If I don't respond to anyone for a while, it's nothing personal, I think I'm about to get booted again by the mods.


Clicky. Casey's a mod, btw.

Xbox 360

The 360 was release a year ahead of the competition, allowing it to sell roughly 8 million systems before the other systems were even released. It got off to a rocky start, and has had reliability issues up the ying yang, but it's in good shape to beat out Sony, and Halo 3's arrival will no doubt help.

pros - xbox live is well established, classic arcade, gamertags, achievement points, excellent graphics.
cons - horrible reliability issues, dated controller, classic arcade can't compete with the virtual console, messy implementation of backwards compatibility.


Wii

Released on Nov.19th 2006, the Wii has some serious momentum, and is catching up with the 360 at an incredible rate, and at the same time is leaving the PS3 in the dust.

pros - motion sensor control, channels (weather, opera web browser, news, etc.), Miis, flawless backwards compatibility, virtual console already better than classic arcade and is growing constantly, best price.
cons - graphics not as good as they could be.


PS3

The third Playstation was release alongside the Wii in some parts of the world. The fact that its true competitor (360) launched a year in advance, and that the PS3 won't be available in Europe until spring 2007 means that Sony's nowhere close to catching up with the 360.

pros - potential to eventually outshine the 360's graphics, apparently more reliable than 360, online gameplay free, if you want a blu-ray player it's a good deal.
cons - every feature of the system is a lower quality imitation of what the competition is doing, no rumble in controller, too expensive, falls short of expectations graphically, less promising game roster than competition.

2001:
Rogue Leader, Smash Bros. Melee

2002:
Metroid Prime, Viewtiful Joe

2003:
Zelda:Wind Waker, Mario Kart: Double Dash

2004:
Tales of Symphonia, Baten Kaitos

2005:
Resident Evil 4, Paper Mario 2

2006:
Lego Star Wars, Zelda:Twilight Princess

Heartbreak #2 of this year.  2007 is just around the corner.  Oh, how I dread the future.

Sup boys, I've just finished serving my time, I was banned from gamespot, but now I'm back.  I'm going to go remake that abortion post that got taken down by gamespot earlier.  Hey, who the f uck reported me for that post anyway?  Someone that I would classify as my enemy, I guess.  On a side note, women are a real pain in the ass - I'll spare you the details.

Final Fantasy 6
This long snes classic has you battling against an immoral empire, and eventually against a super powerful madman named Kefka. This is one of my favourite games ever made, mostly because it had an incredibly good story with great characters. Plus I love the fact that there's a one year gap in the middle of the game, I always thought that was so cool and enjoyed finding my guys after a year of being apart.


Final Fantasy 8
This controversial installment took awhile for me to warm up to, but eventually I did. The story was cool, Squall was a great character, and there were some scenes that were so well done (like when you first try to assassinate the sorceress) that I literally got adrenaline rushes from them. The biggest downside here is that you have to keep watching the same summon animations over and over again to be effective in battle. In addition to that, I hate how enemies level up with you, that defeats the purpose of leveling up.


Final Fantasy 9
This one was a beauty. The leveling up system worked, you could gain new powers from your current set of equipment, some parts of the soundtrack were incredible, great prerendered cutscenes, well done graphics for PS1 hardware, and so on. One thing I really enjoyed was how your group was sometimes split up. I liked being in the middle of some adventure while thinking to myself, "I wonder what my other characters are doing right now?" This was done alot in FF6 as well, but I don't see it happening alot in other rpgs, where your group tends to stick together.


Final Fantasy 10
Truly a beautiful game with excellent production value overall. It's the first Final Fantasy to feature voice acting, and beautifully integrated CG cutscenes into the experience. It had some great characters, and just to make the story more involving, some of your guys actually die, unlike in FF9. The biggest flaw in my opinion is if you think about it, the whole game's structure is that of a giant hallway. You're always moving from one end of an area to another end, until eventually you are done the game, with no world map to travel freely on.


Final Fantasy 12
This one is rapidly climing the ranks, and could possibly be the best, or second best, Final Fantasy that I've ever played. It's even more graphically impressive than FF10, yet allows you to travel much more freely, and encourages some good old sidequest/leveling up gameplay. There is so much depth to this game, you can buy licenses, go on hunts, attain new powers, and basically do whatever you want whenever you don't want to advance the plot of the game. The combat system is much more like an mmorpg, but it still has that Final Fantasy feel to it. In fact, I like this system better, it makes fighting way faster, and removes the boring and repetitive process of going into a special battle scene environment and seeing all those menus every time you fight someone like in the older games.

In almost every 360 vs. PS3 debate I've seen, there's one defense the cows always give, and that is, "wait till teh cell comes with its uber micro! the homosexbox is like xbox 1.5, teh ps3 is uber powerful cause of teh cell!11!" Well, maybe they haven't always sounded that stupid, but you get the picture.


Teh Uber Cell

So, I have a question. Where is teh uber micro now? We've seen the Cell in action, and what we've seen is a "worse than 360" level of graphics. Now, I understand that in the long run the graphics will improve (look at the PS2's graphical progress over the years as an example), and maybe they'll eventually surpass the 360's general quality of graphics. But seriously, Sony has overhyped the sh!t out of this machine, and the Cell in particular.

7 SPEs all simultaneously running at 3.2GHz each sure sounded promising, but also complicated and difficult to efficiently use. Since we haven't seen any breathtaking games for the PS3, and there aren't any on the way that I know of that really blast us into the future of graphics, I think one of two things has happened:

1- The Cell isn't anywhere near as powerful as Sony has been saying it is.

or

2- The Cell is so hard to utilize to its full potential, that it's not realistic to expect graphics at the level that Sony has been hyping it up to.

Either way, the Cell isn't as great as we've been told. This was Sony's big gun, the fanboys super weapon, and it's dead to me in terms of being a relevant factor when choosing a console now.

How can they do this to us?  2 years into development (not to mention a good chunk of what they didn't finish in Halo 2 will go into Halo 3), and all they show is a one minute cutscene that contains 20 seconds of kids talking in the fields?  Why!?

What they showed looked awesome, but why oh why wouldn't they show more?  For Halo 2, they showed a whole level off to the gaming world a year and a half before release.  Now we're less than a year away from Halo 3 coming out, and all we've seen are two cutscenes, and short ones at that, which reveal little.

Sony may be confident in their claim that "next-gen starts when we say so," but from the looks of it they misspelled Wii.

Click Here to see a pretty good article detailing how GameSpot has become a Microsoft Propaganda Site. As you can probably guess, it discusss the review of zelda, as well as other things.