Got the chance to play a Wii a few nights ago for the first time. Aside from the fact that we were playing "Rayman Raving Rabbids" - with creepy, cracked out artwork, characters including bucktoothed psycho rabbits and disgustingly happy worms, and some weird contexts ("Fact: Rabbits don't milk cows. But they can dance!"), playing the Wii was actually quite fun. It's an unassuming form factor that looks like a DVD drive, and the controllers look like remote controls, but the button+motion play style is surprisingly intuitive and easy to pick up for non-gamers, yet challenging enough physically to keep anyone of any skill level entertained. Having the increased play-motions available must have game designers salivating at the chance to think beyond the box of button combinations for gameplay.
Read an interesting article today that said the Xbox360, by virtue of its introduction last year, may have positioned itself to dominate this round of the console wars, simply because they have a lot more product available, from consoles to games, than the dueling Wii and PS3 platforms. In general, it seems that there are 2 primary groups of gamers - serious and casual. In the previous iteration, the serious gamers gravitated towards the PS2 for the wide variety of games, and the casual gamers went to the Gamecube for the fun party games, while the XBox was mostly left out in the cold (with the exception of Halo). Since the Wii has probably cornered the market on casual gamers already, Xbox360 will probably shoehorn out the PS3 from being able to replicate the dominance that the PS2 experienced.
Separate note as we enter into the commercialized Christmas season... good quote from Shaun Groves:
What should you get for the person who has everything? Nothing. So why don't we give them that this Christmas? Seriously. What is it that keeps us from giving nothing to people who have everything...and people who have enough?
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Swap nothing and everything around in the statements. A bit more extreme but it's a good guideline generally in the sense that rather than filling up on more stuff, take the same funds and donate them to someone who needs them more. A friend takes her money and buys gifts from a World Vision catalogue (not for her own friends but for the needy communities the gift to which will go).
Slashdot had some article discussions about production shortages of the PS3 ...
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