Battle of the game consoles - controls at the ready!

by Laura Ford

Game consoles: All market products battle to win the war against their competitors. One of the biggest consumer wars ever is the epic battle between computer game consoles, with Xbox 360, PS3 and the Wii scrabbling to be the best and outsell the rest. Game consoles deathmatch!

Every games console has its perks, parts which are better then all the others. They use these, improving them to try and get more sales and slowly beat down the other contenders. The 3 main contestants are the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. It's time to find out which games console is going to win the war.

Ding ding ding! The contenders for the game consoles war

Firstly we can look at the Xbox 360, a games console which Microsoft has been able to plough money into in order to make it work in the industry. It has become a very popular console in the past few years - partly due to the price, it being the cheapest of the 3 main consoles. However since online communities have been formed, this has allowed the Xbox 360 to really thrive, with a huge online community which is stable and never leaves you waiting 10 minutes to join a game. Exclusive titles are another part of the Xbox 360's success. With Microsoft funding power it is able to buy out rights to games so they may only ever be available on its system, adding to its appeal. However, of course, in the places that the xbox fails the Sony PS3 wins hands-down.

The follow up to the world's most successful console (PlayStation 2) is the Sony PS3 which is (potentially) the most powerful of all game consoles to date. The PS3 possesses an individual feature: A blu-ray disk drive, something which the Xbox 360 lacks. The PS3's blu-ray drive allows not only games but DVDs to be played in HD quality. It also has a free online community - unlike the Xbox 360. However, it rarely feels like much of a community as it has substantially fewer people on at any given time than the Xbox 360 communities around. And the reason why most people turn their noses up at the PS3? The price. It is much more expensive than any of the other consoles out there and almost double the price of the Xbox 360.

Finally, the first motion-sensitive game console is the Nintendo Wii, providing with its motion-sensors an experience that neither the Xbox 360 nor the Sony PS3 can currently cater to. It targets a much wider range of audience than any of the other game consoles, with games being specifically designed to only be played on the Wii. However, where the Wii does lose out is with its graphics - its processing power seems able to handle graphics any more sophisticated than those on the last generation of game consoles. The Wii has to make up for its lack of power with innovation and creativity.

Statistically if we look at the sales figures the Wii wins by a mile, selling over 50 million by March 2009 compared to the Xbox 360's 30 million - and the PS3 falls behind at just 23 million. That doesn't mean the war is over.

But just put on your John Lennon hat for a moment and imagine if there was no war. Imagine combining all the positives of each of these 3 consoles and making a whole new game console. The Xii3 maybe? Okay, maybe not. But as a gamer it's tantalising to think about.

Howver, there is one more strong contender for computer games and the general gaming experience - the humble and long-standing PC, used in households worldwide for Facebook shenanigans, work and browsing the internet. These everyday PC's aren't currently good enough to run the latest games/ Take the PC game Crysis, it would take a roughly £600+ Desktop computer to meet the lowest recommendations needed to run this game. The loser of the battle? I think so. Where the PC comes into its own is for choose your own adventure games, MMPORGS and strategy games - computer games where graphics and speed are secondary to the concept that gameplay is king.

In the end it could be said that, from the point of view of the gamer, these game consoles are all winners. The PS3 wins out as the unaffordable media powerhouse, the Xbox 360 stands out as the exclusive hardcore gamers' king and the Wii has its shedload of awards in innovation and creativity bringing gaming to a new audience.

Me? I wait for the day the battlefield clears and there's a truce between the companies to create the holy grail of game consoles. Call me a dreamer, but the Xii3 would be the winner for me.

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