It was surreal on Friday November 17, 2006 a day that will live in infamy for gamers across the USA, to actually lay my hands on a virgin Sony Playstation 3 system. Eager customers waited as long as an entire week, camping outside of stores nationwide to be sure they would be first in line to experience Sony’s answer to the Microsoft Xbox 360. With a reported one hundred million PS2 units sold worldwide, Sony supposedly would only be rolling out a measly 300,000 PS3s on launch day, with about another 100,000 shipping to stores and online retailers before the end of 2006. By video game standards this is a miniscule number; however, what will be of great interest to home theater enthusiasts who have been watching the HD DVD versus Blu-ray format war is the fact that more Blu-ray players landed in the homes of US consumers in one day than had ...

Introduction As a hard-core gamer for over 30 years and a programmer to boot, both in the arcade and on PC and consoles over multiple platforms, I can say with authority that the true test of any new game system or technology is how much better it is then anything else that’s come before it. And, what does it cost for that performance improvement? Back in the 1970s, when there was almost nothing in video games to play, we were happy to upgrade from black and white to color or from Pong to Space Invaders. Even to go as programmers from Basic or Fortran to DOS offered significant improvements to gaming that a few years before were simply unimaginable. This is because computer power was at a premium, as it was throughout the U.S. Apollo missions to the moon, and arcade games circa 1980 like Donkey Kong, Tempest, Frogger, or Pole Position required the ...

Introduction Let me come right out and say that in the 20-plus years that I have played video games, from the Atari 2600 to the Microsoft X-Box and Sony PS2, I have never been more enthusiastic about a video game system than the handheld Sony PSP. This brand new, handheld gaming system from Sony is not the most powerful game machine on the market. It packs a modest 333 MHz processor and there aren’t a great deal of games available yet, so why am I so up on this system? The answer is simple. A video game system is only good if you actually end up playing it. I almost always fall for the hype and buy the newest home game systems. I currently own an X-Box, a PS2 and a Nintendo Game Cube. I’ll probably be replacing them with the next generation versions when they hit the streets, but I can already ...

Introduction Nintendo’s GameCube videogame system was launched in the United States back in November of 2001, so you may be asking yourself, “Why review it now in June of 2003?” When the system was originally launched, there were very few games and it was unclear as to whether Nintendo could even make a dent in the huge market share owned by Sony’s Playstation and Playstation II. There was also the fear that Microsoft’s Xbox could swallow up the entire videogame industry. Fast-forward to today and all three systems are still in production. The Xbox was not the 800-pound gorilla that many expected, Sony still leads the way and Nintendo’s GameCube has survived and prospered, thanks in part to many exclusive Nintendo franchise games not available on any other system. Now that the retail price of the GameCube is an even more reasonable $150 (down from $200) and I think the chances of seeing a ...

Introduction With a few exceptions, playing video games on a console has always been a more enjoyable experience than on a home computer. In the '80s, the simplicity of popping a game cartridge into an Atari 2600 or Intellivision and blasting aliens on the family television set hooked millions of Gen-Xers on technology. Personal computers soon found their way into homes around the world and computer games soon followed, but something just wasn’t right with them. The controllers were sub par, often requiring the player to control the onscreen action with a keyboard via the arrow keys. The computer speakers were all horrible, the monitors were too small and the systems would often lock up. When I heard that Microsoft was going to be putting out a Windows-based video game system called the Xbox, visions of the blue error screen of death (For all you Mac and Linux users, this is what you get ...