Michele is talking about the Console Wars that will be starting at the end of this year and continue at least through next year (about a year after each console comes out, I consider the “war” over, mostly, and we get to settle down to just enjoy some games).

Here are the parties involved in the war:

Microsoft has the creatively named X-box 360.
Sony comes up with a slightly less creative name for its Playstation 3.
Nintendo enters with the Revolution.

It is, of course, a little early to really make any predictions on who’ll win the war, so I’ll just share my own history as a console gamer and my thoughts on the upcoming war.

I remember having an Atari 2600 when I was very young, but when I think of being a console gamer, the first console that comes to mind is, of course, the Nintendo. My first real exposure to the Nintendo was Super Mario Brothers 2, which I remember thinking was very, very strange. It was some time after that when we finally got a Nintendo in our house.

I remember Final Fantasy, and I have a vague awareness that I liked video games, but it was the Super Nintendo that finally locked in my video game addiction. The Super Nintendo, and Final Fantasy 2 (4, in Japan). I played FF2 nonstop for weeks, stopping only when I got to the final boss and couldn’t beat him. New Year’s Eve came, and I took my copy of FF2 to a friend’s house for our annual get-together. I fell asleep, and they proceeded to beat the game without me.

I kept that cartridge for years, until it was stolen by a friend’s housemate and sold (along with several other games that I loved) to a used game store downtown. Until that point, my original save game (with a play-time approaching 100 hours, as I’d occasionally play around with it and look for places I’d not found the first time around) had remained on the cartridge.

I remember the Sega Genesis coming out, and I remember how many of my friends thought it was the ultimate gaming machine. I remember scoffing at it, and being rather pleased when Nintendo won that first major Console War fairly easily.

I can’t remember knowing much about the Playstation until I actually saw one in college. I didn’t think much of it, honestly. I bought the Nintendo 64 because it was Nintendo, and Nintendo had symbolized gaming for me for years. I bought the Playstation only because of Square’s jump to that platform for its Final Fantasy games.

This is the war I never understood. The N64 had better games, better graphics, and a better controller (until the Playstation got analog sticks, anyway). The Playstation had… well, I still haven’t figured that out. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to have prefered the Playstation, as far as I can tell, and yet they did. (Two reasons why the Nintendo 64 beats the Playstation hands down: GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.)

A few years later, the X-box, Playstation 2, and GameCube went head to head… in theory. In my mind, the actual competition was between the X-box and the Playstation 2. To me, the GameCube represents the same position in the gaming market that Apple does in the PC market. Nintendo makes wonderful games, but their appeal isn’t as mainstream as they deserve to be. The GameCube games have a reputation for being “kiddy”, but any gamer who plays only “mature” games because he fears being considered a kid shouldn’t be playing mature games to begin with. GameCube games are fun, and that’s enough for me.

The X-box, this time, holds the Nintendo 64′s position in the last war. It’s the better system. The X-box exclusive titles are unbelievably fun, more so than anything I’ve played on the Playstation 2. The games that are on both systems look better on the X-box. Despite this, the Playstation 2 seems to hold a bigger portion of the market for reasons I don’t understand.

That brings us to this coming war. I predict that Sony will do better than they have any right to. Nintendo will make a small comeback if they manage to separate themselves from the “kiddy” image they have, but that may alienate some of their core base if they lose the focus on fun that they’ve had for years. Microsoft will come out at least as well as Sony, if they can remember to focus on games and not the “media center” stuff that they seem obsessed with.

I’m definitely buying an X-box 360 (Perfect Dark Zero!). I’ll almost certainly get a Revolution, because of brand loyalty (loyalty that the Nintendo team has earned time and time again). If I have the money to blow, I might buy a Playstation 3, since my current PS2 paperweight would look outdated sitting beside the newer systems.