PlayStation 3 gets cut to ribbons

I would say it's the exact opposite. PS3 would have sold a much larger number if available. The X-BAG should have cleaned up on that, but it's barely doubled the inventory-restricted number Sony produced and sold. That's a pathetic performance considering the big fat greasy softball Sony served up for the Christmas holiday. What that tells you is I'm out there in large numbers - an avid gamer who will not switch to X-BAG. I'm waiting until I can walk into a store and be confident the P3 will be there in stock. I'm not going waste one second trying to get one any other way.

When the PS2 came out there was a colony of dinosaurs who held out hope that the PS1 would somehow hold off the the PS2. Natural selection took it's course; they're extinct.

I'm sticking with my earlier prediction: the X-BAG's day in the sun will be short lived; the PS3 will recapture most of the PlayStation's lost market share before the end of 2007. Why? Brand loyalty. The PlayStation is the preferred platform for a reason.

Check out gaming community sites - the PS3 sucks. I've been an avid Sony fan since the PS1, have purchased both the PS1 and PS2 when they were launched, have dropped I don't want to know how much money in to each for games and accessories, and have no intention of buying a PS3 at all. Sony's constant out-and-out lies about PS3's features and capabilities before launch made a large part of the gaming community bitter about the console, and sales reflect that. I can walk in to any local store right now and a buy a PS3 right off the shelf, and many of those are there because would-be eBay entrepreneurs missed the boat in hawking them to anyone stupid enough to pay $3000 for the console.

Nintendo Wii, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found in stores. As gimmicky as I think the Wii is, being as it's virtually a hopped up Gamecube with a fancy remote, if I was going to throw a wad of money to invest in anything - it'd be Nintendo.

The PlayStation 3 is turning out to be a huge flop. The hardware can't deliver on Sony's promises, the games are lackluster, and the hardware is very hard to develop for so we're seeing a lot of development projects being pulled from the PS3 all together, or used-to-be PS3 exclusives also getting XBOX 360 ports. Sony's reps have said things just recently like "The future of HD gaming starts when we say it does" yet the 1080p at 60 frames per second resolution that they promised from their games hasn't been seen yet.

Only a handful of PlayStation 3 games actually run at 1080p, and none of them at 60 fps. The PlayStation 3 lacks a hardware scaling chip like the one in the XBOX 360, so if you have a TV that supports only 1080i and 480p (and not 720p), rather than scaling games UP to the resolution of your TV like the XBOX 360 does (from 720p to 1080i), the PS3 scales them DOWN to 480p! - Thus making them WORSE than they were originally intended even though your TV supports a HIGHER resolution than what they were designed for.

The gaming community isn't standing for it. We're sick of the lies, sick of the promises, and sick of Sony's false reporting and holier-than-thou attitudes, and we're voicing our opinions with our checkbooks. Like it or not, the "video game generation" has grown up, and we're the ones that are now raking in enough cash to throw around on expensive consumer electronics like video games. It's no longer 8 year old Jonnie's mom that's the bulk of the income for game companies, it's the 18-30 year olds who grew up with Atari, Sega, and Nintendo in the 80's.

We're too smart to have the wool pulled over our eyes like this. Unlike our parents, we actually research what we buy, and we don't like being lied to by faceless corporations. As long as there's a choice, we're going to go to who takes care of us, and makes good on promises - and right now that's looking like Microsoft and Nintendo.

Just "yesterday" Nintendo was the big guy because of brand loyalty. The NES was probably the widest spread and widely accepted video game console America has ever seen. Atari died and it was all Sega vs Nintendo. With every wave of consoles that'd come out, Sega vs Nintendo and Nintendo would always win. I'm sure you remember that.

Then came the ill-fated corroboration between Nintendo and Sony for the Super NES' CD drive add-on, which was to be manufactured by Sony for Nintendo. After some disputes about media formats and such the two split up - Nintendo made their cart based N64, sighting long load times of CDs as a huge negative while neglecting to mention the huge positive factor of CDs - massive amounts of space for a very low price vs EEPROM).

Sony came out with their own system, and that Christmas it was the Saturn vs the N64 vs the PlayStation. Nobody thought Sony was going to win that war, at all, but they did. I remember everyone saying "If I want a CD player I'll go buy a Sony, but I'm not going to play on a Sony game console... this is going nowhere, they're just throwing their weight and money around." That turned out to be a different story, obviously.

The same thing happened with the XBOX later on. The controllers were HORRIBLE, and other than Halo, there wasn't really any reason to own an XBOX. At all. People, including myself, again said the same thing... "If I want an OS I'll buy Microsoft, but they're just throwing billions of dollars down the toilet on something they shouldn't be doing. Microsoft can't make game systems." Then Live evolved... and companies started to take notice, and port games from the PS2. Ultimately the original XBOX still lost Microsoft more money than it's made them, but the 360 seems to be a different story.

Microsoft was the first person to make a game console more than just a game console with the 360. You can get rich media from your PC to your TV, including high definition video content, audio, and pictures. We're talking Apple TV functionality more than a whole year before, for the same price, plus it plays games. XBOX Live has successfully been distributing multimedia content and game content via a download service with micro-transactions - something Sony and Nintendo are both now scrambling to mimic.

Being a year late to the game, Sony and Nintendo had a lot to live up to. Nintendo's gimmicks are clear - their console is cheap, and affordable. Out of the box you can play games for $249 + tax. $310'ish plus tax for a second player (extra Wiimote and controller). It's no frills, doesn't support HD or 5.1 audio, and isn't trying to compete with 360 or PS3 directly. Nintendo has their strategy.

Sony had somewhat of a strategy. First they tried to rip off the Wiimote functionality with the SIXAXIS controller... functionality they said they had been planning prior to announcing it, which was after Nintendo had made their Wiimotion functionality perfectly clear. Yet - Sony didn't talk about this functionality with the PlayStation 3's original boomerag style controller. They tried to pass off ripped off tech and hoped nobody would care. People did.

Next, they eliminated rumble from their controllers because they were sued by Immersion and would have had to pay Immersion royalties to use the functionality in the PS3 controllers. They chose not to pay Immersion (can't say as I blame them), but rather than be forthcoming about it, they gave some lame excuse that they weren't able to incorporate rumble functionality and the gyroscopic functionality in to the same controller, even though Nintendo does it with the Wiimote, and several PC gamepads also do it without a problem. They lied and hoped people wouldn't care. People did.

Third, they showed off game demos at E3 the same summer that the 360 launched that blew the 360's demos away. The difference was that the 360's demos were real, and playable on final hardware, and the games released by MS actually looked like what we saw at that E3. The demos Sony showed - Tekken 3 is the first the comes to mind, followed by Resistance - are nowhere near the games we actually are seeing at launch. For as much as Sony bragged about the power of the PS3, the games we're seeing are no better than what was on the 360 at launch. Current gen PS3 games that are cross platform with the 360 look the same, or sometimes even worse than their 360 equivalents, AND on top of that - the 360 is able to do hardware scaling.

Couple that with the fact that the PS3's online experience, even though they touted it as free, is being called useless because of gross oversights in software (can't do anything else while downloading large files) and there are constant disconnect and lag problems with current titles. It seems as if Sony has just thrown the whole online aspect of their network together in a weekend or on a coffee break and said "here you go, we'll fix it later, just get it out the door right now because we need something before Christmas."

Maybe if they weren't too busy creating a bunch of pre-rendered video and trying to pass it off as in-game footage, swearing up and down that it was all in-game when questioned about it by the press, they would have been able to build a more robust online experience for their users.

You say you aren't going to buy a PS3 until you're sure you can go pick one up in a store - go now. My local Best Buy has over 20 in stock. Circuit City has stacks too. Sites for both companies list them as in stock and available to ship on their websites. You shouldn't have any trouble finding one.

The original PlayStation won it's war because it was innovative. It was easy to develop for - much easier than it's rival the Sega Saturn. It won against the Nintendo 64 because the Nintendo 64 used antiquated hardware for storing games (cartridges) and developers didn't want to be locked down to 32MB on a cartridge when they could get 650MB on a CD. That allows for infinitely more freedom of expression and creativity, not to mention things like full pre-rendered FMV video and digital audio, something we take for granted now, and game developers ate it up. Nintendo couldn't do that with the N64. As a result the Nintendo 64 had a few good games, and almost all of them were first party.

PlayStation 2 won the war because other than Halo the XBOX never really had a "killer app." (I hate that phrase.) XBOX Live for the original XBOX came too little too late, and because of all of the hype still surrounding the original PlayStation's amazing capabilities when the PS2 was released, the PS2 saw a plethora of awesome third party titles right from the start. People knew Sony - they trusted them now, and they liked the exclusive titles. Other competition was what? The Dreamcast? That was riddled with bad business decisions and doomed from the start, even though it was a good piece of hardware (I still own mine). Else was the GameCube, which was another first-party queen for Nintendo with nothing revolutionary to bring to the party and ended up coming in a dead third.

People still trust Sony now - "PlayStation" is still a household name, but with all of the crap that's going around about the PlayStation, people that said "I'm waiting for the PS3 to see what that's like" when the 360 was released two years ago still aren't buying. The launch didn't blow anyone away. It was lackluster to say the least. If you look at the number of units sold in the first week vs the number of units sold on eBay the first week you'll see and overwhelming majority were bought just to re-sell after the same thing happened with the 360 last year. eBay entrepreneurs getting theirs - and they did a good job of duping everyone. Whoever paid $10,000 for a PS3 is probably dangling in a closet right now.

It's three weeks after Christmas and I can walk in to any number of stores right now and buy one, my choice of 20GB or 60GB, brand new in the box. That didn't happen until late Spring of 2006 with the 360 Premium bundles, and it's looking like the story is shaping up to be the same with the Wii. Bill Gates has even changed his mind about the PS3 - stating that now the Wii, which hadn't originally been viewed as 360 competition by MS OR Nintendo, is now primary competition for the 360... and everyone's just watching Sony and wondering what went wrong.

I took your suggestion and checked all of the BB, Gamestops, and CCs in the metropolitan area, and none of them has a PS3 in stock today.

X-BAG lost out to the antique PS2. That's like Mike Tyson getting his butt kicked by his Grandmother.