I've got a Wii myself, though my history playing consoles started on the Sony side with the original Playstation (I do get around to playing the other current consoles though, most of my friends and family own at least one of the main ones).
The whole "console war" garbage I despise though, it's not the systems themselves that can be compared, because it's pointless not include games in the argument. Because, despite that one may have beefier specs over another, or one might have a more interesting control scheme, or whatever, none of them are anything without
content, and when you consider software, specifically games, it all comes down to a matter of personal taste anyway. It's not the console itself that makes it what it is, its what you can
do with it in all areas of the gaming experience.
That being said though, while I've always leaned towards Nintendo as a matter of
gluttonous franchising tactics personal taste (of course my love for Pokémon primarily
), I have my gripes with all systems, particularly new ones where you have to deliver on so many different levels in the modern technological era.
In my opinion, with the PS3, I've always seen it as an excellent system, by quite a bit the best hardware specs of the 7th generation consoles. That being said though, its flaw, and a gripe that I share with a lot of people, is that there's simply less content in comparison with the others, which I think stems from the developer's business perspective. Developing for the PS3 is expensive, the hardware is expensive for consumers, and the games are expensive for consumers. So when you have a bunch of 3rd parties that ultimately produce 99% of your entire content pool for the system (which they do), many of them are going to shy away from it because they have other options for platforms that are inevitably more profitable. It's the unfortunate nature of an industry, but that being said, the PS3 from an artistic standpoint has infinite potential because of its sheer power and ability to handle so many different operations and functions, allowing you to almost definitely bring your ideas from point A, the drawing board, to point B, the screen (or at least you'd have to end up making some sort of hardware plugin to compensate for what Sony doesn't make). A lot of the PS3's problems are with Sony as a company as well, something the XBox can reciprocate with Microsoft. The problem is that when you have a juggernaut company like Sony with an
enormous amount of market share in an industry so vast and volatile like technology, it's so easy to shift gears towards your other products and operations to find again, what is more profitable, neglecting areas like the Playstation platform. Being the company that they are, they ebb and flow with what's popular with the public (like Apple for example, who kind of sets the status quo for popularity instead these days
), and so at the time of the PS3's release, what was popular? HD was emerging and highly received, and multimedia capability has always brought a popular slew of innovations within the past half-decade, so that's what Sony ultimately went for. But alas, what did they
neglect? Content, games, and investment in that area to urge 3rd parties to jump on the development bandwagon. Hence, the price went up for expensive new stuff, and popularity dropped off a cliff once everybody got over how pretty it looked and wanted to play games. I'm not saying there aren't spectacular games for the PS3, that would be a total lie, but in comparison to other platforms there's just not enough games period. The hardware's there, the software just needs to be there as well.
The XBox is a similar animal. In my opinion, it's got great specs like the PS3, some popular franchises to boost software presence like Nintendo, and the system's own niche factor that made it highly appealing even after its competitors were released, it's solid online capability, one that you could say almost fostered online gaming culture as it is today. HOWEVER!
The mistake is not with the XBox, as it was with the PS3, it's with Microsoft. Again, another industry juggernaut, arguably one of the biggest internationally in technology today. They invested in great R&D that yielded great hardware, but software got convoluted. It falls into the same "expensive" trap as the PS3 (though to a noticeably lesser extent), and the majority of its software backbone becomes comprised of "shooters and sports," where Microsoft seems to clearly have a stake in persuading developers to go for a target audience; males between the ages of 15 and 30, the majority of video game players both past and present, as unfortunate it is to admit there still is a marginal stereotype demographic with video games for all they've accomplished in the past few decades to become mainstream and popularly accepted, as many art forms do. Sleazy? You be the judge
. But as a result it's been a huge success for Microsoft, as it singlehandedly developed a notorious "XBox culture" (whether it's positive or negative is another story, haha
), and accumulated its fair share of fervid fans, catapulting it fully into competition with the other two giants despite it's young age in the arena. From a business perspective it's brilliant, but again from an artistic perspective, it's unfortunate. There are popular, successful games that are regarded by general opinion as "great" on all platforms, and the XBox is by no means any sort of exception. However, the XBox's flaw is not in the quality of its games, but the diversity. It's contributing not only to the stagnation of creativity in
the entire industry, but also the popular image of video games to people around the world, most of whom do not play them, but rather look upon them with a cynical eye because of scenarios like the XBox, meaning the stereotyped fare of obsessive teenagers pulling all-nighters with a bowl of Cheetos playing violent, brain-dead FPSs online while cursing nonstop at their online adversaries. But that's a generalization, not necessarily true of course considering all the great content for the XBox that diverges from that norm, but is overshadowed by it, knocked out of attention by the heavily marketed and demographed/segmented games that dominate the platform (i.e. the "shooters") financially, and the popular image of video games entirely via culture. Be that as it may, it is an excellent piece of hardware and an infinitely fruitful platform for ideas. It's flaw simply lies in its execution, and thus its reception by developers, and ultimately in software (again not in quality, but diversity).
So that leaves me with my opinion on the Wii
. Nintendo's got the exact opposite going on, with its own strengths and weaknesses (albeit some extreme ones). The games are diverse, and with the exception of many swarms of shoddy, rushed, and ill-intended party games, well-crafted –– particularly of course, Nintendo's own games that have high budgets and a rep to maintain, though most 1st party Nintendo games sell like hotcakes regardless because of "addicted" portions of fanbases, of which many Nintendo franchises have some of the biggest, so a high-budget wouldn't even be necessary from a business perspective (hence showing a unique dedication and creative spirit that developers like the Nintendo EAD have displayed on the Wii). A large portion of the Wii's library is well-made and diverse, and the console for the longest time had a unique niche in its control scheme that resonates even with popular culture. So games aren't necessarily the problem. The problem is converse to the other two systems, hardware, notoriously known as lackluster in comparison to its competitors. The age-old "bad graphics" insult isn't the issue, the issue is rather the lack of
features the system has, and to that end how reluctant Nintendo is about major firmware updates, something they might consider to be "hip and novel." It hinders developers who have unique ideas, and the Wii controller's own creativity has inadvertently hindered the developer's cause as well, forcing them onto this one method of motion-control, in many places "novel" control default that they can only remedy via the Classic Controllers or even degrading to the Gamecube Controller. That's not to discredit the Wiimote of course, it's only to say that it was a mixed bag for those developers who had their priorities elsewhere than Nintendo. Online gaming is another feature that largely hampers the Wii experience for some, as it lacks functionality and smoothness in comparison to other online systems, again rooting itself in the Wii's comparatively poor specs (for example, it lacks a standard hard drive [though flash memory does the job fine], and uses an AMD "Hollywood," and inferior graphics chip in comparison to the PS3 and XBox when utilized on the Wii platform). So with the Wii, gameplay is great, developer reception is great, but it's lack of decent hardware to perpetuate developers' ideas and a lack of Nintendo's active participation in updating the software framework that really burns it when put in the console arena.
Just my two cents…
