One Month To Go

Well, here we are, one month from the PS3 launch and the Wii launch. Can you feel the excitement? Its palpability is palpable.

Sony held a "gamer's day" to show off the PS3 yesterday, which was ironic given that no gamers outside of the press were allowed to actually touch the damn thing. I must say, I have conflicted emotions about this whole PS3 launch. On the one hand, competition is a beautiful thing in any arena, so a vibrant Sony product with lots o' launch games will make Microsoft step their shit up and gaming goodness will befall us all. Wheeee, rhyming. On the other hand, Sony has been pretty serious dickwads about this whole launch and I'd kind of like to see them fail just so that they'd have to face the realization that people, in fact, won't just buy anything Sony puts out because Sony put it out. On a third hand, enough people will just buy anything Sony puts out because Sony put it out, so the odds of that second hand scenario taking place are pretty low.

The fact is, Sony bugs me about as much as Microsoft bugged me when they came out with the Xbox, so I'm sure that with time, I'd come around to the PS3. I'm sure that most of the people who work for Sony are nice people, and they probably cringe every time Phil Harrison opens his piehole, just like the rest of us do, so it's silly to hate them just because the executives in charge of gaming are clueless lunkheads. It's also important to remember that it's a video game console, so really, investing any serious amount of emotion one way or another is pretty silly. I'm sure that by the time the PS3 is $129, I'll pick it up, and have just as many old PS3 titles to enjoy as I do now with the PS2 and then boy howdy, won't the joke be on Sony? Ha-ha. Hee-hee. Ho-ho.

With the Wii, I'm excited, but feeling a little, what's the word? Concerned. Not sure why. I've read some hands-on accounts lately, by non gaming press people of the Wii and it's launch games and the verdict was that games made for the motion sensing were awesome, others, not so much. This would include, sadly, Zelda. Now, given that this is the first time Zelda has ever been a launch title, and people have been slavering for the game ever since they saw a realistic Link demo on the 'Cube like a hojillion years ago, odds are, Nintendo has this shit wrapped up. However, Zelda was originally supposed to be a 'Cube title, so you wouldn't be completely off base to be concerned that perhaps adding motion sensitivity to sell Wii's isn't exactly an organic game design moment, if that makes sense.

It's also cause for concern that the gaming press hasn't been given final Wii hardware, or Wii games to start reviewing. With about 20+ launch games, that's a whoooooole lot of games to review in a month's time, especially one as huge as Zelda. There's also not a tremendous amount of Zelda hands on information in the gaming press, which makes me a cautious. I mean, this is Zelda. The gaming press should be all over that shit, getting us into a Hyrulean frenzy.

Bah! I'm sure it's just that I really want this thing in my house, so I'm filling the time with needless worry. I tend to do that at times.

I am filling up the time until Marvel Ultimate Alliance by watching movies. Tonight I started watching the Infinifilm version of "A Nightmare on Elm Street". It is an amazingly well done release of the movie, and the sound mix is particularly fantastic. I had forgotten how disturbing some of the imagery in this movie is. Tina's arm flopping out of the body bag as she's dragged down the school hallway always got to me as a kid. I like the fact that the "kids" in the movie look like normal teenagers, including a young Johnny Depp. Were this movie made now, Freddy would be 100% CGI and the teens would be played by slutted out CW tartlets. I bought "Feast" of the third Project Greenlight season today and look forward to watching Henry Rollins as a motivational speaker. The gore also holds special allure. Between this, "Slither" next week and soon "The Descent", it's a good couple of months for horror aficianados.