Even better, in the long term, the consoles get cheap enough that you can get them all and have a huge library of used games available cheap.
There area bunch of preview videos on Xbox live right now, I checked out a few last night.
Bayonetta: Nice, reminds me of Devil May Cry. Nice graphics, fast action and ginormous bosses. What’s not to like.
Darksiders: Had never heard of that one previously; looks like another combat game (like DMC, NG or Gow). Video is pretty short, but looks interesting enough.
Prototype: In the “run around a city and fuck shit up” type games, this looks very good. Graphics seems a bit less polished than inFamous, but the gameplay looks like it might be a bit more varied. The video shows the protagonist going into tanks and choppers and using them to cause mayhem. Tentacles and Wolverine type claws are also shown at various points; not sure how they’ll fit into the gameplay.
Crackdown 2: Same type of game; looks like there’s a new monstrous threat to be dealt with. Graphics have a nice style to them; sorta lightly cell shaded. You can see that the devs are getting proficient with the various consoles; all the news games look incredibly slick.
Forza 3: Now that’s one annoying video. I wanna see some in-game footage, not cars “dancing” around the streets. For what it’s worth, the game looks good; but you can’t really judge a driving simulator from a video. Only cool part is at the end when a car crashes and flips. It’s about damn time we get real accidents in those games.
Halo stuff: Halo Reach lets on very little. Halo ODST is a new shooter in the Halo universe. Hard to tell what’s new, if anything, from the video. It looks good though.
Video games on demand: Apparently, we’ll be able to buy and download full games in the very near future. That’d be nice. Hopefully MS makes available hard drives larger than 120GB before then. Or they ship you the DVD while you play the DLded version, but I’m not counting on that. Ideally, they’d let you store your games on an external USB drive you supply. Get that cheap 2TB box on eBay and fill’er up. Yeah, I know I’m dreaming.
Crappy stuff: Premium avatar stuff. Right, I want to buy virtual clothing for a stick figure who looks like Gumby. Please MS, stop nickle-and-diming everything.
Stuff I don’t care either way about: On demand TV; 1080p download (unless the prices drop precipitously in the near future… currently way too expensive in Canada vs. renting from the store corner or torrenting it of the net.) FFXXXIXIXI or whatever… MGS:Something (unless it’s very different from the last one). Natal controller stuff - I like playing my games sitting down in my La-Z-Boy, thank you very much.
There’s a bunch of other stuff, but that’s all I remember for now.
Looks like it’s going to be a great year for gamers.