LyCheSis op:inion

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I am a big fan of Square's Final Fantasy series since it came to the PSX with the brilliant FFVII. The current iteration (FFXII) is, although very short on story, still very enjoyable and therefore I'd like to share my progress so far with you:

I have been playing since the game came out in germany this year and my play time counter is at 133 hours with round about 3.000.000 clan points. My party is at level 60-61 and I have already had one try at defeating Vayne (obviously I was defeated, otherwise I wouldn't still be playing )

My goal at the moment is to complete as many parts of the game as I can possibly do, without straining myself. Until now I have always found something to do if an enemy was to difficult so I will probably keep on wandering the streets of Ivalice for some time.

This is my progress so far: 

So we all want to dive into next-gen high def entertainment, but somehow the raging format war makes it difficult to decide which side to stand on. Although I have been somewhat of a Sony fanboy since the original Playstation my support for Sony's console has had several dents since it's announcement a couple of years ago.

The current situation however is really quite frustrating. Especially if you put the numbers next to each others.

Ok, maybe the "must have" list is not everyones taste but it is quite clear that the XBox360 currently has the better games and the PlayStation3 only has a title that (in Europe) could be years away. In addition to this several games that appear on both consoles look better on the Xbox360 than on the PlayStation3.

So let's say i'd go with the Xbox360 for gaming... Microsoft has currently priced it's console in such a fashion that you would have a severly limited machine if you went for the cheapest version without a harddrive and if you wanted to add a harddrive later you are currently only able to buy a 20 GB model for 80 € (the 100 € more expensive Elite has 120 GB and comes in the much cooler black finish). There seem to be a couple of alternative versions which probable comes from the overhaul Microsoft did with their Xbox360 lineup but you will probably have to get lucky with them (i.e. getting a cheap HD Xbox) or unlucky (it ring-of-fire'ing out on you).

The Xbox360 isn't as cheap anymore as it was comparing it to the new PlayStation3 price. If you add to this the cost of getting a HD-DVD drive (which sits as another box next to the not-really-small Xbox360 console) you will soon get to a price that's not really close to a bargain. But if you think "oh, I'll get the PlayStation3 for HD movies then" you will be in for a surprise. The BluRay and HD-DVD war is still raging at full force and nobody can really say who is winning. The problem is that you as customer now has to decide which format to get by looking at which movies are released for it. I can understand that the movie studios don't want to produce everything on both formats and have begun taking sides, or switching sides. And as far as I have gathered it is here where Sony is loosing it.

So you can't really buy the PlayStation3 for it's games and you can't safely buy it as a HDTV player. The Xbox360 is now, with the price drop from Sony, suddenly pretty expensive and as HDTV player overly expensive and cumbersome.

What would have tipped me over to the PlayStation3 would have been Ace Combat coming out for Sony's console as well. But since there is nothing even close to an announcement from Namco (aside from a short comment that was quickly withdrawn) it is all very much guess work from here.

The conclusion for me would be to get the darn Xbox360 now to play Ace Combat, then get the PlayStation3 when Final Fantasy XIII comes out and get a HD-DVD drive for my pc.

I see this as somewhat of a defeat for me as I have never bought both contenders of past console wars. I had the SEGA MegaDrive, the Sony PlayStation and Sony PlayStation2 and I am still not comfortable with this outlook. Let's see if I will be able to wait even longer for Ace Combat to appear on PlayStation3 or if I will get weak and go for the Xbox360. Either way I think everybody looses currently because the longer this war rages the longer normal people will stay away from the next generation trying to avoid buying into the wrong format.

I decided to test the power consumption of my new PC today.

Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600
Gigabyte P35-DS3
XFX nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB

just fiddling around with ZBrush. It does work, but I am finding it hard using it with a trackball. I'll have a look if I can find my old Graphire tablet but I am not quite sure that it will be up to the task.

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Hi, my name is Daniel Kluth and I'm a 3D artist and web designer currently working for Capture in Düsseldorf.
I work with Lightwave3D, Autodesk XSI and several other tools.

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