"Reading the pronouncements coming out of Sony HQ, it seems like someone’s slipped them the Kool-Aid. Bizarro announcements are supposed to come from Nintendo—the crazy Howard Hughes of the gaming world—and not from mainline Sony. But the recent pronouncement that the PS3 is going to be insanely expensive, the late release date, the possible loss of Final Fantasy exclusivity, well, all this sounds like another world-spanning console maker at the dawn of a new generation.

Kids today might not remember it, but there was a time when Nintendo was more than just a niche third in the console wars. I’m talking about the Nintendo and the Super Nintendo. The NES put a console in everyone’s home, while the Super Nintendo was a real Eden of gaming. Tons of good titles, from in-house and from third parties, sold scads of units, and despite Sega’s valiant thrashings (Private to Genesis owners: We WERE just plain cooler), it turned out that Genesis did what Nintendid better. That round of the console wars went to Nintendo. But the world was changing." [more]