I went into E3 rather excited. I watched all of the (boring) big 3 conferences; I even watched Sony and Microsoft despite not owning their consoles. I expected to see some serious announcements this year. All of the consoles have been out for a few years so this should have been all about games. The problem is that it was not. Nintendo's conference was awful; I've never been so down after a Nintendo conference. In the past, for every casual game or toy, some great news followed, and I was cool with that. I waited for that moment and it never happened. MS, despite their success, has decided to chase after Nintendo. That's not a direction I expected from them. Sony packed a bit more into the presentation, but Tretton's delivery was horrible.

After the conferences, I waited with baited breath to add titles to the list of upcoming games I'm looking forward to. It's very disappointing when I am only adding a few games to it. Rhythm Heaven(Tengoku) and Retro Gaming Challenge are both rather exciting. At first, I was excited by the prospect of playing Taiko drums in WiiMusic but, upon further research, it seems that the game is a play-along and not a song creator. So, in the end, nothing is added to my Wii list. The DS list was already heavy, so 2 more items added is cool. The Wii is the problem. Between now and February, there are only 5 retail games I'm interested in. That's a problem.



After all of this, I've decided to buy another system. Street Fighter IV is looking better and better, especially after reading some location test articles at shoryuken.com. On top of that, BlazBlue and Battle Fantasia both look amazing. SNK announced last year that King of Fighters XII will be PS3 and 360, so I had to decide on which system to buy.

I historically have bought Nintendo hardware because I've not had any serious problems and my DS Lite hinge crack was fixed very quickly and with no hassle to me. I shy away from MS hardware since they are a software maker that cannot make decent software and their 360 hardware problems are legendary. I also do not like the idea of paying for Live. Most of my friends have a Wii and a PS3. I like that the PS3 is region free and has free online. The game library is somewhat small, currently, but most of the games I want will be released on that console, so I'm leaning in that direction. I have found a place where I can get a 40 GB with Virtua Fighter 5 and the Hori Fighting Stick for just over $400. Battle Fantasia is available for import now and the price is reasonable.



With the Wii on top, I had hoped that I could avoid another system. That was the case just a few weeks ago, but it seems that E3 changed everything.