Recently i’ve been wasting a lot of time on TV Tropes, a website primarily dedicated to cateloguing recurring themes and ideas that turn up in fiction in all kinds of media, including gaming. t into related topics in various forms of media though – there’s a lot there and it’s it’s almost like a more light-hearted Wikipedia without the directive to be rigidly neutral.

I thought this quick overview on The Console Wars was quite fun. It briefly covers each generation and gives a pretty fair guess at who “won” in terms of sales and popularity. (short form: Nintendo in the early days, then they lost it in the late nineties, now they’re leading again due to the embracing of casual gaming)

I’ve never actually owned a console, and only recently picked up a handheld (the DS). Still I have followed developments on and off from the sidelines. I’m too young to remember the first two generations, but have been a Nintendo fan since the third (ie the NES). Even tho, now I’m actually in a position to buy their games, I find it a depressing exercise in flicking past boxes entitled Are you smarter than a 10 year old, All Star Cheerleader and Imagine Dream Wedding. PS and Xbox meanwhile have never attracted me – not to say there’s anything wrong with them, just little of interest to me that the PC doesn’t do better.

sidenote: I’m quite determined to try and get into the habit of more regular updates to this blog. Twice-weekly perhaps? The flow of new reviews is going pretty slowly right now, but i really should at least be able to think of something brief to say here every few days.