The only thing more certain than UEFA drawing Liverpool and Chelsea together is that the release of NPD numbers is followed by hyperbole from the big hitters of the console world.
In this case, it’s Xbox 360 Product Management Director Aaron Greenberg, whose message when speaking to Gamasutra can be summed up thus: We rock! You suck!
He didn’t actually say those words. I have paraphrased from his paragraphs of anti-PS3 rhetoric so as to give you a nice soundbite for the purposes of misquoting.
He does, however, make some good points. Notably about the loss of exclusivity of certain titles resulting in a shift of expectation from the PlayStation brand being the horse to back to Xbox. Note the continuation of today’s horsey theme.
So, let’s say Sony and Microsoft are stable hands, preparing top horses for top jockeys. The better the preparation, the better the chance of ultimate success.
Sony has historically had exclusive training aids denied to Microsoft, stuff like Final Fantasy and Resi and GTA. Although Microsoft were allowed GTA, but only after Sony’s horse had won the Derby using it. Microsoft had Halo, of course, and while it was a magnificent training aid, it hardly had the depth of Sony’s offerings.
Now we’re seeing Sony giving up some of its training secrets to Microsoft and letting them train their horses in the same way. As Microsoft cheated by starting to train horses early, they’ve built up quite a stable and now many horses are benefitting from these once Sony-only training aids.
But, Sony has new methods. Killzone and Motorstorm and Uncharted are cutting edge techniques designed to further a horse’s abilities. The peerless Warhawk and LittleBigPlanet are ground-breaking, giving horses the lung capacity to go the distance and win the National.
And let’s not forget that “Training Winners for Dummies” is available only on Blu-ray.
Yeah, so you can take your well reasoned points and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine, Mr Greenberg, because I’ve got a pile of horse dung and I’m going to stick my head in it!