The First Hour

Five years after its release, I finally own a PlayStation 3. This feels like a significant length of time, especially as the only console I purchased after a comparable amount of time was the Dreamcast, which had already been "dead" for years at that point. But the PlayStation 3 is far from dead, and through a combination of a down economy and systems that are still "good enough", neither Microsoft or Sony seem to be in any kind of rush to release their next console iteration. This is beneficial to consumers like me, who are greatly rewarded for waiting with lots of great, exclusive games at cheap prices.

There is definitely an embarassment of riches to be had jumping into a five year old, successful console like the PlayStation 3, emphasized by my recent Christmas extravaganza. My wife ordered me the system over Black Friday, triggering a chain reaction of purchases from siblings and in-laws, hey, I can't complain. Here's my haul:

On the first of the year, the writers here presented their predictions for 2010 in the video game industry. It was our first attempt at anything like this, and since we're primarily gamers first, writers second, and industry experts in a distant last, this was definitely more of an exercise in fun forecasting than put-your-money-down-now predictions.

Well, we can't let bad predictions go forgotten and made fun of, so here we are again. We'll quickly cover what went randomly right and what went horribly wrong, but then we'll be back again on Friday for our fourth annual Game of the Year Awards.

Here it is, the fifth episode of The First Hour Podcast! In this episode, Paul and Greg discuss their views on the 3DS announcement, another writer (also named Paul) drops in to talk about the latest Pokemon games, and Mike returns to give his opinion of Final Fantasy XIII. And that's not all!

Download the podcast: 

first-hour-podcast-episode-005.mp3

Going to try something new this year, we're going to make some completely wild predictions that may have little base in reality. I think they're pretty self-explanatory, and hopefully at the end of the year I'll remember we did this and we can have a good laugh at how wrong we were (or be shocked at how right).

So while these are guaranteed to be wrong, they are my current feelings about the industry from hopefully a non-biased gamer's point of view. Well, non-biased until it comes to BioWare games that is.