So once again a major company with millions of dollars behind it decides to pull the ol’ rug out from under their market. Last year Microsoft released the XBOX 360, but only with about half as many units as they promised. The release day hysteria was ridiculous, with people standing in lines for days, fighting for the first spot, and then leaving empty handed because stores couldn’t meet demand. The lucky people that did go home with a unit had to risk overheating and black screens of death. The launch games weren’t all that and a bag of chips either. Perfect Dark Zero for all its hype was a quick flash and done. Kameo was a great game but somewhat frustrating. Halo 2, naturally, would have sold even if it was packaged in a box of crap. I don’t play sports games, so I can’t speak to those. Lesson (hopefully) learned: do not buy an expensive game system on launch day. (I ended up getting one long after the bugs were worked out and there were actually games to play on it.)
Fast forward to last Friday, the long-awaited release of the PlayStation 3. Once again, history has a short memory. People get in line days in advance, regardless of the fact that many of them were already called and told they weren’t going to be able to get a system. Sony saw the hysteria surrounding the release of the XBOX 360 and decided, “Hey, we want that too!” So they promised X number of units, stores took pre-orders for the units, then a month later Sony says “OOPS, we can only deliver 400,000 units across the US on launch day!” People who pre-ordered get phone calls from the stores saying sorry, we won’t have a unit for you. These people get in line anyway, figuring if they get there first, they can take someone else’s pre-order. Then there are all the others who didn’t pre-order, but hope they’ll get a unit anyway. Bottom line, people standing outside in the rain and the cold, in tents, for DAYS. People getting robbed and shot while waiting in line. People getting sick and dehydrated. FOR A GAME! The PlayStation 3 cost $500 or $600 depending on which one you got (and of course everyone wanted the more expensive one, because if you’re going to stand in line for a week, you’re not going to settle for second best.) If someone told these people they had to stand in line for a week and pay $600 for their groceries, they’d scream bloody murder, but they’ll do it for a video game system. Where exactly are the priorities? I can only imagine, based on some of the people shown waiting in line, how many overdue rent payments there will be next month.
Like the XBOX last year, the PlayStation was not without its problems. Naturally, there will be a percentage of DOA units, and having that many sold at once is going to appear as a higher number simply because they are all dying at once. Dead, beeping units, black screens, etc, are to be expected, but the more interesting reports are design flaws, not failures. HDTV support that doesn’t always work, a pile of games that were promised to work yet don’t, and then of course the disappointing launch titles. Several web sites are reporting that, side by side, the XB360 version of a game is light-years ahead of the PS3, which released a year later. Many people are attributing this to “the PS3 is harder to design for, wait until developers figure out how to squeeze performance out of it.” I can buy that, as the same applied to the XBOX360. This is just another reason not to buy a console on launch day – the games will suck.
Interesting aside about review sites – as long as a web site gives favorable reviews to your platform of choice, it’s the definitive site for news. As soon as they say something negative, that site is now and forever more a shill for the other side. They’re fanboys for the other platforms, they’re paid off by the competition to tell lies about your beloved game console. This is what you learn by reading gaming newsgroups, anyway.
And then yesterday, the Wii-lease of Nintendo’s Wii-diculously named console, the Wii. Once again people stood in line for days, only this time there were more than enough units on hand so there was no bloodshed over it (hence the reason there was no mainstream media coverage – it’s not news unless someone’s been injured and someone else can be assigned “blame” in some way.) Everyone is calling it “revolutionary” because of the wireless controller – instead of moving joysticks and buttons, you swing the controller through the air like a sword, or a ball, or a racket, or whatever is appropriate for the game you’re playing. Okay, sure, the concept is cool… but all the people shown playing these games look like dorks. They’re hopping around the room swinging their arms around like, well, a bunch of Wii-tards. The only reason (I think) the idea took off is because it was developed in Japan, and Japanese people aren’t afraid to get up and move around when they play games (Dance Dance Revolution, as stupid as it is, is all the rage in Asia. Might be why you don’t see a lot of obese Asian kids.) Japanese people don’t just sack out on the couch for a weekend marathon session of Final Fantasy LXXVII, guzzling down Mountain Dew and powerslamming Cheese Curls. Americans, on the other hand, are completely allergic to any form of entertainment requiring more energy than required to move a thumb-stick. I predict that one of two things will happen within 3 months: a) people all over the United States will suffer heart attacks and cause structural damage to their houses when they attempt to bounce their 300+ pound bodies in front of their televisions, or b) the novelty will wear off and they will suddenly realize that they look stupid, causing them to drop their controllers in a sudden flash of coherent thought, smacking their foreheads shouting “WTF am I doing?” Then they will slip into a coma of depression knowing that they can’t even hang themselves from their wireless controllers.
I’m not even going into the Wii’s lack of support for any resolution over 480p, or the fact that it can’t even play a DVD (that’s been standard since the PlayStation II!) And good lord, how many more Mario games does the world need? The new Zelda game has been hyped to death and back again – Nintendo will sink or swim on that one game.