Coke or Pepsi?
The cola wars used to provide the best example we had of a functioning free market. Whether you bled red for Coca-Cola or were true red, white and blue for Pepsi, most people had a preference, and no one could argue they were all that different. It was a perfect competition.
These days, the battle for taste rages between Sony and Microsoft, between the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.
Like their carbonated counterparts, these twin titans of home gaming have more things in common than differentiate them. Sure, the PS3 is sleek and black next to the 360’s cool, modern, off-white casing. But once you load the games, the difference becomes details that most gamers will hardly ever notice.
If you want to know how close together the machines really are, just spend a couple of days comparing games available for both platforms.
“Armored Core 4” shows the futility in such comparisons. You might find the graphics in the PS3 version a bit more detailed and the screen display a bit wider. But once the giant, armored robots rumble into battle, the fun stays the same regardless of the platform. Even the PS3 and 360 controllers so closely follow the same model that switching between the two consoles won’t cause a single hitch when it comes to releasing a flurry of homing missiles at the enemy.
Sega’s “Virtua Tennis 3” follows the same logic – same game, two different machines. Whacking a little green ball back and forth across a high-definition net remains an eternal amusement in spite of any specific allegiance you might have to a particular game company. If 360 gamers need a reason to gloat, the PS3 version curiously lacks online play. While playing a computer opponent works well for practice, nothing beats smashing a serve past an opponent in another state.
Back on the PS3 side of the argument, Sony gamers finally get access to a 360 favorite – “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.” This “Dungeons & Dragons”-inspired role-playing game promises to suck up the hours in your real life and trade them for time in an enormous, detailed fantasy environment. In the translation to the PS3, the graphics picked up a little extra shine and the game a bit of new content. Otherwise, the new game remains almost a photocopy of the original.
Of course, cross-platform titles tend to work to the lowest-common denominator of both systems. So these games never show off the best that either system can offer. And every gamer knows that the exclusives – more so than cross-platform titles – really define the machine. Until “Grand Theft Auto” was on Xbox, PlayStation was the only machine for many gamers. And as long as Microsoft owns “Halo,” you can count on resounding sales of its gaming hardware around that title alone.
From all this you probably can understand the recent obsession with Nintendo’s Wii. In the world of cola, the Wii remains as unique as diet orange cream soda.
