The next wave of price drops are soon to hit us for the 09 holiday season. So there's no better time to jump into the High Definition gaming platform ……or is it? While Sony has already announced its new PS3 Slim with a price drop of $299, we are still awaiting the “official word” from Microsoft on the “new” Elite SKU of $299.

So now you can get a Xbox 360 top of the line Elite system for just $299 or can you ? Like Sony before it the new 360 SKU comes with more the just a price change. It also comes with a bit of a down grade. Yes you still get the Black Xbox, 120 GB HDD, headset and Ethernet cable, but the one thing you don't get that is the HD component cables which now need to be purchased separately. Instead just “standard” A/V cables are packed in. 

What's the big deal you ask ? Well for anyone using an HDTV set it would mean spending more money to get the true next generation experience. Now a days a simple $10 HDMI cable will do the trick so the cost isn't that bad. My biggest problem here isn't the added cost, but the fact the average consumer may  not even know that that they would have a choice to maximize their gaming experience. Here's to hoping that most people are educated in the world of High Definition. Folks gaming on a normal TV set would be good to go.

On the brighter side of things the price of gaming is coming down at a time when the we are in a economic state of BLAH which is great for the industry going into the holidays season. $299 for a High Definition gaming system is a great deal. And as always there's still the $199 entry level Xbox 360 Arcade unit and the $250 Nintendo Wii.

-TX

During this weeks Game Developers Conference (GDC), the OnLive Game Service was unveiled. OnLive provides the user the ability to play games by servers streaming the gameplay to a set-top box or PC in your home, eliminating the use of physical media. With partners such as EA, Codemasters, Epic and Ubisoft, the service is set to launch this December.

Looking at the current trend of digital distribution of games and movies and the wish of the publishers looking at a way to eliminate piracy, etc., OnLive or future competitors is undoubtedly where gaming is headed and has inherent benefits such as never having to upgrade a system or worrying about it breaking down (i.e. RROD).

But is this technology, at a quality to satisfy gamers really almost upon us? The connection required for the service to stream gameplay data at 720p is about 5 Mb/sec. A consistent connection of this speed is not common, not to mention a large amount of the population is not even connected to the internet. I kind of have gotten used to playing in HD, 480p won’t cut it! Other potential issues game latency, ownership, IP bandwidth/download limits, bypassing retail for games, etc., may prove that such technology is not ready for primetime.

Myself, I’m not only skeptical of the quality that OnLive will provide (will it even be available in Canada???) , but personally, at this point in time, I’m still attached to physical media whether it’s games, movies, magazines, whatever. I like have the package in my hands, on my shelf and not having to worry about a server going down and not being able to play when I want to play.

It will be interesting to see if the next Xbox or Playstation will be a disc based system, use servers or both?

- Schu

Technorati Tags: GDC,OnLive