All eyes watched as the Sony PS3 boomed (creeped?) into the American market in November.  Joy was replaced by disapointment by the price and the availability of the system, but come on, guys!  It's a Sony Playstation!

When it comes down to the real deal, Sony Playstions still rock, and everyone knows it.  Right now, everything else is second to the quality, the playability, the sheer fun that Sony PS provides.

In a couple of years, we're going to all look back and praise Sony for coming out with the super-cool PS3.  The games will be plentiful, the online capacities will have been realized, and a whole lot of new functionality will have been added because of downloading updates and patches that have been impossible in the past.

Sony still rocks!

Fantastic!  I just watched the FEAR tournament, and I have to say: WOW! 

This is the greatest thing that's happened to video gaming yet.  What we're going to see is professionals vying for money and a new set of heroes.

I love it!

I'm a radio and television host and video gaming fanatic, working in Shanghai, China right now.  I'd like to share some observations with the fans.

You'd be totally amazed at how few of the Chinese own a game platform.  Nevertheless, gaming is popular, mostly on the PC, and the PS2. 

You can find many game stores around, all small little shops that pirate the games and sell them for about a quarter apiece.  All the shops modify the PS2 to play the pirated games.  There's no other way.  If you play the PS2, you do the pirated thing; you simply can't find the real thing unless you order the games from the Internet and have them shipped to you.

Of course, all of this pirating is short-lived, and these little shops will soon be put out of business when the government clamps down on all the fake junk out there.  Everyone in China says it'll hurt the economy, but now China has started writing games with companies like UbiSoft. 

UbiSoft writes the Tom Clancy games and hopes to gain a large success, but, of course, they have to fight their own country's policy of turning their back to the piracy, to no avail.  Thus, their market is the rest of the world.  What a shame.

The X-Box has no presence at all here in China, and the prospects look poor.  The reason:  money.  The big problem with marketing video platforms in China is twofold:  There's not enough money floating around to afford them, and the piracy keeps the manufacturers from doing too much marketing. 

Sony is pumping out a lot of advertising all over the country and has some really cool exhibition shops to demonstrate the PS2 and the PSP.  Fortunately for Sony, the PSP has boomed here, mainly because it does so many things other than play games, like access the Internet and play MP3 music.  Sony has been quite successful in China with the new handheld game device.

What's next for China? 

I see more and more game companies opening up here and the piracy biting the dust in about three years or less.  Those companies brave enough to try to achieve a big market share in China will eventually be successful, but, of course, the product life cycle of a video platform is only about that long.  A dilemma.