There is also a $500 version planned - so we'll have two PS3s to choose from, just like the dual Xbox 360s - but even that is out of control. The $500 has a smaller hard drive (which already makes it better than the gimped 360), no WiFi (which sucks) and no HDMI output. I would much rather trade out the stinking blu-ray. Give me a PS3 with the 60gig HD, the WiFi, and everything else, take out the blu-ray, and I'll give you $300. Then I'll pick up three launch titles and an extra controller, which will almost get me to $500 anyway. This was the deal we struck six years ago on the PS2, Sony.

All Nintendo has to do is get those cheap, shiny Wiis out a week before the PS3, and Sony will be scrambling for the Brighter Side press release.

Oh, here's something Nintendo should have thought of first: Sony's upcoming EyeToy game Eye of Judgement. It's a real world card game that you play in front of the EyeToy camera. When you play a monster card, the EyeToy recognizes it and animates the creature onscreen, hopefully doing whatever you intended for it to do, attack, defend, sacrifice it for life points, who knows.

Huh. If only Nintendo owned some kind of monster-battling card game that desparately needed a good video game shot-in-the-arm. You know, something the kids could really get into, with toys and cartoons and stuff.

Rockstar placed the next GTA title at October 2007. Nice going. Now everybody is just going to wait for October 2007 to buy a PS3 and hope there has been a price drop by then. (And starting at $600, there will almost have to be a substantial drop before the second holiday season.) GTA4 will actually come out for Xbox 360 first; up until now, the GTA games have always kinda tiptoed across the way to Xbox a couple months later, to no great effect. Sony probably should have paid cash money to have the franchise exclusive to PlayStation... but they probably wanted to keep a safe legal distance from GTA, since the game regularly has to catch hardballs from over-eager, anti-freedom politicos. Regardless of exclusivity, nobody thinks of the Xbox as the "home" of the GTA series, so getting another lame-ass tattoo about it was just Head Shill Peter Moore being a dick again. Does this dude have to SHOCK us with a new tattoo every year now?

Microsoft was thrilled to announce that GTA4 will have additional downloadable content, which raises several important points. First, Microsoft lies about stuff all the time. "Exclusive" to them can mean it is an exclusive title/feature for three months. Second, the PS3 will also have online play and a hard drive, so what's to stop them from distributing additional GTA4 content? And thirdly, "additional downloadable content" is marketing-speak for "junky extra crap that you have to pay for."

You know, when Nintendo had the eReader and started selling trading cards that unlocked additional content in GBA and GameCube games, everybody unzipped their flies and pissed hot lava on it. Now that Microsoft is nickel-and-diming gamers to download new horse saddles, it's the fucking Second Coming. And what's up with "pundits" and "critics" and "reviewers" getting excited about all the upcoming "interconnectivity" between the PS3 and the PSP? Nintendo held that party three years ago, and I was the only one there.

About that Wii. I daresay that we're all starting to take the name seriously! "Wii" was not a bait-and-switch press grab fake out, as everyone previously hoped. The remote controller is a perfect gimmick interface for a new Wario Ware game. I'm looking forward to seeing how Wario Ware (frightening how quickly that became a franchise, eh?) and the other big names - Metroid, Sonic, Mario, Resident Evil - translate to the remote. HOWEVER, I am not looking forward to this:

Nintendo: I am not interesting in playing games like that.

I want to sit down on a comfortable couch and play my games. Not jump around all over the damn place. By the way, I titled that image "wiiner.jpg."

The Wii controller has a speaker in it, surprise. As well as rumble. So that will be cute. I would have liked the thing to have a mic, for use in future karaoke or Mario Party games.

Hey, did you notice? I think this is an entire E3 without mention of a new Mario Party game.

There is a new GameCube bongo game though, so that's cool. And Super Paper Mario looks awesome. I'm a little put-off by TWO versions of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, one for GameCube and one for Wii. We had previously been led to believe that the same GameCube disc would just gain magical powers when put into a Wii. ("Revolution." *sniff*) The Wii features (wiitures?) of Twilight Princess seem pretty extensive, so I suppose Nintendo could have just switched to a Wii version and given a big middle finger to all the droolly GameCubers out there. Even though we probably should have all been playing GCN Twilight Princess by now; I'll bet it was all the Wii-dev that delayed the title in the first place. Nintendo has made great hay in the last decade of being the one "good" video game company, despite their monopolistic practices of the NES days. So it is nice that they didn't abandon the GameCube version entirely.

Nintendo released images of the "standard" Wii controller, IE the one you're going to use for all your old games, your ported games, and your old ported games. Which better damn well come shipped with the unit. I'm not even going to post a pic of it, because it looks like a Dual Shock. Same interior-positioned twin analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, etc. It would be nice if Nintendo could stick with the same controller design from one generation to the next, because there is an advantage to controller continuity. I liked the GameCube controller, but if it had to be changed for the Wii, I guess I'm glad they made it feel more like the PlayStation standard.

Speaking of that, Sony revealed their PS3 controller... which is no longer a pseudo-future concept-prototype space-boomerang. It is - TA DA - exactlythesameasthePS2scontroller. Duh. Thanks for listening, Sony! Now if you would have canned that terrible Spider-Man font. Interestingly, the rumble has been removed (legal reasons, I believe)... which makes me wonder if they can even call it the Dual Shock anymore, since didn't that specifically refer to the two internal vibration motors?

Now that Sony has their own Xbox Live system coming - which will be free - and Nintendo has their own Xbox Live system coming - which will be free - Microsoft was scrambling to show how their Xbox Live - which is not free - will be worth paying for. Their answer is to tie it to Windows Vista! Hooray! Who cares what all the customer confidence surveys show! Let's take our one product that has been a word-of-mouth success (albeit not a financial one) and marry it to our other product that everybody hates! And if you buy a Madonna video on your 360, you'll be able to watch it on your cell phone! Yes!

Seriously, this will never happen. Or, like the new season of Survivor, it will happen but no one will care. It's the kind of thing that a company announces as some kind of far-flung future dream feature, but by the time it happens, it is so hobbled and hamstrung that it is barely recognizable as the glorious experience once promised.

Like Windows Vista itself, actually.