Yes Virginia, there are still Sony fanboys (and plenty of them)

It's real easy to look at all the bad press Sony's gotten over the last several months in the internet vacuum and believe that the Sony faithful have been abandoning their company in droves and they are destined for a huge downfall. But back in the real world, Sony's still a massive juggernaut, and despite all my bashing, it pleases me to see so much enthusiasm for any system. My real problem with Sony is their complacency, which just comes naturally with a stranglehold on the home console market like they currently have. Nintendo had the same problem when they were dominating the home market, and it ended up with them just barely competing for a solid 3rd place in the console wars. Domination by any one company is bad for the industry as whole. I'm hoping for a much more even market share for all three systems this time around (admittedly though, I hope the Wii has a slight but definitive edge over the other two).

In all the hoopla this week over Gears of War, Microsoft's other potentially big console exclusives were virtually ignored. Viva Pinata is an obviously blatant attempt to have something to try a compete against Nintendo's own massive hit series Animal Crossing, with a breeding mechanic thrown in. Everybody will drool over GOW, but assuming this title delivers on its simple but addictive potential, this will probably be a huge sleeper hit.

And the 360 HD-DVD hard drive is finally out. Now you can play high definition movies on your 360 just like the PS3. Unfortunately, the $200 price tags makes a new system with the player just as much as a high end PS3, and if you add in an almost necessary year of Xbox live, it's suddenly $50 more. So much for that price advantage. As much as I don't think either format is going to take off anytime soon, at least Sony's integrating it into their hardware to give it a solid shot. Historically, add-ons are a disaster (see the PS2 hard drive, the Sega CD, the Super Scope, etc.), I don't see the HD-DVD drive going much differently in the long run, especially if the movies aren't there to support the format (which they aren't for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray right now).

I've been meaning to post the trailer for the guaranteed to be completely awesome for season 6 of 24 for quite awhile now, so here it is if you haven't seen it:



And also the almost as awesome (cause nothing's more awesome than Jack Bauer) trailer for Spider-Man 3:



That's it for today, but with less than a week until two of the biggest launches in history, I'll be sure to be posting something almost daily in the meantime, here's your FREE GAME OF THE WEEK: Puzzle Bobble