to be treated like humans. If you are hammering home the politics of fear in an effort to make the corporation flourish, your strategic approach is going to eventually be what causes your downfall, and we've all seen that bear fruit during the dot-com bubble-bursting of 2000 and the gaming collapse of the mid-1980s. To disregard history is to condemn one to reliving it.

It's bad enough that Gamespot, which lost a great deal of credibility when the likes of Jeff Gerstmann and Alex Navarro flew the coop (or in Gerstmann's case, made to fly the coop), continually and consistently delays its reviews. There is no question that this tendency has its own nefarious designs, namely to ensure that GS ratings can effectively sandbag the Metacritic average for a given title. Personally, I think Gamespot reviewers have used the practice in order to appoint themselves the "Fox News" of the game industry--delivering allegedly unbiased and unfiltered reviews that purport to give the "real" take on a particular title. It's as if Gamespot relishes the faux prestige that comes with dispensing the last opinion on a game, even if reviews elsewhere are better-written, more comprehensive, and more in touch with the general gaming public's expectations.

What exacerbates this failing, however, is Gamespot's insanely unbalanced scoring system, which was revamped a couple of years ago and has proven time and time again to be an abject disaster. Two recent, ballyhooed releases provide perfect examples of how disingenuous the Gamespot scoring system has become:

Madden NFL 10 received an overall 7.5 rating. This is effectively a C+ for a game that, per the review, had but a handful of minor annoyances. Bland commentary and AI quirks take this game down that many pegs? It should be noted that in a comparable review from another website, these same drawbacks were also cited but the game received a score in the high 8s. Apparently, Gamespot feels that minor, subjective grievances warrant significant point reductions, which is odd when you consider how these quibbles are treated elsewhere. Then again, refer to my point above about the delay factor--every other major reviewer had already published its review by the time Gamespot threw its two cents in, and no score was lower than an 8/10. So naturally Gamespot scores it a 7.5 and gives off the pompous air of being unimpressed.

Shadow Complex got an admirable 8.5 overall in a review published only hours ago. Now, having not played this game yet, I can't fairly debate the merits of whether this comparatively low score--in the context of the critical mass that had accumulated so far--is justifiable. But again, I can read the review and ascertain that while this may be the best $15 digital download to date, Gamespot thinks some occasional aiming quirks should take the game out of the Editor's Choice realm. I never really quarrel with what Gamespot reviewers identify as flaws, but I do question the gravity they assign to these alleged shortcomings. Why did Grand Theft Auto IV get a perfect 10 when it had some pop-in and clipping issues?

The scoring system that was adopted a few years ago was designed, presumably, to make Gamespot's critiques distinctive. The emblems and the good/bad snippets had the potential to be useful, but instead the removal of categorized scoring has made these overall ratings completely flaccid and untrustworthy. I don't necessarily want to know how the sausage is made but I do want to know the ingredients--Gamespot has taken the position that you don't need to know what's even in the sausage, short of assigning cutesy little icons, but that at the end of it all, it's sausage of a particular grade. And, frankly, I think that's doing the readers a disservice.

Admit it: you've watched Bret Michaels' amusing little skanks-fight-for-a-burnout festival on VH1. You realize that all of those "women" are unscrupulous, empty-headed twits, but mostly you recognize that the sun around which they orbit is none other than a guy who, after years of embarrassing obscurity, still thinks he's God's gift.

Far be it from me to correlate the gutter of popular culture with the video gaming world, but since last November, I've had an 11-pound, jet-black version of Bret Michaels in my entertainment center. And a year ago, if you had told me that the PS3 was going to be at the crux of that kind of analogy very soon, I would've initially questioned if your hallucinogen intake had increased, and followed that by simply asking you what the hell you meant.

Alas, Sony's megabucks re-investment in the industry is very much analogous to the demise of the hair band. You see, the PlayStation franchise had a pretty strong grip on gamers for at least a decade, and exacted that control in the same way that a guy like Bret Michaels managed to become something of an icon in his own right. Sony didn't develop the best or most thought-provoking device when it trotted the PS1 and PS2 out, but it did things with glam-rocker flair and bravado. You want cutting-edge graphics? Here they are. How about rockin' sounds? Got 'em. And, look, we have games on funky black-backed and blue-backed discs. All of this worked for a while until Microsoft, appropriately based in Washington, and Nintendo slowly worked to make Sony less relevant. Microsoft actually introduced a console that had plenty of onboard storage and a watershed launch game, Halo, the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" of its time. Nintendo popped out a neat little cube that allowed its long-standing franchises to continue to flourish, and even though Sony had dominated the market for so long, you could sense that its grasp was pretty tenuous.

But as Bret Michaels is seemingly oblivious to his own decline, Sony doesn't seem to recognize that pride indeed cometh before a fall. Microsoft didn't squat on its laurels, and despite some serious hardware headaches, they beat Sony by a full year with the next-gen 360, and while Sony delayed and sandbagged, and dished out snarky comments about how its competitors were mere pretenders, Nintendo came along again and pledged itself to the gamer first and foremost. The result is that Microsoft is pushing more 360s than the original XBox while amassing the kind of game library that most wouldn't have anticipated by now, and Nintendo is battering the bejeezus out of Sony on every continent by making sure that, above all, its users HAVE FUN.

Last night, looking for a change of pace from the literal weeks of 360 gaming I had done (BioShock wrapped up, a couple of years of Madden '08 and NCAA Football '08 both in the books), I fired up the PS3. Oh, it's still pretty, but also mostly an aesthetic achievement. The XRoss menu bar is nowhere near as functional or innovative as the 360's menu blades. The PlayStation Store has a very sterile and uninviting veneer, not to mention a complete lack of actual substance. Friend management is horrible. Oh, the memory slots for photo slideshows are nice, and you'd be crazy not to love the ability to customize your themes, but what measure of victory can Sony claim for these ancillary achievements?

It's when you pop in a disc, though, that you realize just how weathered and sad the PlayStation name has become. All that bluster and all that excess...and for what? For a game like Resistance, which is enjoyable enough but can't even begin to compare with the likes of Gears of War or BioShock? For something like Motorstorm, which was clearly exposed as nothing more than a visual showpiece bereft of any sort of variety? For poorly-executed ports of games like FEAR or Rainbow Six Vegas? Sony is hanging its hopes on the Killzone franchise, which has never gained any kind of a foothold among gamers, and putting a lot of stock in its handful of exclusives like Warhawk, Lair, and Heavenly Sword, none of which have the moxie to transfix the average gamer for any measurable length of time.

In a recent episode of "Rock of Love," Bret Michaels--and he insists on that ridiculous bandanna and sportcoat look--gazed into the lens and pontificated laughably about some "deep" subjects, like what it means to be a soul mate and how hard it is to find one. Shortly thereafter, he was officiating a game of mud football involving several ragged, vacuous groupies.

And that's an apt visual for the Sony PlayStation brand. It had its heyday, even if some at the time could foresee a downfall in the offing, and made a name for itself. But the tide turned, the consumer demanded something substantive and different, and the corporate behemoth could only produce more style, more sheen, more pixels and bits without a trace of thought or care.

Go to your local Best Buy and see which is gathering more dust, the copy of Poison's "Look What the Cat Dragged In," or the Sony PS3 on the shelf. I bet it's a tossup.