Website Review - November 2006
Console Wars
The next-generation console war stepped up a gear on Saturday with the launch of Sony’s PS3 in Japan, and naturally the console’s long-awaited (perhaps ‘long-delayed’ is more accurate) release has been the subject of a lot of discussion on the internet.
Two great accounts of the shambolic PS3 launch in Tokyo are ‘PS3 Get!’ on Tokyo Incidents and ‘Foreigners and Fights, PS3 JPN Launch’s Dark Side’ on Kotaku.com which report on chaotic queueing, poor organisation and hordes of Chinese people paid to wait in line by Japanese entrepreneurs planning to resell consoles on Yahoo Auction for over-inflated prices. Both sites have photos of the launch, and the Kotaku.com report has videos of the chaos too.
For a more general look at the console war, this month’s Japanzine has a good overview of the Xbox, PS3 and Wii. I also checked out the official MicroSoft, PlayStation and Nintendo sites and found Nintendo’s Wii to be by far the most interesting console - The official site has videos of an elderly Japanese couple, a Japanese family, a Japanese girl, and people of various other nationalities having loads of fun using the Wii-mote controller.