Microsoft today announced yet ANOTHER pro version of the console, shafting out recent elite and even early adopters by adding an HDMI port at no extra cost.

www.engadget.com/2007/...0-premium/

With all the recent RRoD problems, the pricy add-ons too bulk up the 360 to the PS3's standards, and MS's recent moves to squeeze more and more money out of current and potential 360 owners, I am well beyond frusteration, and will more than likely support Sony and Nintendo exclusively on the next generation of consoles.

Just my take, but why do they keep upping the ante on an already older system? 360 came out too early (No one learned from the Sega Dreamcast?), and while it beats the crap out the PS3 for game catalouge, the hardware sure was not very well thought out long-term.

After the Halo 3 craze dies off, I predict the 360 support from the gaming world will begin to wane in favor of the oher two companies.

I love my 360. I don't watch movies on my 360 so I don't need the hddrive. I don't buy any of the extra except for the wireless racing wheel.

I've had two 360 go belly up since I got my original, but it has been fixed in a timely basis for no cost to me and the unit that I have now has had no issues. I think these new models coming out are really just manufactuing changes to fix the original hardware failures that they are bundling up to get rid of the older units that still haven't had the 3 red rings.

There is nothing out there that makes me want to buy a ps3 and I have the wii but don't play it nearly as often as I do my 360.

Don't forget to download the demo for Blue Dragon and Bioshock. Other than Halo 3, these are the games to me that are going to great this year. I've already got my christmas list made.

As for the extra HDMI port, I already have both of mine used on my TV so far so it's not that big of a deal to me.

I'm with Reyak on this one. Even though my 360 just started it's travel to Germany for repair, I love it as a gaming machine. HDMI-port on the newer models is just a a natural thing. Remember how many revisions of PS2 has come by? Closer to 10? Also, I don't actually need HDMI, component gives perfect (or "good enough for me") picture.
PS3 is still too expensive, it doesn't have any "Killer App"-game and frankly, I don't believe it has so much more muscle than 360, that so many are led to believe... Wii, now that I most surely will buy sometime. But it has nothing to do with these REALLY Next-Gen machines

Don't get me wrong, I love my 360 as well. I am just not impressed with the progression of the system so far. I could care less about the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD options, games are important on the console.

The 360 wins hands down for all 3 systems there thus far for game offerings. It's quite sickening that except for a few games (The Darkeness, Fall of Man, Lair (Out today btw), most of the PS3 game offerings are titles that have already been on the 360 for quite sometime.

Microsoft has the better system currently for me, I get a lot of use out of the marketplace gaming and the online play. I do use my PS3 to play all of the PS2 titles I missed however, like God of War 1 and 2, and some of the offshot Resident Evil games. A lot o them are bargain bin now, so I am using my PS3 a lot.

I guess my main point here is that the HDMI port should have been included in the Elite model, it did just afterall just recently come out. 1080p is usable with component video, but the slightly better 1080i will only display on the HDMI cable from what I understand.

My other gripe is that the newer model wih the HDMI port (Already in stores) does not yet have the improved small chip and heat reduction. This means even the newer units are prone to he RRoD. I don;t need all the new goodies, but I am saying they could have waited 2 months and made a better descision on hardware timing.

The reason, why there isn't "great" PS3 games (well, maybe a few) is quite simple. It's (PS3's) architecture is unlike anything else, it's hard to program efficiently. I read from somewhere, that if a game is firstly made for PS3 in mind, it will be kinda easy to transfer to 360, but the other way around brings BIG problems (as we have seen in many EA games, which have framerate issues). Totally same situation was with PS2 at the beginning, the startup games were totally awful...MGS2 was the first one to show that something can be made with PS2...
1080p is in my mind overrated (on gaming), these machines just don't have the muscle to make proper "Next-Gen" game at that resolution and scaling from 720p just doesn't look good. If you however need 1080p (movies...), HDMI is the way to go, component wasn't engineered to scale that high.
Regarding the RRoD (my 360 just got picked to voyage to Germany), I believe that the HDMI-version has been already fixed (chips glued to motherboard, more cooling added, different clamp... Choose one or all, I don't know).
All is not rosy, that is true and bad decisions have certainly been made.

Actually, the games I played on the PS3 that did use 1080p looked pretty awesome. They arn't the more graphically intensive though. I think it's probably a good thing that the graphically intensive PS3 games use the lower resolutions which still look darn good.

Next to that, MGS3 and FFXIII both look promissing. Now if only they'd come out, it might make a change for Sony right there. If you havn't seen the E3 MGS3 video (which was basically a dev playing the game right in front of everyone), you should probably take a look at it. I'm also looking at The Agency (check the SOE Fan Faire post I made for that one), which will also be a PS3 game.

I noticed yesterday that the 360 had higher definition capability for Madden 08 than the PS3 version did (720 on the PS3, 1080 on the 360). I just find it plain odd.

I am no developer by any means, bu I do know several that program for consoles and most of them say that PS3 and 360 are different, bu no harder to write code for from machine to machine. An article came out about this recently from the GRAW dev team.

www.joystiq.com/2007/0...-than-360/