console yourself

First, some background. There was a distinct narrative to the last round of the ongoing war between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft (and, debatably, Sega, who received a knockout punch and won't be competing in the hardware arena any more). Each company's new plans seem to be informed by their past strategy.

Sony got out of the gate early with its Playstation 2, releasing it more than a year before Microsoft and Nintendo's competing consoles. Although this ultimately ensured that the PS2 would hold the dominant marketshare for this generation, it also resulted in less cost-effective hardware than its competitors. Sony's system also wasn't very developer-friendly, leading to a lot of games that didn't look or play as well as they could have. Still, Sony was the clear winner in this round.

Microsoft had never before participated in the console market, so they decided to buy their way in by subsidizing the hardware. It was an expensive strategy -- analysts estimate that MS lost between $30 and $150 per XBox sold over the course of the unit's manufacturing run. But the strategy worked -- the XBox is the number two console in America and indisputably the most powerful. It's got better graphics, sound and online play than its competitors. Oh, and because it's built on the same architecture as your desktop computer, it's found a second life as an emulator/media-pc/all-purpose linux machine.

Nintendo... well, sometimes it seems like Nintendo doesn't really have their heart in this fight. The Gamecube was a nice little system, with cheap but effective hardware, a hard-to-pirate media format, and, eventually, a wireless controller so good that everyone else has stolen the idea for their next system. But Nintendo consistently refused to embrace the other platforms' strategy of releasing swarms of tasteless "adult-themed" games, instead preferring to eke out a trickle of fun but juvenile titles based on longstanding franchises like Zelda, Mario and Donkey Kong. As a result, the industry's core angry-teenager demographic has largely written off Nintendo as kid's stuff. Also not helping: Nintendo's technological tone-deafness, which reached its pinnacle when president Satoru Iwata claimed that "users don't want online games". Ouch. Bongo controllers and tight integration between the Gameboy and Gamecube were pleasant enough, but not enough to prompt a landslide of purchases. Still, the hardware is cheap and commands the nervous-parent segment of the market. The Gamecube beat the XBox in Japan and is competitive with it here in the US -- but despite having many excellent games, it's generally considered to be hopelessly uncool.

So what are the big three up to now? Well, pretty much more of the same, but in slightly different order.

Microsoft is the only company that has publicly committed to releasing its hardware before Christmas -- and an accidental leak surrounding the product's MTV preview special suggests a November debut.

So here it is: the XBox 360. It'll have the de rigeur wireless controllers, hi-def support for every game and a new three-core PowerPC processor. (Kind of) answering the two biggest questions surrounding the console: there will be a detachable hard drive that, at least initially, will ship with all units. Also, there will be backward-compatibility with some XBox 1 games -- but not all. The transition from an x86 to a PowerPC architecture makes supporting older games tricky. Assuming that mod chips can be developed, the PPC architecture might also slow down the development of user-created applications. The three-core chip is powerful, but programming code to take advantage of parallel execution is tough -- we probably won't see what the hardware can really do until developers have had a year or two to learn how to fully exploit the platform.

But the signature feature of the 360 isn't the hardware; it's Microsoft's online strategy. XBox Live is being massively expanded, with a free basic level available to everyone. You won't be able to play Madden and its ilk on this "silver" offering, but you'll be able to maintain your online profile, play parlor games like checkers, download game updates, and participate in the micropayment content economy that Microsoft is talking up but will almost certainly end up ignoring. The 360 will let you stream a downloaded movie off of your Windows PC onto your hi-def TV, and receive an invitation to play Halo from an online Buddy in the middle of it. All in all, I'm pretty excited... although of course I wish they'd named it the XBox 2π.

So here's the Playstation 3. I think. I could have mixed up its picture with that of a particularly advanced coffeemaker. I'm not a Playstation guy -- you'll have to forgive the hostility. But to me, this looks like an amazing leap forward in Sony's ongoing quest to make the worst controller possible.

Still, the PS3 does seem poised to win this round in terms of sheer horsepower: its Cell processor is supposed to be wildly powerful. But it's also likely to pose a challenge to developers. The new XBox's PowerPC architecture is at least familiar to developers from the world of Apple; the Cell is a whole new deal. It remains to be seen how many titles will take full advantage of the hardware.

Aside from the processor, the PS3 will also have wifi (to allow integration with the PSP) and a removable hard drive. And, like the PS2, it'll be fully backward compatible, both with PS2 games and the original Playstation. Oh yeah: wireless controllers.

Finally, we have the misleadingly named Nintendo Revolution. The actual unit is going to be even smaller than this -- the size of three or four DVD cases, supposedly. It'll play Gamecube games and the Revolution's new full-sized discs, offer wifi support for the Nintendo DS and have better online options than the Gamecube. The only truly exciting feature, though, is all about playing it safe: the Revolution will feature 512 megs of (removable?) flash memory, onto which older Nintendo games can be downloaded -- the word is that this includes support for the NES, SNES and N64. This would be a hugely popular value-added feature. Who doesn't love Super Mario 3? But I suspect this is a core plank in Nintendo's ongoing strategy of clinging desperately to their existing franchises (and doing little else). These ROMs are already widely available, and flash memory is easy to hack. The system looks susceptible to piracy; if Nintendo is counting on it for a revenue stream, they may find themselves disappointed.

Other than the backward compatibility, the Revolution is unexciting. It's tiny, it's probably going to be cheap, and it's only a few times more powerful than the Gamecube. Nintendo seems content to be everyone's second-favorite console and continue to dominate the portable market. But with the PSP offering a serious challenge in the handheld arena, I suspect we'll see Nintendo flailing in a pretty serious way by the end of this era of the console wars.