Keepalive: Breakdown & Sony Both Suck

My sleep schedule is ostensibly normal now. I've seen Buffy: The Vampire Slayer beginning to end. And I now have an Xbox (original, not 360).

I started playing Breakdown. It's a "you have a body" type game, where you can look down and see your feet. And there's an emphasis on hand to hand. Well, there's supposed to be. The early sections all involved guys who shoot you, so hand to hand is pretty much useless so far. And there's a lot of trial and error in the gameplay. And the game looks painfully generic, like it was a PS2 port. And the pacing is the suck as well. It turns out that having a body in this game just means you get to spend large amounts of time watching boring, repetitive animations. I got sick of it and put in Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.

It's a first person / third person hybrid in an alien version of the old west where the main character is a cat man bounty hunter who has a crossbow that shoots animals. I should have a review in a day or two. Kinda sucks that I don't have a capture card to take screen shots, though. :P

I also wanted to mention one strange phenomenon I'm noticing. Apparently certain games (Devil May Cry 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4) are selling more units on the PS3 than I would have thought. I think the 360 has something like a four to one install base advantage in the US but is outselling the PS3 (on certain games) by less than two to one. I'm sure that's partly because 360 owners have more choices and PS3 owners are a little more hard up for content, but there's probably another major reason. Since these were franchises that defined the PS2, I'm assuming people feel like playing them on PS3. This is despite the fact that DMC4 has a 20-30 minute install on the PS3 and GTA4 will have exclusive downloadable content on the 360.

It's good that Microsoft isn't gaining a complete monopoly, but with Sony lagging in game quality, hardware performance (slow ass blu ray and taking over a year and a half to get rumble into controllers), and online service quality, I'm not sure it matters. What good does competition do the consumer if it provides no pressure to improve?