Has The Console War Reached A Peace?

By: cynicalmonkey | July 2nd, 2009

Or has PS3 started a nuclear stock pile?

I am wrong about things more often than I could ever feel comfortable admitting to in public.

I thought the Dreamcast was a wise purchase.
I thought In Bruges would win the best original screen play Oscar.
When I was 13 I thought a teal & cyan denim jacket that said bad boys on the back would make me look cool!

As I said, I’m wrong a lot.

I remember the release of the original Xbox; I remember it well mostly because it prompted a lot of discussions with my older brother where I would make sweeping statements about how the Xbox would never amount to anything. I would say things like -

‘How can the Xbox thin to compete with the PS2 and its back catalogue?’
‘Who gives a crap about Halo?’
‘What the fuck does Microsoft know about gaming?’
‘But Sony revolutionized gaming for an adult market, Microsoft are trying to hustle in on a cash cow and nothing more!’

Was I ever that young?

Since then I spent a lot of time being very poor and haven’t owned a system since the PS2, but boy did I want one! I have wanted a 360 since release date and soon my dreams will be realized, soon that shiny white and green box of joy will be mine and I can finally stop parasitically feeding my game addiction off brothers and friends. Despite not owning any consoles I have become quite an advocator of the 360 and in pub and office discussions have voiced many times why the 360 is better than the PS3 (total back seat opinions).

It used to be such a simple thing – the Xbox won because

1) It was cheaper
2) It had more and better exclusives
3) It knew what gamers wanted

How similar my pro 360 arguments were to my anti Xbox ones years before and all were true. For the longest period it seemed Xbox was just showing up the PS3 all round, especially in the exclusive area, but then the battle seemed to start to turn. Giant exclusive franchises started to go multi platform and for every Gears of War 2 there was a Killzone 2, the exclusives didn’t seem so exclusive anymore. Throw in that the ones that were exclusives weren’t actually all that good. Haze seemed to do nothing but underwhelm and games like Lost Odyssey & Infinite Undiscovery felt uninteresting. It seemed that the equilibrium was balancing out and no longer favored one over the other for every Dead Rising there was a Bullet Witch and for every Little Big Planet the opponent had a Fable 2, coupled with the big games all going cross platform and what was once a massive gap became little more than a crack.

Let’s fast forward to now and look at the upcoming exclusives; yes Mass Effect 2 excites me but as exclusives that come to mind that’s the only Xbox game that does. Flip that equation over and you have Infamous. Uncharted 2, MAG & Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Combine those 4 games and you have more than pause for thought, for me that’s an entire reason to buy a PS3. Not only because they are good looking titles but Uncharted 2 and MAG may actually offer new multiplayer dimensions that no Xbox exclusive is doing.

Now let’s throw in the prettiness factor. For HD gaming at its finest ps3 is shades above Xbox, especially as to me it feels the 360 is showing us everything it can do right now while the PS3 just seems to be gaining momentum in graphical ability. As far as the price goes the difference is a little large but not really that much when you take the blue ray player into account (£100 difference < £150 cheapest blue ray player).

I just bought my first Xbox 360 but I would not be surprised if within the year I am putting forth arguments to my girlfriend of why we really need a PS3.

It’s an argument I may well lose because as I said, I am often wrong about things!