While I personally have decided to stand on the sidelines, the next-gen war is moving into it’s second phase …”Battle of the Console Games”. That’s right friends and foes, as you know videogames are actually the reason we buy a game console, not it’s blue-ray capabilities, sleek black paint job, or enormous hard drive size. Thus, this E3 is particularly exciting because it’s time for game makers to show us if they can match all those tech demos we saw last year.

Notable launch games were few and far between. The Wii looked pretty desirable with Wii Sports and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Sony’s Playstation 3 was kind of slacking, to tell the truth. However, the PS3 and Wii have been out for several months and it is now time for them to unleash the heavy hitters. The Xbox 360 already has quite a head start on the competition in terms of having an established gaming library that includes both console exclusives and ports.

Today’s announcement by Sega that Virtual Fighter 5 is coming to the Xbox 360 with online play isn’t much of a help to the struggling PS3 especially since the PS3’s version lacked online play and was thought by many reviewers to be the only fault of the game if any was listed at all. Combine this news with the recent announcement of the PS3’s loss of exclusive rights to Capcom’s Devil May Cry series and it would appear that exclusive game rights are going the way of the dinosaur.

While exclusives are not the end all be all, I know that I personally bought my PS2 because it was the ONLY way I could play Final Fantasy X. As of right now though, the only console differing itself with it’s games is Nintendo, and the main reason for this is the fact that they own the rights to several popular characters. Maybe the day is coming where we will no longer have to worry about exclusive rights and whether or not we purchased the right console for the game we wanted. Time will tell.

Source: Computerandvideogames.com, Gamespot.com

Tags: E3

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