I was never a huge Simpsons fan, but that thing up there warms my heart like nothing I’ve ever seen before. No, not even the shiny PS3 when it was officially unveiled May of last year. Roughly a month ago, the Xbox 360 Elite saw light of day with HDMI (which practically nobody in third world Philippines uses today) and a beefier 120 GB hard drive to let you get all the Live Arcade games there are, and there will ever be.
If you haven’t been following the rumor mill lately, new 65-nm processors are on the line and should pave the way for less noisy and cooler 360’s (with hopefully less chances for red rings of death), but none of the graphics bravado and a processor as powerful as the PS3’s Cell. Which makes sense, as any major hardware change can result to compatibility issues with the games that are already out. The question “Is this all Microsoft has up its sleeves in the wake of the Sony PS3 giant?” should then not make very good argument.
Much like the personal computer, console generations are typically three years in between. Already halfway through its lifetime, we have seen the 360’s games go from cartoon-esque (think Dead or Alive 4) to life-like (Rainbow Six: Vegas), and we can expect things to get better as newer games exploit 1080p. Meanwhile, we see PS3 games already undergoing the transition from ports of games from older consoles (Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) to finally coming into its own (Resistance: Fall of Man).
The yellow and shiny Xbox 360 – I like. Happy gamers need no stinkin’, yet another next-generation console: at least for the time being. And so ends my talking up Microsoft brownies in an attempt to put balance in a world where Mac users get thunder for all fanboy-ism.