How Video Game Systems Work

that are out right now. Because of the Electronic Entertainment Expo that's going on, there's been a lot of announcements, so we want to catch you up on what's going on. Yeah, this year's E three is It's known is UH scaled down a bit from years past where the public was invited. It's more of a UM press and industry only event. But this year's big story is that there's really no big story. New new consoles to UH to announce, no new game with some kind of massive new controller that

you have to buy. It seems like a lot of things are improved UM Sony and UH and Mike Usoft both announced larger hard drives in new models UM. But other than that, the consoles seem to UH to have legs they're they're going on the way they have been, just with brand new titles and enhanced versions of older titles. Right,

It's it's really all about incremental improvement this year. Uh. And of course, all three giants we're talking about, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo here are all claiming that they are going to dominate this year. But I mean, what else are you going to do at a press event? Of course, So let's talk a little bit about some of these improvements. So well, we'll start over with the Microsoft's Xbox, So

the Xbox three sixty. A lot of the improvements they mentioned, uh refer back to Xbox Live, which is their online portion of the their console system. Um. That includes things like you can now go online using the web and and shop at the Xbox Marketplace and buy games and other applications and download them directly to your console. It's kind of like a TiVo thing where you would log in and and and shop around for for television shows and tell your vote to record the same sort of thing.

You don't have to be at your Xbox to do it anymore. Yeah, and um, now they have a partnership with Netflix, So if you have an Xbox Live Gold membership. You can stream movies directly through your Xbox three sixty, which is a nice feature, although you can't you know, download them directly to your hardware. That's true. Although there is one other kind of cool feature. You can now play games from your hard drive. You can actually uh copy games onto the hard drive, which decreases load times.

You still have to have the disc in the in the game system to play it, but it means that your load times are much shorter. But let's let's move on to one of the others. Let's talk about Nintendo for a little bit. Yeah, Nintendo, of course has been selling like hotcakes there. WE has been flying off the

store shelves. You can them anywhere, you know. Now, they're very very hard to find still and um, you know, I think people expect them to come out with some brand new uh feature or or device like the balance board that came with WE Fit. But this year, um, they're coming out with two new games. The announced WE Sports Resort, which has a WE Motion plus plugs into the back of the Wi Remote and gives it some

added functionality regarding motion and how it detects what you're doing. Um. They also have WE Music with more than fifty instruments that you can play. You know, the music games Rock Band and Guitar Hero still very popular, so that's We's unique entry into that market, right. And then there's also the We Speak, which is a microphone application that will specifically work with an animal crossing game that's coming out for the Wei, but hopefully we'll be used in other

games and applications further down the road. And and just for you guys to know, my most anticipated game announcement is the Clone Wars because I want to play with lightsabers. But let's move on to uh to the third biggie Sony Now Sony. Sony's big announcement was mainly the the new model that's going to replace the forty gigabyte model. It's a it's an eighty gigabyte model, will cost about four hundred dollars that will come out later this year.

But they had some other interesting information. Um, by the way, people who are waiting for Sony Home, you're still going to be waiting a while. We don't have any date on when that's gonna come out, but it is still in development, so it should be coming. I just hope that the price decreases enough where I can buy a PlayStation three and get a Blu ray Player and get to play my Ratchet and Clank games that I used

to plan on. They announced a new Ratchet and Clank title with a pirate theme, yes, Quest for Booty, So I'm excited about that, right, And there's going to be a whole slew of downloadable games. Actually, downloadable content is gonna be big for PlayStation uh. They They are also going to allow users to download movies and television shows

from a certain group of of providers and producers. Um, but you get to actually download those, it's you get to store them on your PlayStation and watch them whenever you like. You can you can purchase movies and television shows, unlike the Xbox version where you're dreaming. Yeah, I bet the Sony fans were really excited about the new Final Fantasy game. Oh, I'm sure they were, especially when they heard it's also premiering on the Xbox. I hope you

guys can sleep at night. Well that about wraps it up for this podcast. We have tons of video game articles on the site, but to to get started, if you're really interested in learning more about some of these consoles and games. You can read how video game systems work. That's available right now at how stuff works dot com for moral this, and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.

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