Imagine that I get back on my computer and right away I find my minimum three pieces of news required. I found out some interesting things that both sets up more predictions and confirms some past predictions.

1up has an article titled “Assassin’s Creed Dev issues“. Apparently they are having an issue fitting the game on a DVD .I love to say I told you so. On that same note there is a rumor floating around that Microsoft is talking to Toshiba about possibly putting an HD-DVD player into the 360. Being that Blu-ray has been kicking HD-DVD’s ass solely because there is a Blu-ray player with every PS3 shipped. This seems to be the only way to not only solve the 360’s capacity problems but to save HD-DVD from certain death. Yes being right this often is a burden. This is a ballsy move if Microsoft decides to take it, I wonder if Sony would be able to make such a move.

Game Daily has an article titled “Wii Bubble about to burst?” Some developers are worried that their games might not sell well. They think that a large section of the Wii buying group bought it as a curiosity and won’t continue using it. Yes once again my crystal ball was right it is a fad, all though I do think it’s too soon for a heart felt “I told you so.” The developers also **** about Nintendo being a primary benefactor of the Wii’s success, gee what a horrible idea. Basically what I read in the article is that the devs shrugged the system off before it launched and now they are not riding the tide afterwards, boo hoo. Nintendo does seem to have gone back to it’s roots in terms of how it treats 3rd party developers. If there is one thing I agree on with just about every blog, message board post, article, etc Is that you do not have a good console without lots of good games. My Wii is sitting there collecting dust. Why? Cause the only game in the foreseeable future that I want is a 4 times sequel. Oh well maybe Nintendo has enough talent to keep it’s own system afloat. But being that they bank on every console sold they are probably already planning a new console once the Wii fad (if it is one) dies off. One probably more focused on the hardcore gamer.

PS3 games pushed back, ugggghhhh. I remember back in March looking at the soon to be released list I was thinking, “Holy **** From the end of August to the end of October there are too many games to buy! I DON’T HAVE THAT KIND OF MONEY!!!” But nope, HL2 gets pushed back, Unreal gets pushed back, Haze gets pushed back, Uncharted gets pushed back, GTAIV gets pushed back, the list goes on. My list has been whittled down to one. Ratchet and Clank is off the list because after thinking about it…it’s not worth 60 bucks, had this been $40-$50 games I wouldn’t even have to think about it. Much like Blu-rays, I can’t bring myself to spend an extra 50%-100% extra for a movie. Anyway Eye of Judgment looks really cool, but I don’t think I want to go that far down the nerd hole collecting neo-magic cards. Besides I’ve got all my Magic cards still. Anyone want to buy a black lotus? That leaves skate, which I didn’t even put on the list. I played the proving grounds demo and felt Tony Hawk has jumped the shark. I figured skate would be only worse, but since there were no games to buy I down loaded the demo to kill time, now I like it. I’m rambling now. Anyway next fall is shaping up to be another wallet buster. Already Borderlands, Fallout 3, and RFoM 2. Will these games get pushed back as well? I hope not because Sony is suffering from a severe case of vaporware.

One more article to talk about is the one where “EA wants gaming on a single open platform.” This has been my stance about computer gaming. If you want to increase your user base you have to lower the cost of entry. Shedding $200-$400 dollars off the computer is a way to do it. One console would not benefit the consumer though. I imagine that Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft absorb a lot of cost for their systems OS. EA may come out and say this, but they are not really stepping up to that plate. If they offered say 6 exclusives at a two a year rate you would see somebody come to the table. Hell I can see an open source console coming from the ATI/AMD merger. They already have the resources to develop the critical components of a console the main processor, the chipset, the graphics processor. I imagine AMD has already done some development of motherboards to make one integrated unit. The rest of the box could be off the shelf components.
If I would have to make a guess at the processor I would say either a duo Conventional/Graphics processor or a quad two conventional, one physics, one graphics, sitting on top of some massive L1 and L2 cache with about 2 gig of unified memory. I’ve got the rest of the system weeded out, but I’m trying to keep it short. I haven’t heard of anything even remotely like this so I’m really shooting in the dark.