gameplay ???

Why the hell would you call something a Wii? Sure, I’ve read the blurb about why they chose to call it that, but to the world’s English speaking population, it sounds like a synonym for the verb, ‘to piss’.

Xbox 360 - I’m sure a team of top high-flying marketing guys had a whole week at “Why-we-called-it-this-camp” before Microsoft scraped together a worthy enough nutsack to rubber stamp it, but still - what the hell do the words on their own actually mean?

Conversely Sony clubbed itself round the head with a mallet a couple of times and in a moment of ‘inspiration’ called a thing you plug into your TV to play games on - a playstation. Then to avoid subsequent concussion, they went crazy and slapped on a number ‘2′ for the second one. This time round they truly went apeshit, probably setting a world record for least amount of time spent coming up with a name by calling their third model, ‘3′.

Coming up with a different crap name for the playstation would have screamed to the world “We’ve moved on! We’re on the bleeding edge! It’s not just about games anymore! We’re thinking so far outside the box, it’s disappeared! We’re in the future, and it’s this:

The Sony Abstract Concept Name Part X!”

Think, then everyone would be all like, “Holy shit! It’s not even called a Playstation anymore!Not only can I play games on it, but I can watch TV, cure disease, win the war in Iraq…”

But no, they felt nice and cosy in their established brand, and instead they built up the same anticipation as before about something that is in reality, different, and shat themselves when people started to ask when the games were coming out.

Call me pidantic, call me lots of things, but it’s this same lack of imagination that results in crap computer games, crap movies, crap TV and crap all entertainment.

Do something else and stop whining god dammit.

And sure the first year game output hasn’t been incredible, but to me it seems things are picking up speed quickly at this point. The list of 1st and 3rd party titles coming out before Christmas is pretty long. Personally I am looking forward to titles such as Eye of Judgement, Haze, Little Big Planet, Folklore and Gran Turismo. Looking at next year I am looking forward to Soul Caliber, Socom and Final Fantasy.

I am sure others have different lists, but there should be more than enough game titles coming out over the next few month to feed most peoples needs.

And personally I think the media center functionality of the PS3 is a killer feature. Already bought myself two blu-ray movies and I am for sure going to get more.

So sure, the list of games so far isn’t that impressive, but the line-up for the next six Months looks solid to me.

Calling something a Playstation 3 immediately conjures up the word ‘gaming’ above and beyond any other features they bundle it with. So the PS2 could play DVDs - great, but it hardly compares to what they’ve tried to do with the PS3.

If they’re being bold enough to try to push beyond what people traditionally think of when they see that black box under the TV, why haven’t they been bold enough to come up with a new name that better fits with what they’re striving to accomplish?

At least then they wouldn’t have people bitching at them when they announce new stuff that isn’t to do with playing games.

Okay, calling it a Playstation gets a huge number of existing Sony customers foaming at the mouth with anticipation, but delivering something other than what those same customers who bought PS2s are drooling about is likely to piss more than a few of them off, and you end up with defensive comments like, “Oh but we’re trying to do so much more with this console than anyone’s ever done.”

Great, but we were kind of expecting a games console.

On another note, given how hard and expensive it’s been for developers to get to grips with the PS3 processor, it’s hardly surprising things have been quiet on the games front this first year.

There’s a similar reason why Wii games have had mixed receptions - games developers are still getting to grips with how to program for the control system in a way that doesn’t suck.

It also goes some way to explain why the 360 gets a raft of new big name title announcements every quarter - programming for the processor and the control system has been established further in advance and over time cost and complexity has been driven down - which wasn’t as big an issue (for better or worse) compared to Wii and PS3 in the first place anyway.

The best thing to do would be to embrace the new features and wait patiently for new games - when they come you might have too much arthritis to play them, but at least your grandchildren might enjoy them. Purely for nostalgia reasons, of course.

SUMMARY: worry about games 1st, and new tech/extras 2nd–the PS3 costs way too much to have such a void of software