News flash! It's the holiday season! At least, the conglomerations of retailers, manufacturers and marketers have decided that it is holiday season, and whether we like it or not they are going to do everything they can to convince us to give them money! The big ticket items, as always, are the consumer electronics. TVs, PDAs, MP3 players and, this year, new seventh-generation (yeah, we've been through that many) video game consoles. In order to either A) surreptitiously advance the schemes of marketers or B) undermine them from below, I've compiled a short list of the major offerings this year, along with some cynical and possibly useful commentary.
Zune. This little rectangular device is Microsoft's attempt to break the iPod's stranglehold on the MP3-player market. While it has some great ideas, such as wireless communication with other players to share music and video content and an FM tuner built in, it's unlikely to gain much traction among computer users due to its image as a Microsoft product, as well as a restrictive rights-management model. Who would you rather be rockin out with: Nerdy Bill Gates or black-on-black-on-jeans Steve Jobs?
Xbox 360. Speaking of Bill Gates, it appears that he skipped math. What comes after one, Bill? Microsoft took a big risk last year to launch its new game console a full year before the competition from Sony and Nintendo. It hopes that early adoption from players and developers will lead to a triumph in the long run, despite having slightly worse technical specifications than the PlayStation 3. So why is this on my list now, a year after release? Microsoft has been bringing a large push of new games and features to its console to try and steal the thunder from the new consoles.
Wii. Nintendo's make-or-break system after the (relative) failure of the GameCube, the Wii, had a much cooler name when it was called Revolution. Despite the wacky naming decision by the boys in Kyoto, the Wii is promising to be a very interesting new device. Priced the same as the Zune and less than half the cost of the PlayStation 3, Wii is banking on its technological and gameplay innovations to trump the superior graphics and processing power of the other two consoles.
While it doesn't even support the native resolution of HDTV, the Wii has an incredibly unique control scheme. Sensors placed around your television detect the exact position and orientation of your Wii-mote—a fanciful moniker for the controller *shudder*—allowing for very interesting development possibilities, especially for those looking to create titles that educate as well as entertain. A game with swords could have you thrusting, slashing and parrying the
attacks of your enemies. First person shooters could have you aiming with more precision than anything available on other consoles or even PCs.
PlayStation 3. This is the biggie. Sony has taken a lot of flack for coming out late, with even less initial stock than promised (blamed on missing droids â_ I mean diodes), and at a higher price (by far) than the competition. What Sony does have going for it is... wait, I was blasting it along with everyone else. In all seriousness, the PS3 does have much more raw processing power than anything else in the market, and can even compete with high-end PCs. Its Cell processor has been vaunted by computer scientists, and Folding@Home—a distributed computing project working on protein simulations and known for being difficult on users' systems—hopes to drastically increase its research capabilities with users' consoles. Sony's efforts may be for naught, however, if no one can afford the high price of admission.
Keaton Miller is a junior majoring in math and economics. He's too poor to afford the PS3, and he's waiting until Halo 3 comes out to buy into Microsoft's Xbox empire.
This column will be on hiatus next week, since he will be far too stuffed with turkey to write. Seriously.
