Its Time to Rip on Sony!

I'll be the first person to say that when the Playstation first arrived it was the second coming of the video game system. Then something happened to Sony. They went from a company that knew EVERYTHING a gamer wanted to, well, SEGA. They created a difficult architecture with the PS2 but yet it thrived and SONY has thrived in the gaming market most prominently on name. It was a year or so back when a high ranking SONY executive spotlighted Microsoft's multi SKU issue with the 360 and the fact that some 360's had hard drives and other's didn't that was a major problem for the average consumer. That person had said that with SONY, everyone gets the same experience. Well unless that experience is confusion, he was wrong.

I'm pretty knowledgeable about tech and gaming systems and I can honestly tell you the differences between Microsoft's 360 SKU's but quiz me on SONY's and you'll stump me in a minute. They have changed the price and feature list on the PS3 so many times already I don't even think THEY know the difference anymore. They did it with the PS2 as well and most recently they did it with the PSP. But there's a big difference between SONY and Microsoft. Okay with Microsoft you may need to add a hard drive or a larger hard drive but you can add it, with a knock on Microsoft not all system's can add the HDMI port. But with SONY when hardware changes so do features.

When the PS2 went from a full on system to the PS2 slim there was no room for the PS2 hard drive add on anymore. I'm not even going to get into the PS3 in this blog because right now its the PSP I'm ticked about. I bought one and have relatively done not a whole lot with it but SONY was adding features to it (ungodly slowly but they do) but recently the major new features are you guessed it, only coming to the PSP SLIM.

Hey I get the idea of selling more hardware, and if you're an iPod owner your the king of knowing that, but these are game systems and aside from making the insides cheaper and slimming the thing down to lessen costs don't leave your customers out in the cold. A hand held system should not have to be rebought for a new feature, sure if you WANT the new updated looking one go buy it, but "old" PSP owners are already left out of the SKYPE add on, the VIDEO OUT addition and surely the new GPS feature will soon be announced as PSP Slim only.

This is good only in a sense as every time I get close to thinking about getting a PS3 SONY gives me a reason to hate them a little longer, putting off that purchase just a bit more and hopefully getting to that next feature addition or price drop.

As for now, well my PSP sits in front of the computer monitor in its cradle quietly hoping to be used again some day (most of its uses were taken over by my Zune 80)and well I posted a photo of where my PS2 "slim" is these days, yes its pretty much only a DVD player, yes its in the bedroom and yes those are flowers on top of it. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Everyone Loves the Wii, but Mii

While I won't say the Wii is without its coolness, the total package is one that lacks. I don't regret buying a Wii (I did it on impulse when I had the opportunity last year) but I probably could do without it. I don't have many games but Wii Sports, Carnival Games and a few others fit the bill. Most of my games are basically mini game collections, my most recent purchase being the Zapper that came with Link's Crossbow Training. My issues may be from what I expect from the machine based on my usage of my 360. Sure I know the Wii is NOT a 360 but there's a bar that has been raised. On Christmas eve I purchased another nunchuck in hopes of playing some two player Link's Crossbow training Christmas Day, but alas my second Wii Mote would not stay synced once the game started, worked fine during Wii Sports, but by the time we spent 30 minutes trying to sync them we never got to play (We played Scene It? on the 360 instead).

So I let the Wii sit, maybe there was an update, there was. But it was for the shopping channel and the Photo Channel, so I did an update, which failed the first time because there was no connection, there was by the way. However I never did get to update the Photo Channel yet. I kept getting an error (maybe too many people were accessing the Wii World). And thats another thing, the shopping channels, aside from the fact that I actually like the elevator music they make me feel like I'm shopping using the very first graphic web pages ever. Why does it have to look so ugly? Part of the purchase is the shopping experience, that's mostly why Microsoft gets so much of my money, I like browsing the online stores. Of course the tied to the system idea of buying Wii games has kept me from buying anyway. I'd like to know that if anything ever did happen to my Wii I wouldn't have to jump through hoops to get back what I purchased. Sure Nintendo has a way of making good hardware but still.

I just feel like so much has been left on the table with the Wii, why can't I download DS demos, why can't I download NES games and play them on my DS, why can't I demo a game before I buy. Why are there no Wii demos? The news and weather channels are nice, but much like the Web Browser (again which is nice) I rarely use them. As a matter of fact I rarely keep my Wii in standby mode, because I rarely use it. I do try to, I do want to. I suppose what I want doesn't really matter much anyway, Nintendo is selling ALOT of Wii's to ALOT of different people, hell my parents have one, and they LOVE it! the irony is that the one game I thought I might want to pick up (Wii Fit) I heard isn't coming to the U.S., which baffles me because this was a big Nintendo announcement? For now I'll keep watching and playing, but hopefully in the future this little box will be let out of its cage, of course its Nintendo we're talking about here so I should probably just learn to swing my arms around and make sure I don't hit anyone instead.