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"What the hell are we doing?"

You know, I look out over the Future of Gaming today, and what do I see?

I see the Sony camp, a group who pride themselves over their technological achievements and the vast amount of choice for their console. This camp reaches out to gamers of all ages, and reels them in with talk of Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo 3, broadband, hard drives and countless other future assets. They are proud of their choice and will not be swayed, and they thoroughly believe that Sony is the only true way forward. They will defend the black behemoth day and night from the heavy barrage fire emanating from the Nintendo camp, but their defences are impregnable.

I see the Nintendo camp, a group whose main strong point is the games. They worship a man known as Shigeru Miamoto and the software house Rare. They will defend the honour of these men to the death with talk of the fantastic games, unending depth and constant originality. The Nintendo hardware is no great achievement, having about the same power as Sony’s offering despite being two years its senior. The one thing you can count on with Nintendo is that each game will reach new heights in gameplay and graphics don’t count for nothing.

I see the Sega camp, a group who recently pulled out of the hardware market and has focused on software. They are the neutral body, who develop for each and every other group. They are purely in it for the games, yet they have still amassed quite a following of die-hard Dreamcast supporters who will argue that this failing machine has everything anyone could ever want and more. Despite their enthusiasm, they can only be described as shortsighted, and must one day move on. Every Sega game guarantees great playability and a huge lifespan fused together with arcade thrills. Every offering from its many software houses is something to be looked forward to.

And then I see the Microsoft camp, the new group in town. Most people look upon them as evil newcomers who are just in it for the money. They use their amazing wealth to buy their way around. They make neither their own hardware nor software, and employ or purchase companies to do it for them. Arguably the most powerful of the four, their offering is more akin to a PC than a console, and it brings many of the PC problems with it. Sightings have been reported of blue screens and unstable workmanship, the question on everybody’s lips is will people ignore Microsoft’s previous failures and give them a second chance? The evidence is bleak, with only a few inhabitants of the Future of Gaming willing to give a second look to them. This group is a force to be reckoned with, utilising their superior hardware and big name developers to their advantage. Whatever the future holds for Microsoft, rest assured they will be back.

And as I look out over the Future of Gaming, what else to I see? I see war, conflict, battle and skirmish. I see rival groups fighting with and within each other over polygon counts, unit size and storage. I see friendships built and destroyed over games consoles, things that were created to bring enjoyment into the world. Palestinians and Israelis in the Gaza Strip are warring over our mistakes, Pakistanis in Afghanistan are being brutally ethnically cleansed by Muslim extremists. Babies and capitalists are executed every day in China yet we ignore all this cruelty and wage war amongst ourselves of consoles? Games were created and nurtured to bring happiness and enjoyment into our lives. We should be ashamed of ourselves that we are creating all this conflict when people are dieing for their beliefs in other parts of the world.

We should stop all this and be grateful as to what we’ve got, which is a form of enjoyment and a damn fine one at that, whichever you choose.

*FM gets out his toasting fork and some marshmallows...*

That was a batch of duff power supplies. Not Sony's fault, just a mistake. It has been sorted now. My PS2 has never crashed ever and works fine.

Turbonutter wrote:
We should stop all this and be grateful as to what we’ve
> got, which is a form of enjoyment and a damn fine one at that,
> whichever you choose.

My money goes on the following:

Turbonutter bought a PS2. Turbonutter KNOWS that PS2 owners get an awful lot of stick on these forums, more than the Nintys even. Therefore, this is his roundabout way of trying to avoid the posts that will generally be aimed in his direction, as well as the other two-ers, concerning the fact that the PS2 is in reality £300's worth of general naffness, shortly to be made completely obsolete by the arrival of the Gamecube and the X-Box.

Am I right or am I right?

The PS2 does have reliability problems. The drive on my mates and my cousins have both stopped working. Of one batch 1 in 5 were not working when taken out the box. That is first hand experience I am going on.

The PS2 doesn't have reliability problems. Where did you hear of this?

That is one way of looking at it. But you do have to remember that all th ecomapnies get other comapnies to make their hard ware for them. Nintendo do not make the processors or graphics chips for their consoles. Sony do not make the chips either. They are made by companies like ATI, NVidia, IBM. I would think it dangerous to call DC fans shortsighted. The DC will die but it already has a life times worth of triple A titles that most people will struggle to own all of. I think that Sega fans should embrace the X-box as the new DC. That way the X-box would have some people to call its user base. I do not know how the X-box can have bluescreens etc but I trust that Microsoft will sort out the problems. We need to give tham a chance. After all most people who own PS2 bought them despite knowing the reliability problems that the PS2 was reported to have had. But I wish all the companies to make it through the next console wars. The only platform that needs a lot of work to have a future however is the PC. Not enough companies are getting the most out of old hard ware. I am not going to go out and replace my graphics card for quite a while. But the minimum specs keep going up and there are a lot of games that I can not play on my PCs. So that can be viewed directly as lost sales. But my N64for example is not going to need upgraded to play all the games available for it. OK so there was the expansion pak but that was a one off. And now there are no N64 games that I can not play. At least gaming is still entertaining. But another thing that needs to be addressed is the amount of games that have been canned or never got a UK release. NUK need to release PAL english games when they are finished, not when the rest of Europe are finally ready to get the game.

Roll on the Fourth World Console War!!!

True.

Peace and happiness to be shown in this thread only, but in chat, well, that's another story.

Turbonutter wrote:
> then I see the Microsoft camp, the new group in town. Most people
> look upon them as evil newcomers who are just in it for the money.

If anyone thinks that Sega/Nintendo or Sony ARNT in this game for anything other than the money, then they are sorely mistaken...

I don't care. Either way is fine with me.