- Joined
- Jul 20, 2006
It was WILD!
People were predicting "The End of Sony." According to completely unreliable sources Sony was going to absolutely go out of business and bluray was going to fail. Then there was the meteoric rise of the Nintendo Wii... which some predicted would dominate the market. And... in terms of console sales due to artificial "shortages"... it did! For a while anyway.
This was the next gen! And what a wild ride it became.
The biggest shock of the entire next generation of consoles came at the very beginning when Microsoft released the X-Box 360 and caught both Sony and Nintendo with their collective pants down and left them in the dust. It was a move which neither company ever fully recovered from. As recently as this past Thanksgiving the X-Box 360 was still selling more than the Sony and Nintendo's offering.
Which brings us to the only thing I was wrong about with this console generation: I thought releasing a console that early would be suicide... but it was actually Epic Games that came to Microsoft's rescue by convincing them to add more RAM to the system by showing them what gears would look like with... and without the additional RAM.
It was the gift that kept on giving and allowed Microsoft to remain competitive against the much newer (but RAM lightweight) PS3. Bluray drive be damned!
Meanwhile Nintendo was losing at the same time it was winning. I called it early... 280 billion systems sold and about 30 games sold. And that was pretty much just 30 copies of New Super Mario Brothers. To the tune of... now when you go to the supermarket... you have the tough decision of whether to buy a Nintendo Wii... or another package of napkins... because who seriously wants to run out of napkins when you need them the most?
Meanwhile most of those 280 billion Wiis... Including my revision 1.3 Wii that plays gamecube games and supports every bootloader ever invented and is the only device I brought to Spain that will allow me to play DVDs... all of them are currently collecting dust in someones closet or doing a weak job of holding up the books on someone's shelf while the rest of us are playing Assassin's Creed 3 and Tekken Tag 2.
It was a wild ride of Sony and Microsoft as well... Red light of Death! YELLOW light of death! Exploding lithium batteries! Anonymous attacks shutting down PSN and stealing everyone's info! But if you thought any of this would be the end of either Sony or Microsoft then you obviously suck at math and should start working on a liberal arts degree or a political science major because then THEY CAME BACK! Like The Undertaker! (Who also came back at Wrestlemania this year.)
And speaking of comebacks... What a great year for Anderson Silva. He didn't need to comeback. He just kicked *** all year long and scored the cover on THQ's UFC3... only for THQ to file for BANKRUPTCY six months later! The UFC franchise must have saw it coming and moved over to EA. The fate of Saints Row, Smackdown, and Homefront? UNKNOWN!
And who could've POSSIBLY guessed... after a series of half-assed efforts on the previous console generation that THE FIGHTING GAME would make the most dramatic comeback of all time on next gen systems? Sure... there were fighting games on the PS2 and Xbox... but let's be serious here... they weren't actually trying.
And while Soul Calibur IV at least participated it was Street Fighter IV that went BALLS OUT and led what became the fighting game revival. Followed quickly by BlazBlue and every other fighting game that ever existed. (Even a re-release of Fighting Vipers and Virtua Fighter 5!) How wild can you get!?
Fighting games in 2012! Tekken Tag on a new Nintendo System! A Nintendo controller with a screen for no reason!
MAAAAAAAADNESS!
People were predicting "The End of Sony." According to completely unreliable sources Sony was going to absolutely go out of business and bluray was going to fail. Then there was the meteoric rise of the Nintendo Wii... which some predicted would dominate the market. And... in terms of console sales due to artificial "shortages"... it did! For a while anyway.
This was the next gen! And what a wild ride it became.
The biggest shock of the entire next generation of consoles came at the very beginning when Microsoft released the X-Box 360 and caught both Sony and Nintendo with their collective pants down and left them in the dust. It was a move which neither company ever fully recovered from. As recently as this past Thanksgiving the X-Box 360 was still selling more than the Sony and Nintendo's offering.
Which brings us to the only thing I was wrong about with this console generation: I thought releasing a console that early would be suicide... but it was actually Epic Games that came to Microsoft's rescue by convincing them to add more RAM to the system by showing them what gears would look like with... and without the additional RAM.
It was the gift that kept on giving and allowed Microsoft to remain competitive against the much newer (but RAM lightweight) PS3. Bluray drive be damned!
Meanwhile Nintendo was losing at the same time it was winning. I called it early... 280 billion systems sold and about 30 games sold. And that was pretty much just 30 copies of New Super Mario Brothers. To the tune of... now when you go to the supermarket... you have the tough decision of whether to buy a Nintendo Wii... or another package of napkins... because who seriously wants to run out of napkins when you need them the most?
Meanwhile most of those 280 billion Wiis... Including my revision 1.3 Wii that plays gamecube games and supports every bootloader ever invented and is the only device I brought to Spain that will allow me to play DVDs... all of them are currently collecting dust in someones closet or doing a weak job of holding up the books on someone's shelf while the rest of us are playing Assassin's Creed 3 and Tekken Tag 2.
It was a wild ride of Sony and Microsoft as well... Red light of Death! YELLOW light of death! Exploding lithium batteries! Anonymous attacks shutting down PSN and stealing everyone's info! But if you thought any of this would be the end of either Sony or Microsoft then you obviously suck at math and should start working on a liberal arts degree or a political science major because then THEY CAME BACK! Like The Undertaker! (Who also came back at Wrestlemania this year.)
And speaking of comebacks... What a great year for Anderson Silva. He didn't need to comeback. He just kicked *** all year long and scored the cover on THQ's UFC3... only for THQ to file for BANKRUPTCY six months later! The UFC franchise must have saw it coming and moved over to EA. The fate of Saints Row, Smackdown, and Homefront? UNKNOWN!
And who could've POSSIBLY guessed... after a series of half-assed efforts on the previous console generation that THE FIGHTING GAME would make the most dramatic comeback of all time on next gen systems? Sure... there were fighting games on the PS2 and Xbox... but let's be serious here... they weren't actually trying.
And while Soul Calibur IV at least participated it was Street Fighter IV that went BALLS OUT and led what became the fighting game revival. Followed quickly by BlazBlue and every other fighting game that ever existed. (Even a re-release of Fighting Vipers and Virtua Fighter 5!) How wild can you get!?
Fighting games in 2012! Tekken Tag on a new Nintendo System! A Nintendo controller with a screen for no reason!
MAAAAAAAADNESS!
