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I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Unalone asserts Wii dominance (also here):

A commenter on Hacker News reminded me: 2009 ought to be the year that we see legitimate titles hit the Wii. It takes 3 years to develop a production-level game for the Wii, and nobody bet on the Wii’s winning. Now it’s regained Nintendo’s lead by a ridiculous amount. This should be the year that development for the Wii finally hits a sort of climax.

I’ll believe it when I see it. The video game world is full of hype and anticipation that later evaporates or disappoints.

It’s a terrible idea to buy a console based on what might come out and might be good in the future.

The 360 is the better system for most gamers today. It has tons of games that are already out that we know are definitely good. And since the system has been out for a relatively long time, it has a sizable library of hit games that cost $20-30 each.

I don’t take certain competitors seriously. People developed for the 360 only because it launched early and beat the PS3, not because the system has anything worthwhile of its own.

Do you have anything in particular to back that up?

(I don’t count online gameplay here, because my attention has always been solely on hardware features, but the Xbox certainly has the online advantage.)

Oh, you’re judging on hardware features. Well, that’s a weak position to take at all — hardware doesn’t matter nearly as much as a console’s game library. Now, capabilities matter a lot, and they’re often related to hardware. But you won’t convince me that the Wii beats the 360 overall on noteworthy hardware-enabled capabilities. You might prefer the Wii’s motion-based controller, but I prefer the 360’s hard drive, HD resolution (and far nicer graphics), and HDMI port (saves a ton of cables). And once we go into software capability differences, it’s pretty tough for the Wii to beat the 360’s DVD playback, network video playback, the new Netflix on-demand client, Xbox Live, Xbox Live Arcade, the media store, downloadable game demos, and downloadable add-ons (like Rock Band tracks, extra game maps, etc.).

The PS3 doesn’t have anything interesting to offer on its own, either.

It’s a Blu-Ray player that’s not much more expensive than any other Blu-Ray player. That’s not nearly as compelling as when the PS2 was the most affordable DVD player in 2001, but it helps. It also has some useful innovations like entire downloadable games, user-installable OSes for hobbyists, and probably a bunch of other stuff that I don’t know about. That said, I don’t follow the PS3 at all, but last I heard, it still had a fairly weak game library.

What’s interesting, though, is that having a weak game library doesn’t really hurt the PS3 as much as it hurts the Wii because people have other compelling reasons to buy the PS3 instead of only playing its games, primarily the Blu-Ray playback. (If the 360’s library was weak, it would have the same benefit with all of its media features.) But the Wii has no such fallback. It has no other useful purpose: if you don’t feel like playing any Wii games for a week or a month or a year, it’s useless. I know that’s the way all game consoles used to be, but advancing past that was progress — good progress. The 360’s multiple media roles have replaced 2-3 potential boxes and ~20 potential wires with 1 box and 3 wires (power, HDMI, Ethernet).

I wish you’d back up your incredibly dismissive statements with a few more specifics. It sounds like you’ve never seen or played a 360 or PS3.