Can't wait for NGS, but I'm avoiding the Collecter's Eddition like the plague. The only CE I ever bought was Jade Empire, and it was the same price as the regular eddition.

Advertising high-res packaging reminds me of the early days of DVDs when "interactive menus" were listed under the special features...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Game_Crash

Basically, two things caused the crash: there were too many consoles out at one time and there were way too many shitty games being released.

After the huge success of the Atari 2600, everyone and their mother wanted to get in on it. Companies that had no connections to electronics at all were making their own consoles. Coleco (which is a fricking LEATHER company) released their own Colecovision console.

Also, many companies were releasing shitty games just to make a quick buck. Remember all the horror stories of ET cartridges being buried in New Mexico landfills? ET was just the worst case scenario. There were hundreds of other shitty games too.

Today, we don't have the multitude of different consoles or as many shitty games as we did in '84, but we have another potential problem with video gaming becoming too expensive. This is just my opinion of course, but look at how the average consumer is ignoring the PS3 so far. The PS2 sold like hotcakes for a very long time after release. The PS3 sales pretty much died off after a few months. Why? Mostly because the average consumer will not pay 600 fricking bucks for a console. Hello Sony, remember the 3DO and Neo Geo? They were grossly overpriced too and look where they are today. Combine the PS3's huge price tag with the rising costs of games themselves and all these online "microtransactions" and the average consumer very well could abandon video gaming for cheaper hobbies.

Wasn't there an article recently that said the PS3 sold more units in a given timeframe than the PS2 did back when it was released?

Yeah but to be fair, by the time they released Colecovision, Coleco was already established in the electronics business, having released their Telstar console back in the mid 70's (and by that point, the leather division of the company had been sold off, with them concentrating on making plastic pools, toys etc.)

Not according to this:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/05/18/th...onth-birthday/

First 6 Months:

PS2 = 2.2 million (U.S.)
PS3 = 1.3 million (U.S.)

I just downloaded the trailer for the PS3 special edition of Stranglehold from PSN. The clips they showed of Hard Boiled looked absolutely awful. Not even close to high def. Hell, they were VHS quality. Doubting that I'll buy that version now. Hopefully, the game is good.

It's already drawn a reply, but the description of Coleco was so off-the-mark, I'll draw the game misconduct by being the third man in...

By 1982, a whole generation had no idea that Coleco's genesis had anything to do with leather; they were just a toy company with a history of electronic games, just like Mattel, with Intellivision.

(In fact, one could make a great "what if?"-argument about Colecovision...if not for Coleco's self-inflicted headshot of the Adam, its console may have been able to survive the crash, supported by the hundreds of millions in profits being generated simultaneously by the Cabbage Patch craze. Who knows how things would have turned out different at that point.)

There's no question that the description of too much terrible software was accurate, though. If one wants to pick a worthy company to illustrate just who was jumping in, creating all the problems, look to Quaker Oats.