The first battle, in what will hopefully be a long war, is over. Both have given their first presentation, and Sony has completely stolen the show. Why? Because they have shown a lot of cool stuff and Microsoft hasn’t, that’s why. At the moment theres a certain feeling that Sony has Dreamcasted the XBox 2 (I refuse to call it 360).

Most of the videos are pre-rendered clips, and for those that are in-game footage, when you see the screenshots you notice a lot of tricks which you know will lessen the sense of photorealism and detail. BUT, the fact remains, that Sony is showing games, and doing so in a great bang, whereas Microsoft has been trickling, leaking, and finally exposing, lists of features and plans and visions and fucking celebrity endorsements. Sony shows (prerrendered) footage from MotorStorm and Killzone 2, while Microsoft announces that Final Fantasy XI will be ported to XBox2. Meh.

PS3 has about twice the overall computing power of the XBox2; same RAM (thank god Microsoft listened, they really believed 256Mb was good enough!); I expect very similar rendering features; similar extras, with wireless, net, pluggable HD and etc; Blu-Ray discs versus XBox’s DVDs.

With the same RAM and only twice the raw rendering / computing horsepower (real performance is a different thing), both consoles end up very similar in my book. I doubt that Blu-Ray vs DVD is going to make a difference, Sony simply wants to push that format into the living room ASAP. No, Sony, I’m not going to buy all my movies again. In fact I don’t believe I’ll even have a HDTV for a few years.

The next battle starts tomorrow when people hit the E3 floor and see (and play) the beasts; that is, if the PS3 is in playable form (I bet not).

Nintendo? We should find out soon.