I have no real problem with the 360. I own one (for Oblivion), I have played a few good games on it. I don’t find that catalog quite as rich as some because it seems overloaded with mediocre shooters, online games that aren’t that interesting or sandbox GTA clones that aren’t that interesting.

I’m biding my time until the next Halo and the RPGs hit.

And for the record, I dare you to name 5 purchase worthy title in the first year of PS2′s existence. I bought my PS2 about 2 years after it was released because there weren’t enough good games. After 1 year I already got over 15 X360 games now and countless XBLA title. You own a 360, right? Why all the hate?

They’re just machines, what matters is the games.

Since the ps2 was introduced in ’99 (msrp $300), chip and board manufacturing costs have continued to drop, so I think it’s safe to assume a PS2 daughter board would cost less than $100 today.

This is significantly less than the current cost of a Blu-Ray drive, so I would substitute a standard DVD drive for the Blu-Ray and add the PS2 daughterboard for full backwards compatibilty.

To keep the marketing yahoos happy, I’d put the DVD player on a slide mount so it can be easily replaced without opening the case. That way, in a couple of years when the first killer games appear that require a Blu-Ray’s capacity, and Blu-Ray drives have significantly dropped in price, consumers can easily upgrade.

With this approach, the PS3 could sell for at least $200 less than it does today, with Sony losing less money on each unit.

But do the fools listen to moi? Never! Not even when they pay me for my opinion. Cassandra ‘R Us.

1) We’ll force consumers to buy new games by crippling the backward compatibility and claim it’s to shave a couple of bucks off the cost of the machine, which we plan to lose money on anyway.*

2) “Remember The Betamax!” shall be our battle cry! We have to get Blu-Ray DVD players into the market somehow, so we’ll force it down the throats of the gamers who’ll buy anything we ship, even though it doubles the cost of the machine, forcing us to lose money on every one.

The Wii, on the other hand, seems to be very much an engineers machine:

The only thing that’s changed significantly in video games in the last 25 years is the complexity of the sound and especially the images. How do we differentiate our platform from all the others? Let’s take a clue from “Dance, Dance, Revolution” and develop a new game controller that gets the gamers off the couch and knocking over the table lamps.

*) It worked for Gillette a century ago, and works for the home video gaming industry today.