For love of art.

Truth is, I was expecting a lot more from the new generation of video game consoles. With all the hype, I was expecting different ways of interacting with the interactive entertainment that I was told I needed to purchase.

Then something funny happened. Microsoft was the first one to get great games (Dead Rising and Gears of War), Sony camped out technology, and Nintendo decided to go with blue ocean thinking, and decided they were going to make theirs fun, rather than more powerful than their competitors. And that strategy has been rather successful for Nintendo. Unsurprisingly, whenever I get a console, odds are it'll be a Nintendo Wii, but that's oddly, not that germane to this monolouge.

Ultimately, I haven't seen a game that justifies the steep price of any of these consoles. Sony still needs to find a $700 game, in my eyes, and good as Resistance (Insomniac) is, it isn't it. Hopefully, it'll be the new Ratchet game (also by Insomniac), which should be eons better than Resistance, which bit most of its interesting technology bits off of stuff the last three Ratchet games. Much lauded was Resistance's "vision" to have players walk on ceilings, but much ignored was that you could do that in previous Ratchet games on the PS2. Maybe Metal Gear Solid 4 will do it. Then again, I played the second entry in the series, and while that was a nice movie, I paid for a game, and the endgame lost me entirely.

Nintendo, who has captured my imagination, has yet to deliver a great game with it. I've played Wii Sports and a little bit of the newest Zelda game for it. Still not sold. Nothing screams must buy, but then again, it is a good $150 lower than it's closest competitor, the Xbox 360.

Speaking of which, the Microsoft console has a couple games that scream must buy, which I've mentioned already. If you haven't played Gears of War yet, well, you should. It's the kind of synthesis of old and new ideas executed perfectly that ought to be commended from men in towers and people with trumpets. Dead Rising, from what I understand, is endless fun to play and has a spirit that most games would kill for. Unfortunately, the console on which you'd play those games is famously unreliable.
There's no way in hell I'm putting down $400 on a console that's prone to that many errors that have been denied and then fessed up to the company two, three years later. I don't have that kind of excess cash to spend on a wheel of fortune.

People who have venutred into my cave room will know that I do in fact, blow my copious discrentionary income elsewhere, but at least if I lose all my CDs, the files are backed up elsewhere.

However, I'm just fine with my PS2, which, I hear, will be down to $100 by the end of the year. That library, is probably the best and most eclectic in video game history, and paired with a console that works, great games that I still haven't finished and time on my hands, I see no reason to upgrade to the next generation. Perhaps, that new generation are like Hawkeye, Patriot, and whatever robot is calling itself Vision, they just need a chance to shine.

Whether that's the case or not, I'll be giving the current generation a wide berth. Maybe it'll find it's generation's Okami, or perhaps it's own Nick Fury to kick its ass into gear. If it does, I'll be watching.

Also, you may have noticed that we don't have a theme or any other posts since my last one. I'll try to fix that.