Warren, dude, language is articulated and conventional, communication is any exchange of information. It's not that it's "more grounded". How did you make it two years in linguistics without learning how to express that difference? Gah. Killed me every time he repeated it.

Even these pics don't really capture the diference. I mean, Dead Space I've seen on both a decent Dell XPS machine and consoles and that leap from 720p to 1600+ resolution is extremely noticeable. Sometimes the PC version is almost too crisp, exposing low poly modelling that wasn't obvious on the consoles, for instance. If you output your PC through a good 1080p HDTV, though, the results are simply amazing. But I stll go with consoles on most multiplatforms. To be honest, I can't be bothered to get that bulky, sort of noisy desktop PC going just to play for an hour. Convenience is key here.

It makes me so mad, really. Gamespot editors whine all the time about fanboys engaging in the console wars with illogical arguments, but they're not above ridiculously nitpicky comparison features designed solely to drive fanboy traffic, at the same time feeding on and fueling the geek wars. Really, for the good of the Internet, stop this. It's just so stupid. Just make a not of the differences in reviews if they are noticeable and stop feeding the trolls. For the record, and since posts like this tend to be met with "oh, he's a XXXX fanboy" reactions, I do own all three consoles, and I'm not above channel switching between two versions of the same game to see how they look (the answer is identical, by the way). I just do it in the privacy of my own house, without causing IQ80s to break into a berserker rage.

What Sony can do to make me buy a PS3, eh? Well, they could give me a job so I could pay for it. That'd be a start. Other than that, I do think the PS3 is a nice deal that will only get better with time. If and when BluRay becomes something I'm interested in (more or less at the same time I buy myself an HDTV), the PS3 will have become a bargain. But the one thing Sony needs to improve and market better, I agree with the GS staff, is their free multiplayer. Let's be honest here for a minute, I'm not going to pay a single cent to MS to play online over Live Gold. I'll be caught dead before I pay a fee to play Need for Speed or FEAR online when it's free on the PC. Gear of War? Yeah, it's nice, but it's already 60€, I'm not going to add more money ont top of that for the online portion. Maybe if MS gave me back my fee in Live Arcade stuff I'd think about it, but turns out I have to pay for that on the side. I'm a pay once play forever kinda guy. I don't like microtransactions and I don't like monthly fees. Much less monthly fees to unlock features in games. I'm not the only one, either. By MS's own accounts, 40% of 360 are online but just below 20% pay for Gold. That means 80% of 360 owners don't want to pay to play online or don't want play online at all. Now, Sony gives me that for free. That's good. But nobody's mentionng it. Sony should be there yelling "You know? By the fourth year you own a 360 you'll have paid them the price difference in monthly fees, so save up a bit, buy a PS3 and stop wasting your money every month". But they're not. They just come out and babble about Home and how rumble is last gen "cause I say so". Of course, their online service isn't nearly as good as MS's at this point. If they fix that AND keep it free, that'd be a major selling point in the US (not so much in Europe and Japan, I think). Maybe they should learn from Nintendo, not Microsoft. Nintendo kept their systems easy on the DS, and it seems the Wii one will be identical. Basically, they stopped trying to manage huge user databases and matchmaking. They gave players a big red button with the word "Online" on it. You hit it, you're playing online. No lobby, no nothing. Of course, the prize to pay was friend codes to play with specific rivals, but that annoying, unreasonable detail aside, that model works for me. Instead, Sony seems to have tried to do everything MS is doing without knowing exactly how. They'll probably get there, eventually, but the time it'll take will probably work in MS's favor.

There's one way Sony can make this become a plus: Make Guitar Hero 2 work on software emu, since it doesn't seem to work on US consoles. That and singstar. Because, to be fair, party games are what you keep playing after the generation is over. I still brought the N64 out of the closet to play Mario Party and Mario Kart on parties months after I had a GameCube. There's no way I'm going to give up all the PS2 party games if I get a PS3 and, honestly, I don't need a new guitar controller for Guitar Hero, nor am I going to buy GH2 again, with another controller for another 80€. In fact, I'll be really pissed if Guitar Hero 3 from Neversoft doesn't support my old controller. So emulating specific games could still be better than hard emu. And graphical upgrades, like filtered textures and 720p (could be done pretty easily if the Cell is everything we've been told it is). Still the announcement itself and the way it's been handled are still a big mistake and a PR hit and now I hate Sony for taking away my hopes and dreams.

I do. Really. The PS3 is as big as my bed. I want to remove my huge PS2 from there as soon as I get one. But I don't want to stop playing what I play. Heck, I still play some PSX games every now and then, so just packing away my PS2 games is not an option. Plus old consoles tend to break. Picture this: you keep both consoles under your TV (plus a Wii, your HDDVD and who knows what else) to play old games, but in two or three years your PS2 stops working and there's no way to find a new one anywhere. And you haven't played Dark Cloud yet. And you REALLY want to play Dark Cloud because... well, because at the moment you can't and that pisses you off and makes you go all obsessive over it. And the PS3 still doesn't have a patch to let you play it. Yeah. I don't want that to happen. And, to be fair, this one is more a PR blunder than anything else. It's not as much the practical reasons as the fact that everybody else is getting a better treatment. If I'd had the money available I'd have been playing a 360 the day I read the announcement. Not that I want one. I don't really like its software library yet, but another slap in the face by Sony is one too many at this point..

Actually, "Ganados" is another instance of crappy translation. It's a generic name in Spanish, so it doesn't admit the plural. You can be "ganado", but not "un ganado", and more than one is still "ganado", not "ganados". In fact, a single cow or sheep isn't "ganado", just a cow or a sheep. "Iluminados" isn't a generic, but it's spelled with a single "l". A double "l" in Spanish sounds like the y in "you". But who cares, right? The town in RE 4 doesn't look like anything in Spain and everybody speaks with a thick Mexican accent anyway, so it's not like they did much research on anything and they just made up a fitting Lovecraft-y location and decided it was set on Spain. The one thing that was spot-on, though, was the design on the cops' uniforms. It was a weird sight to see a member of the Policía Nacional impaled by a bunch of not-zombies.

As always, the clever thing to do is wait. Also, I'm worried about copy protection becoming an issue if it's actually locked to a hardware key. Plus Vista is way too expensive to buy without being 100% sure of the results, so... Maybe after SP1 it'll be a good idea. I don't have a DX10 capable video card, anyway.

I agree with the consensus above that this is a PR problem more than a units sold problem. Sure, missing a christmas season is a small disaster, and it will have some impact (especially if the Wii is a hit), but PlayStation as a brand is taking the worst hits. PSP was already a small failure in that regard (I own one, I can tell), falling short of being "the new Walkman" Sony promoted. Now the euro delay, the high price tag and reduced specs for the PS3 is leaving a brand that was once a synonim for videogames turned into a jumbled mess. I mean, how bad has your PR to be to beat MS at bad brand name recognition? They're the guys behind Windows. Granted, they mostly fixed that by making XP much less of a crappy product than their predecessors, but bad press is sticky as hell, and Sony and PS will have to use a lot of really really good soap to remove it. Hopefully in the form of great games. AS for the HDDVD vs BluRay wars, it's a non issue. To me BluRay is probably a winner, even if the PS3 comes out third, but the real fight will be between both of those and plain vanilla DVDs. At least in Europe. HD tvs won't be all that popular here until 2010, when they'll be pretty much mandatory, and even then the jump in quality between both formats might not convince everybody to make the move from their cool HD-enables recorder DVDs to a much more expensive HD system with less features.

My current laptop games list: Sim City 4 Rome Starcraft and, surprisingly, even on a 1.5 Ghz 512 MB 128MB card Psychonauts X-Men Legends 2 Fahrenheit So go try those. They're all worth it. Great games, all of them. You have platforms, 4 players action RPG, strategy, adventure... I like this feature. Hardcore gamers usually make it seem like only this weeks games are worth it, but I got a Gamecube and a PS2 years after launch and I had lots of fun with the back catalog and the bargain bins.