Not entirely. The generation before the PS2-GC-XBox generation was PS-N64-DC, with a little splash of PS2 toward the end. That was all Sony’s spotlight, though. In my personal estimation, I thought the N64 sucked the most of the three consoles, but in terms of overall success I think the N64 came in #2 only because the Dreamcast bit it and bit it hard. I still mourn.
(Tried to find data to back this up, but couldn’t, so it’s all IME)
The Dreamcast didn’t come in until near the end of the Playstation and N64.
Pretty sure Goldeneye won’t be available on the Virtual Console due to licensing costs. Your pants are safe.
Perfect Dark was pretty much the same game in multiplayer. Rockets in the temple!
Atari VCS, Colecovision, Intellivison ?
NES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx?
Gameboy, Gamegear, Lynx?
N64, Saturn, Jaguar ?
And the Wii, at $250, is being sold at a profit.
So Sony is gambling big time. They’re gambling that they sell enough games to recoup their losses in consoles. They’re gambling the Blu-Ray doesn’t become the new Betamax. Microsoft is using a similar model, but not quite as extreme.
But even if Sony or Microsoft wins in terms of units sold, Nintendo will almost surely still sell enough to remain financially solvent, and may even come out on top in terms of pure profit!
Ah, yes, I concede defeat. Although, really, was the Turbo Grafx or Lynx even a real factor against Sega and Nintendo?
I’m looking at getting a Wii this chrimbo for a number of reasons, including (in no particular order)…
1: HDTV. Haven’t got one, and getting a decent sized one (32" or thereabouts) is going to add another £4-£500 to the price of PS3 or 360. I know that you don’t need HDTV to play the games, but presently a number of developers don’t seem to realise this (have you tried to read the text on Dead Rising, on a normal TV?)
2: Game releases. Alot of games coming out on the PS3 or 360 either (a) are also coming out on the PC, (b) have an equivalent headed for the PC or (c) genres that I have no intrest in (sports/eastern RPG’s). The releases announced for the Wii seem to be more original and innovative.
3: Price. £178 for the Wii. Hell even if the games turn out to be junk, and I bin the thing 6 months down the line, it’s not cost me the earth. Add on the fact that I’ll be able to buy one of the DX10 graphics cards for my PC and the total spend will probably be less than a PS3.
4: The controller. So I’m shallow 
5: The name. I did think it was stupid at first, but it is growing on me. And I know all the store staff will be sick of it, but I want to walk in and say in a loud voice, “I’D LIKE A WII PLEASE”. (see point 4 as to why).
One thing I would like to know is what the games are going to cost. The £50 price for PS3 and 360 games is just too much. Especially with the likes of FIFA 07, which actually has less content on the 360 than the original Xbox version.
So yup Wii for Me this December
Tell you what, the Turbo Graphix wasn’t a real contender… great games. But that’s not what we should be looking for, for an analogy to the PS3.
For that, we have the Neo Geo.
Indeed it won’t be for two reasons: 1. It would cost too much to obtain the James Bond license, and 2. No Rare games, since they’re a division of Microsoft now.
As ever, I will buy Nintendo’s next console second hand, and buy maybe ten games maximum, mostly Nintendo offerings 
Of course having a new kid and a part time degree on hand, perhaps I won’t 
All they’d have to do is remove Bond-specific content (names, perhaps faces, and such) from the title and menu screens. The actual content of the game shouldn’t be affected at all, unless perhaps bungee jumping down the face of a dam is a copyrighted maneuver.
The game was jointly published by Rare and Nintendo, rather than as a third-party release, so I’d imagine Nintendo would be within their rights to do so, no?
Oh well. At least F-Zero was all Nintendo; they can’t take that one away.
I beg to differ, good sir! My current system is a socket 939 Athlon 64 3700+ at 2.75GHz with 2GB DDR400 RAM and a Geforce 7900GT at 600MHz/1600MHz. With motherboard and power supply, these listed internals will cost you about $700; I score about 5,000 in 3DMark06, 10,000 in 3DMark05, and I can run Oblivion on maximum settings at 1280x1024. You could definitely step this down to below $600 and still get an excellent visual experience.
Addendum: upon checking the prices of these components again, it seems that memory prices have gone through the roof in the last few months. The 2GB of Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM that I paid $150 for back in June has now shot up to $300!!! This is ridiculous, and it would certainly make building a budget gaming system based on last-gen sockets and memory a real pain in the ass. Still, you could definitely get solid performance in Oblivion (and any other current-gen PC game) for about the price of a PS3. (They’d probably look even better, in fact, unless you’re willing to fork over even more dough for an HDTV to go with your next-gen console.)
Definitely not. I’m sufficiently intrigued by it that it might be my first console since my NES.
A good post. I was exaggerating, a little - gaming computers are as affordable as they’ve ever been if you want to go last-gen. Still, though, if you’re even thinking about gaming, building a box from scratch?.. 100 for a processor, 150 for a video card, 150 for RAM, 100 for a motherboard, 100 for a case/PS, 100 for a HD, 100 for assorted hardware (CD-DVD drive, cheapish sound card, other random stuff I may have forgotten) is 800ish for hardware alone, plus a copy of WinXP is another hundred (required for gaming, unless you’re masochistic enough to set up a Linux box for Windows gaming). And that doesn’t include monitor/speakers/peripherals, either, if you don’t just have them lying around (and a decent monitor, in particular, is another significant expense). This is a price range where it’s pretty easy to get a decent deal from someone like Dell, probably a better deal than building it yourself because it’ll include the monitor, WinXP, etc… but you’re still talking 700-800 for a very basic gaming box that will be obsolete years before the PS3. Of course you can also do X other things on that computer, so again, the point is more that they don’t really compare
No Donkey Kong Country, then? That’ll seem…odd, won’t it? I mean, does it get much more Nintendo than Donkey Kong?
Nintendo still has Donkey and Diddy Kong. They’re still making Donkey Kong games, and Diddy Kong has appeared recently in games like Mario Tennis, so I’m sure the Donkey Kong Country trilogy will be available.
Not quite. Donkey Kong is still a Nintendo license, and I’m pretty confident Nintendo reserves all rights for the DKC games, so there really isn’t any reason why it couldn’t/wouldn’t be on Wii.
I suppose you might say I fudged a little in my original post; often when discussing the price of a gaming system, one considers only those components that will actually affect performance - the motherboard, processor, memory, and graphics card (also probably the power supply). For the other things, like the case, HDD, optical drive, and operating system, oftentimes the ones you have lying around will be sufficient. You are right though; the total cost of a good Oblivion-capable PC would be a bit higher than the cost of a PS3 once you include HD, OS, and input devices. I still think you shouldn’t include the monitor, as you probably wouldn’t include your TV in the price of the PS3! 
This is sometimes true, especially in the really low-end PCs (with the free monitors), but a lot of times it would be much cheaper to order the components separately.
For example, take a look at their [$1600 XPS 410](
http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/cto_xpsdt_410?
c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs) system. It includes an E6300 Allendale Core 2 Duo ($180), an ATI X1300Pro ($80), two 1GB DDR2-533 DIMMS ($200), what I’m assuming is two 250GB HDDs in RAID-1 ($160), a CD/DVD drive ($20), some unknown motherboard (maybe $100), and Windows XP MCE ($110), for a total of about $850. Throw in a case ($50) and a 19" LCD monitor ($200) to bring the total cost up to $1100. By putting this stuff together yourself, you would save $500.
On their cheaper systems, the included 19" monitors really do bring the package much closer to being a good deal, but even with their $999 XPS (on the same page as above), you’d save over a hundred bucks buying everything yourself.
This is very true. Keeping a gaming system up-to-date does add costs over the years that you won’t have to worry about with a console. Still (and to get back on topic after this long derailment :D), for just a gaming console, $600 is way too much for me, especialy since most of the extra cost is just that damned Blu-Ray drive. I don’t want one, and I don’t know why I would ever want one, until they’re cheaper and more ubiquitous than plain old DVDs.
I plan to buy a Wii, for two simple reasons:
The price. I can in good conscience sink $1000 on my next PC upgrade, and still add $350 or so for a Wii and a couple of games. I can’t say that for the equivalent $700+ PS3.
The gameplay. I am really very excited about the possibilities of Wiimote gaming - it’s something that simply, fundamentally, I can’t get on a PC (unlike most of the offerings of PS3 and Xbox360). I just hope developers take full advantage of it, or the Wii may very well turn out to be a disappointment.
If Sony just hadn’t made this stupid gamble on Blu-Ray, I might very well have been picking up a PS3 this season; after all, there will probably be many PS3 games that make me wish I had one. I might buy a PS3 if they can be had for less than $200 within 3 years. I can’t really see that happening though.
Rare owns the rights to all games featuring original characters (*Banjo-Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark *, etc) as well as GoldenEye. As Least Original User Name Ever said, Nintendo owns the rights to all Rare games featuring characters originally developed by Nintendo such as Donkey Kong Country, so these are the only Rare games that would be available on Virtual Console.