"The PS2 games will have a hard time of it all the way till the day that they stop manufacturing PS2s, then the software will magically work."
Backwards compatibility on the PS2 has actually gotten progressively worse since they stopped manufacturing the PS1. Witness the abysmal track record of the silver slimline. In general, backwards compatibility is the first thing cut in a console's lifetime in the name of saving manufacturing costs (DS and GBA micro didn't have GBC support, Sega Nomad and Genesis 3 didn't have SMS support, etc.).
"I think Sony noticed the PS2 sales dropped lower than they originally anticipated, so they killed the 60gb PS3 in order to control the emulation abilities."
They may not be buying PS2s, but that's because they're buying Wiis, not PS3s. Sony does not that kind of market dominance and control any more.
"George Washington presided over the Constitutional convention"
Working to abolish the limited government under which he had been appointed and served, creating in its place a more centralized government with sweeping new powers.
"It was Washington's commitment to limited government, shared by Franklin, Jefferson and most of the rest that built the foundation of the republic."
"Limited government?" Note that you're referring to "republic" in the singular, rather than plural. The convention you refer to created a centralized government where there essentially was none, and if they adhered to "limited government" above anything else, the convention would never have happened.
The Constitution of 1789 happened because "limited government" wasn't working. The United States government before it was so limited it was impotent, and the convention was brought about by people who set aside their knee-jerk reaction against centralized authority and focused on results, of meeting specific needs and creating a document that was made of political compromise more than anything else. It produced a legislature with the power to tax and to raise an army, a unitary executive, and a court system with the power to nullify state law. The only way you could say that document was about "limited government" is to ignore the long years the United States persisted before it and the sweeping changes the document brought about almost overnight.
It was the "limited government" ideals of people like Patrick Henry (who, among others, were very vocally opposed) that made the document such a struggle to ratify, and if they had their way, as Hamilton and Madison pointed out, it would have left the States open to predations from without and within. A limited government is too limited to quell violence and ambition.
"Emperor Burr...gimme a break."
Why not? It took 36 ballots to choose between Jefferson and Burr in 1801, and if it weren't for his duel, he'd likely have had a decent shot at the presidency in some future election. You mention that Washington set a precedent of two terms, but a precedent isn't law, and do you have any idea how many precedents Washington set that didn't last a decade after his presidency? And Burr had been accused of wanting to carve a new nation out of the western territories; if the Articles of Confederation had persisted, why couldn't (or wouldn't) he have used his political and military expertise to do it from New York and New Jersey instead?
In the absence of the strong, centralized government created by the document you claim did anything but, what exactly stood in the way of an American Napoleon (whoever he might have been)?
First off,/shout spamming like that probably kept you waiting longer. Nobody likes spammers, so why invite one?
Secondly, in those two hours, instead of sitting on your ass and/shouting, why not leave your/invite flag up, go to a weaker zone, and solo your way to 10 (at least)? Until around, say, level 30, partying is a faster way to get experience points, but by no means the only way, and at least one job (namely, black mage) I soloed past Dunes levels.
The main problem with the game are players that lack creativity. "You have to go to Valkurm Dunes at 10," "You have to go to Jeuno at 20." There are other places to go to, other things to do, but if you focus exclusively on stat building, trying to follow "the correct way" to build your levels, that's all you're going to find.
Why Valkurm Dunes? Why not Bubumiru Peninsula? What about Jugner Forrest, Pashhow Marshlands or Meriphataud Mountains? They all have monsters with the same levels and linking behavior.
"At level 20 spend several hours feeding a chocobo"
Once per hour, three or four times. And it never occurred to you to get up and do other things during the intervening time? Maybe talk to some other townspeople at least? At 20 that was likely your first time in Jeuno.
"so you gain the ability to RENT one at specific locations which shortens your run from zone to zone from 20 minutes to 10 minutes."
Why, exactly, did you stray so far from home? What was in Valkurm Dunes that wasn't in Dangruf Wadi, King Ranperre's Tomb or Inner Horutoto Ruins? Your burning need to/shout for two hours?
It's easy enough to make friends in FFXI who are as sick of Valkurm Dunes as you are. Find some, get together and go do something else instead. If nothing else, it sounds like your main problem with the game was that you were playing it by someone else's method rather than your own.
"FFXI was Japan only for ages before finally being released in North America"
About a year and a half. And the North American release coincided with a gradual raising of the level cap from 50 to 75.
"and then Europe."
A little over two years, and the release coincided with the introduction of several level-capped areas and missions.
"All the Japanese players were already maxed"
Even if they had reached level 50 with all jobs available, the North American release coincided with the introduction of 4 new jobs.
"FFXI is quite possibly the single worst MMOG ever played, and people only put up with it out of desperate love of the final fantasy name and franchise."
I continue to play it because they continue to add new content in the form of quests and missions. I play it for the cutscenes.
Of course! Our success had everything to do with the American mythos we've been spoonfed since birth and absolutely nothing to do with cultural and historical differences at all! It's all so simple, why can't everybody understand this?
Thank you for proving my point. The Reign of Terror happened because everybody was focused on ideals that nobody bothered to sit down and look at policy, unlike the United States where people sat down and said "Gee, this isn't working like we planned." Your vision of "classical liberalism" would have us rejecting the Constitution of 1789 and trying to pretend the Articles of Confederation were workable until the eventual interstate and intrastate warfare, resulting perhaps with an Emperor Burr rising to Napoleon's status.
"This is so clearly fraud that the MD attorney general should have completed the arrest warrant for key members of Vastech's management by tomorrow morning."
Fraud is deliberate. Unless you have some key information proving that their "rogue employee" is false, there's this pesky little clause in the Maryland Constitution's Declaration of Rights that boils down to "innocent unless proven guilty," and you'd have the attorney general's office wasting taxpayer money on a lost cause (and if he won, most of the victims weren't Maryland citizens), something that the voters will likely remember next election day.
Exactly. My sixty year old father made an unsolicited comment to me that he's heard nothing but "good things" about the Wii and mentioned the balance board in particular, and he sure as hell doesn't follow the gaming press.
"The public has elected a Democratic House and Senate but you wouldn't realize it from the media..."
Ah, yes! The people have overwhelmingly chosen to oust the party of old, white men and replaced them with fresh faces from a party full of old, white men! How dare MSM doesn't change its presentation to account for this earth-shattering shift of 8% of the seats of the House!?
As I sit here, we have 541 comments posted, and I'd say at least 500 are from people who are simply enjoying hearing themselves talk, or "verbal masturbation" as a friend of mine would put it.
I'd say most of those comments can be summed up by one sentence: "We're libertarians because we're smarter than everybody else." Dozens of people are reaching into the depths of pop "psychology" to show how they're categorized as "thinkers" and "enlightened intellectuals" while ignoring how they are emotionally reaching for these labels because there are few things more pleasurable in life than feeling like you're better than everybody else.
The question asked was "Why are you all libertarians?" but the question being answered in spades here today is "Why doesn't anybody else ever vote Libertarian?" If anything, you're all taking the "We know what's best for everyone else, just sit back and let us take care of everything and everything will be so much better" approach that you yourselves decry from the major parties, but of course you're the ones who are saying it this time, so that makes it all better.
This isn't about policy solutions or ideology or anything of the sort. The answer to the question posed is that people in technical fields spend most of their workdays ego-tripping on telling the commoners to "RTFM N00B," translating their peculiar, specializied interest into a sense of superiority, and the "libertarianism" prevalent in the US today, with it's near-religious sense of gnosticism, naturally appeals to their own sense of self. "It's all so simple! Everybody else is just too stupid to see the answers! Why can't they all eat cake?"
"In the wake of the exposure of Microsoft's attempt to buy Sweden's vote..."
"He quotes ALLIED TUBE & CONDUIT CORP. v. INDIAN HEAD, INC., 486 U.S. 492"
Isn't it bad form around here to call for the application of US laws to acts committed in other countries? Or do we only say that about copyright laws?
If there are anti-trust laws violated here, they should be Swedish or EU laws.
If two parties "come to blows," it means they actually laid hands on each other, got into an actual fistfight, etc. It does not mean "exchanged nasty letters" or "called each other bad names."
Thanks for getting my hopes up, only to shoot them down. Don't bother me again until someone really does get hit over this.
"The issue is men and women somewhat differ on what the definition of "pleasure" is."
If what you say is true, then most male gamers are homosexual tops into BDSM.
Women are the ones more likely to pursue the sexual angle in whatever it is they're doing (the point of my post), and generally of the variety they themselves find enjoyable, while men spend most of their online gaming time playing power games with each other. So in order for what you assert to be true, then at least 75% of male gamers are closeted and enjoy teabagging other guys far more than they'd like to admit.
I mean, we've already seen that Sims-type games are disproportionately more popular with women than are other games, and women are the people who tend to write fanfics, read trashy romance novels and the like. Guys don't tend to do much with sexual game mods beyond "Surprise buttsecks!" and other such attempts to humiliate other guys with homophobia, while women, being women, are more interested in actual pleasurable sex.
"Current Wii installed base is about 11M worldwide, with the XBox 360 also over the 10M mark and the PS3 clear of 4M. So even if Nintendo's design decisions doubled the Wii's market that's still less than half the size a cross-platform market would have been had things been different."
First off, your math is off: it would be 2/3 of the market.
And you still seem to be missing the point: an expanded market. 2/3 of 20 million is more than all of 10 million. If you're going to look at numbers, how much longer until the total number of console owners (remember to discount those that own more than one) surpasses what it was from the previous generation?
"That's bad news for game studios, because it means less revenue per title."
This assumes that the growth of the market is stagnant or non-existant. The whole point of the new control scheme, as Nintendo has repeated ad nauseam, is to make gaming more accessable to non-gamers.
If the conrol scheme expands the market in the way Nintendo hopes to (and, so far, it seems to be), then there will actually be more revenue from Wii exclusives as the game will be available to people who simply aren't interested in the kind of gaming the other two consoles provide.
Your opinions about console exclusives are only valid if the consoles in question are interchangeable, with little or no difference in gameplay between them. The Wii control scheme is trying to break out of that in a big way, seems to be succeeding, and because reality no longer resembles your worldview, your response is to complain about how others are straying and have changed reality rather than adjust your worldview.
"In a country where anyone can, without qualification, defend themselves in court, the entire concept of a bar associations is a joke to begin with."
"Can" and "should" are two very different words. But the issue isn't people representing themselves, but what happens when someone decides that they need an advocate and/or legal advice. You are also entitled to self-diagnose any medical ailments you may have, but that doesn't entitle you to start charging money to dispense medical advice or treatments to others.
"They exist for one purpose; to line the pockets of their members."
They exist to ensure that people seeking legal advice are able to find competent sources.
"How many US bar associations really protested against Guantanamo?"
Regulatory body != political body, and I hope it stays that way.
"Shouldn't the legal profession be at the forefront in defending the attack on legal rights."
Maybe they should create some sort of Union, dedicated to defending American Civil Liberties or something. If they have the time after they're done their pro bono work, of course.
"Personally, I would just get rid of bar associations and the like and subject the whole lot of you to the harsh winds of the free market and watch your tear yourselves apart."
And what of the defendants who would get caught in the middle? There's enough legal quackery out there as it is (e. g. "tax protesters") that I really don't think much good would come out of what you propose.
"You're the ones that end up drafting all the laws after all."
They are also all the ones challenging said laws and getting them struck down. You're playing with, at best, a doubled-edged sword.
"Yes, but we're just coming into the first real release season for the PS3. Over the next year that will change."
I realize that you're responding to someone talking about the PS3 versus the Xbox 360, but really... you can go keep waiting for "things to change," I'm going to go out next week and get Metroid Prime 3 for a system that came out the same week as the PS3.
I do own a PS3, as well as an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Of the three, the PS3 is the only one for which I own no games written specifically for it. I admit I bought one because I see the chance for a game gracing the system that I'd want to play and didn't want to get stuck with a later model's software PS2 emulation, but the Wii has been giving me fun with new games as well as some old GameCube lovin'.
Slashdot Mirror
"The PS2 games will have a hard time of it all the way till the day that they stop manufacturing PS2s, then the software will magically work."
Backwards compatibility on the PS2 has actually gotten progressively worse since they stopped manufacturing the PS1. Witness the abysmal track record of the silver slimline. In general, backwards compatibility is the first thing cut in a console's lifetime in the name of saving manufacturing costs (DS and GBA micro didn't have GBC support, Sega Nomad and Genesis 3 didn't have SMS support, etc.).
"I think Sony noticed the PS2 sales dropped lower than they originally anticipated, so they killed the 60gb PS3 in order to control the emulation abilities."
They may not be buying PS2s, but that's because they're buying Wiis, not PS3s. Sony does not that kind of market dominance and control any more.
"People think they can buy whatever hardware they want and just have it work."
The horror!
"Buy companies that support open source from the beginning"
I want an operating system, not a political movement.
"I always insist they spend the $20 on the Atheros chipset, as, again, it is damn near flawless."
So it's "free" as in "you have to buy new hardware?" Even when the built-in adapter "just works" in Windows?
Will "Go buy new hardware, n00b" be the successor to "RTFM?"
"George Washington presided over the Constitutional convention"
Working to abolish the limited government under which he had been appointed and served, creating in its place a more centralized government with sweeping new powers.
"It was Washington's commitment to limited government, shared by Franklin, Jefferson and most of the rest that built the foundation of the republic."
"Limited government?" Note that you're referring to "republic" in the singular, rather than plural. The convention you refer to created a centralized government where there essentially was none, and if they adhered to "limited government" above anything else, the convention would never have happened.
The Constitution of 1789 happened because "limited government" wasn't working. The United States government before it was so limited it was impotent, and the convention was brought about by people who set aside their knee-jerk reaction against centralized authority and focused on results, of meeting specific needs and creating a document that was made of political compromise more than anything else. It produced a legislature with the power to tax and to raise an army, a unitary executive, and a court system with the power to nullify state law. The only way you could say that document was about "limited government" is to ignore the long years the United States persisted before it and the sweeping changes the document brought about almost overnight.
It was the "limited government" ideals of people like Patrick Henry (who, among others, were very vocally opposed) that made the document such a struggle to ratify, and if they had their way, as Hamilton and Madison pointed out, it would have left the States open to predations from without and within. A limited government is too limited to quell violence and ambition.
"Emperor Burr...gimme a break."
Why not? It took 36 ballots to choose between Jefferson and Burr in 1801, and if it weren't for his duel, he'd likely have had a decent shot at the presidency in some future election. You mention that Washington set a precedent of two terms, but a precedent isn't law, and do you have any idea how many precedents Washington set that didn't last a decade after his presidency? And Burr had been accused of wanting to carve a new nation out of the western territories; if the Articles of Confederation had persisted, why couldn't (or wouldn't) he have used his political and military expertise to do it from New York and New Jersey instead?
In the absence of the strong, centralized government created by the document you claim did anything but, what exactly stood in the way of an American Napoleon (whoever he might have been)?
"spam level 9 Monk LFG for 2 hours"
/shout spamming like that probably kept you waiting longer. Nobody likes spammers, so why invite one?
/shouting, why not leave your /invite flag up, go to a weaker zone, and solo your way to 10 (at least)? Until around, say, level 30, partying is a faster way to get experience points, but by no means the only way, and at least one job (namely, black mage) I soloed past Dunes levels.
/shout for two hours?
First off,
Secondly, in those two hours, instead of sitting on your ass and
The main problem with the game are players that lack creativity. "You have to go to Valkurm Dunes at 10," "You have to go to Jeuno at 20." There are other places to go to, other things to do, but if you focus exclusively on stat building, trying to follow "the correct way" to build your levels, that's all you're going to find.
Why Valkurm Dunes? Why not Bubumiru Peninsula? What about Jugner Forrest, Pashhow Marshlands or Meriphataud Mountains? They all have monsters with the same levels and linking behavior.
"At level 20 spend several hours feeding a chocobo"
Once per hour, three or four times. And it never occurred to you to get up and do other things during the intervening time? Maybe talk to some other townspeople at least? At 20 that was likely your first time in Jeuno.
"so you gain the ability to RENT one at specific locations which shortens your run from zone to zone from 20 minutes to 10 minutes."
Why, exactly, did you stray so far from home? What was in Valkurm Dunes that wasn't in Dangruf Wadi, King Ranperre's Tomb or Inner Horutoto Ruins? Your burning need to
It's easy enough to make friends in FFXI who are as sick of Valkurm Dunes as you are. Find some, get together and go do something else instead. If nothing else, it sounds like your main problem with the game was that you were playing it by someone else's method rather than your own.
"FFXI was Japan only for ages before finally being released in North America"
About a year and a half. And the North American release coincided with a gradual raising of the level cap from 50 to 75.
"and then Europe."
A little over two years, and the release coincided with the introduction of several level-capped areas and missions.
"All the Japanese players were already maxed"
Even if they had reached level 50 with all jobs available, the North American release coincided with the introduction of 4 new jobs.
"FFXI is quite possibly the single worst MMOG ever played, and people only put up with it out of desperate love of the final fantasy name and franchise."
I continue to play it because they continue to add new content in the form of quests and missions. I play it for the cutscenes.
Of course! Our success had everything to do with the American mythos we've been spoonfed since birth and absolutely nothing to do with cultural and historical differences at all! It's all so simple, why can't everybody understand this?
Thank you for proving my point. The Reign of Terror happened because everybody was focused on ideals that nobody bothered to sit down and look at policy, unlike the United States where people sat down and said "Gee, this isn't working like we planned." Your vision of "classical liberalism" would have us rejecting the Constitution of 1789 and trying to pretend the Articles of Confederation were workable until the eventual interstate and intrastate warfare, resulting perhaps with an Emperor Burr rising to Napoleon's status.
"This is so clearly fraud that the MD attorney general should have completed the arrest warrant for key members of Vastech's management by tomorrow morning."
Fraud is deliberate. Unless you have some key information proving that their "rogue employee" is false, there's this pesky little clause in the Maryland Constitution's Declaration of Rights that boils down to "innocent unless proven guilty," and you'd have the attorney general's office wasting taxpayer money on a lost cause (and if he won, most of the victims weren't Maryland citizens), something that the voters will likely remember next election day.
"This was ridiculed by the Western gaming press."
Exactly. My sixty year old father made an unsolicited comment to me that he's heard nothing but "good things" about the Wii and mentioned the balance board in particular, and he sure as hell doesn't follow the gaming press.
"The public has elected a Democratic House and Senate but you wouldn't realize it from the media..."
Ah, yes! The people have overwhelmingly chosen to oust the party of old, white men and replaced them with fresh faces from a party full of old, white men! How dare MSM doesn't change its presentation to account for this earth-shattering shift of 8% of the seats of the House!?
As I sit here, we have 541 comments posted, and I'd say at least 500 are from people who are simply enjoying hearing themselves talk, or "verbal masturbation" as a friend of mine would put it.
I'd say most of those comments can be summed up by one sentence: "We're libertarians because we're smarter than everybody else." Dozens of people are reaching into the depths of pop "psychology" to show how they're categorized as "thinkers" and "enlightened intellectuals" while ignoring how they are emotionally reaching for these labels because there are few things more pleasurable in life than feeling like you're better than everybody else.
The question asked was "Why are you all libertarians?" but the question being answered in spades here today is "Why doesn't anybody else ever vote Libertarian?" If anything, you're all taking the "We know what's best for everyone else, just sit back and let us take care of everything and everything will be so much better" approach that you yourselves decry from the major parties, but of course you're the ones who are saying it this time, so that makes it all better.
This isn't about policy solutions or ideology or anything of the sort. The answer to the question posed is that people in technical fields spend most of their workdays ego-tripping on telling the commoners to "RTFM N00B," translating their peculiar, specializied interest into a sense of superiority, and the "libertarianism" prevalent in the US today, with it's near-religious sense of gnosticism, naturally appeals to their own sense of self. "It's all so simple! Everybody else is just too stupid to see the answers! Why can't they all eat cake?"
Ye gods! I never thought I'd be saying this, but, between the two, I'll say I prefer Shatner's singing!
"In the wake of the exposure of Microsoft's attempt to buy Sweden's vote..."
"He quotes ALLIED TUBE & CONDUIT CORP. v. INDIAN HEAD, INC., 486 U.S. 492"
Isn't it bad form around here to call for the application of US laws to acts committed in other countries? Or do we only say that about copyright laws?
If there are anti-trust laws violated here, they should be Swedish or EU laws.
"Indeed, the better thing to have done would have been to split the damn company up. "
We split up Standard Oil. How many oil companies do we have now, and how much do they cooperate rather than compete with each other?
We split up AT&T. How many telephone companies do we have now, and how much do they cooperate rather than compete with each other?
In most states (including California), the attorney general is elected separately.
Maybe Microsoft's problem is that, like you, they have no idea how their own government works, to the point of bribing the wrong people?
Really, people, you can't change your government for the better if you don't know how things work as they are.
If two parties "come to blows," it means they actually laid hands on each other, got into an actual fistfight, etc. It does not mean "exchanged nasty letters" or "called each other bad names."
Thanks for getting my hopes up, only to shoot them down. Don't bother me again until someone really does get hit over this.
"The issue is men and women somewhat differ on what the definition of "pleasure" is."
If what you say is true, then most male gamers are homosexual tops into BDSM.
Women are the ones more likely to pursue the sexual angle in whatever it is they're doing (the point of my post), and generally of the variety they themselves find enjoyable, while men spend most of their online gaming time playing power games with each other. So in order for what you assert to be true, then at least 75% of male gamers are closeted and enjoy teabagging other guys far more than they'd like to admit.
I mean, we've already seen that Sims-type games are disproportionately more popular with women than are other games, and women are the people who tend to write fanfics, read trashy romance novels and the like. Guys don't tend to do much with sexual game mods beyond "Surprise buttsecks!" and other such attempts to humiliate other guys with homophobia, while women, being women, are more interested in actual pleasurable sex.
"Christians aren't going to start murdering innocents if you make fun of them in a comic."
Does the phrase "Lord's Resistance Army" not ring a bell?
"And he doesn't have 'hardcore' greek cred? What does it take?"
Well, as was mentioned, he's a parent, i. e. he's had sex.
"Current Wii installed base is about 11M worldwide, with the XBox 360 also over the 10M mark and the PS3 clear of 4M. So even if Nintendo's design decisions doubled the Wii's market that's still less than half the size a cross-platform market would have been had things been different."
First off, your math is off: it would be 2/3 of the market.
And you still seem to be missing the point: an expanded market. 2/3 of 20 million is more than all of 10 million. If you're going to look at numbers, how much longer until the total number of console owners (remember to discount those that own more than one) surpasses what it was from the previous generation?
"That's bad news for game studios, because it means less revenue per title."
This assumes that the growth of the market is stagnant or non-existant. The whole point of the new control scheme, as Nintendo has repeated ad nauseam, is to make gaming more accessable to non-gamers.
If the conrol scheme expands the market in the way Nintendo hopes to (and, so far, it seems to be), then there will actually be more revenue from Wii exclusives as the game will be available to people who simply aren't interested in the kind of gaming the other two consoles provide.
Your opinions about console exclusives are only valid if the consoles in question are interchangeable, with little or no difference in gameplay between them. The Wii control scheme is trying to break out of that in a big way, seems to be succeeding, and because reality no longer resembles your worldview, your response is to complain about how others are straying and have changed reality rather than adjust your worldview.
IANAL.
"In a country where anyone can, without qualification, defend themselves in court, the entire concept of a bar associations is a joke to begin with."
"Can" and "should" are two very different words. But the issue isn't people representing themselves, but what happens when someone decides that they need an advocate and/or legal advice. You are also entitled to self-diagnose any medical ailments you may have, but that doesn't entitle you to start charging money to dispense medical advice or treatments to others.
"They exist for one purpose; to line the pockets of their members."
They exist to ensure that people seeking legal advice are able to find competent sources.
"How many US bar associations really protested against Guantanamo?"
Regulatory body != political body, and I hope it stays that way.
"Shouldn't the legal profession be at the forefront in defending the attack on legal rights."
Maybe they should create some sort of Union, dedicated to defending American Civil Liberties or something. If they have the time after they're done their pro bono work, of course.
"Personally, I would just get rid of bar associations and the like and subject the whole lot of you to the harsh winds of the free market and watch your tear yourselves apart."
And what of the defendants who would get caught in the middle? There's enough legal quackery out there as it is (e. g. "tax protesters") that I really don't think much good would come out of what you propose.
"You're the ones that end up drafting all the laws after all."
They are also all the ones challenging said laws and getting them struck down. You're playing with, at best, a doubled-edged sword.
"Yes, but we're just coming into the first real release season for the PS3. Over the next year that will change."
I realize that you're responding to someone talking about the PS3 versus the Xbox 360, but really... you can go keep waiting for "things to change," I'm going to go out next week and get Metroid Prime 3 for a system that came out the same week as the PS3.
I do own a PS3, as well as an Xbox 360 and a Wii. Of the three, the PS3 is the only one for which I own no games written specifically for it. I admit I bought one because I see the chance for a game gracing the system that I'd want to play and didn't want to get stuck with a later model's software PS2 emulation, but the Wii has been giving me fun with new games as well as some old GameCube lovin'.
So the Europeans get HDTV tuners and PVR capabilities, BFD. Mine actually plays PS2 games.