Barely have the press conferences passed, and I’ve already preordered them both.

Both seem to have spectacular hardware that will certainly lead to equally spectacular games and the fact that, if you believe Bill Gates’ comments in Time, we’ll have Halo 3 and a next-gen GTA at the same time, it’s going to be an incredible time for all gamers. I’m still trawling through the videos from last night in an attempt to get all the good ones down my 512k pipe before the American schools kick out and the bandwidth spontaneously combusts but from what I’ve seen, Sony could actually have a generation where they have the most advanced hardware and the most comprehensive library of games (PS3 already has a lot on the way, but it can play PS2 and PS1 games as well). It’s ironic that Microsoft have made so much of the dawning of their “HD era” but it’s only the PS3 that will support all games in 1080p. On two displays. At the same time.

As for Revolution, it certainly looks nice but I can’t help but feel that by not competing with the others in terms of raw power they’re missing the same boat that they missed with CD-ROMs in the 32/64-bit days and online play in the current generation. Digital distribution is very intriguing, though.

What a piece of crap. I’ve been looking forward to the official unveiling for so long and eagerly eating up every little morsel that “leaked” out, but this was disappointing. We saw, what? Three minutes total of stuff on the console itself and four music videos, famous people, and flashing lights. It was a complete waste of time when we didn’t even get some direct feed Perfect Dark Zero (which looks like a PS2 game in its current form) even though it was clearly being played there.

Thankfully the press embargo has been lifted on the console which means that the real gaming news outlets have been able to show us some stuff. I was blown away with the video and pictures of Gears of War and I’m dying for E3 to start (not least because it will herald the arrival of Star Wars) to see some proper direct feed and high-res videos. They have to have some trump cards with which to upstage Sony’s PS3 announcement and whatever Nintendo might have to show. The latest issue of Edge also has some great coverage that answered a lot of my questions, as well as impressing me with the fact that they must have had that information for a month or so now.

I suppose the announcement was intended for the members of the MTV generation who can’t keep their attention on one thing for more than a few minutes and managed to inject some gaming into their usual diet to give the Xbox 360 a lift in the coolness stakes which is needed for the upcoming battle with the PlayStation 3. The real unveiling for the real gamers will be in a week at E3 – this was just a preview.

Somehow Microsoft thought that they could tape their unveiling of the Xbox 360 and not have at least one person disregard the NDA and leak out pictures anyway. Sure enough, someone snapped a picture on their phone and it shows that the design that leaked last month was, in fact, the real deal. It also offers the first glimpses of the new controller, headset, and some kind of webcam thingy.

Engadget broke the story.

Last night the psychological illusionist Derren Brown pulled off an amazing stunt on his current TV series which makes an interesting example on the effects of violent games and the appeal of frightening entertainment experiences. He’d commissioned an arcade game to be made called ‘Waking Dead’ which looked like your average House of the Dead zombie shooter. The difference was that it had been designed to induce a catatonic state in people – basically put them to sleep standing up. They set it up in a bar and waited for someone to have a game. Eventually someone did, and after being ‘flashed’ a few times with a white screen his head and gun arm drooped, much to his friends’ bemusement.

Derren and his camera crew rushed in and carried the guy onto a waiting stretcher before wheeling him into a nearby building which, as they entered it, was obviously what the game’s level was based on – the layout and lighting was exactly the same. They left their victim standing in the replica of the room that he was in when he went under and put a fake gun in his hand, then went and hid in an adjacent control room and woke him up.

He was obviously shocked when he woke up in a strange room with a gun in his hand and a dead body on the floor, and then he found that all the doors were locked. People dressed up in as zombies started shambling in from the far side of the room. The guy, obviously terrified, was shouting at them to stay away as he ran around before picking up the gun and threatening them with it. When they wouldn’t stop he started firing at them and squibs attached to them exploded with stage blood to make it look like he was shooting them. This went on for a while with the ones he’d shot getting back up, and by now the guy was hysterical and screaming with terror (the arms groping at the windows didn’t help). When he tried to barricade himself in a small room and force open a window before being overwhelmed by the zombies Derren intervened and put him back to sleep so that they could take him back to the bar.

He was set up with the lightgun in his hand in front of the game and woke up as if nothing had happened. A camera crew burst in and posed as the game’s developers conducting market research to see what he thought of the game, and they found that he was raving about how incredible and immersive it was. He was then shown the video of what he did and was OK with everything.

If it’s shown again I’m going to try to capture it because it really was very interesting. Possibly cruel, but interesting and gripping television nonetheless.

I always find there’s nothing like a dearth of new games to send you rushing back to the classics, and it always seems to happen in that long drought between Christmas and…well…the next Christmas. You wonder whether or not it’s those damn rose-tinted glasses making you remember your SNES as the paragon of gameplay and see all modern stuff as commercialised shit, and then you remember that, as great as the SNES was, it had its fair share of utter crap, too. Still, we can still look back and remember, right?

Anyway, the fact that there’s little of note to play at the moment (although I might start on Guild Wars if it can bring back those halcyon days of Phantasy Star Online) has driven me back to finish some of the classics that I didn’t complete the first time around and, unusually for me, I’ve been playing traditional RPGs.

The first one to pull me back was Chrono Trigger which I spent much of last week playing having lost interest at the (possible spoiler) first battle with Magus. That annoying thing where you’ll struggle with something and then come back months later and finish it first time happened, and then I found myself pretty much walking through the rest of the game up until you (spoiler) get Crono back from the dead. Now I have to complete side-quests to power myself up for the final battle and I’ve lost interest again, so I’m probably looking at finishing the game around May 2010 when the cycle of disinterest finishes again.

Nonetheless the game has some of the best music and art that I’ve seen in ages, and some of the later locations are beautiful. The character designer of Chrono Trigger, Akira Toriyama, is returning to the RPG fold with Blue Dragon on the Xbox 360, so I’ll be interested to see how his designs transition to such meaty hardware where he won’t be so able to rely on the two-dimensional visuals of Chrono Trigger and arguably his most famous work, Dragonball Z.

The other one that I started on today when I picked up a used US copy was most people’s introduction to the RPG, Final Fantasy VII. I never got off the first disc in this one (I got bored around the introduction of Cid) but I’m hoping that my current RPG ardor and the fact that I plan to actually level up will carry me through. It looks positive when the good memories came flooding back as I replayed the opening moments, but it will have to wait until I buy a memory card tomorrow because my PS2 won’t recognise my crappy old PSX card…