Salon.com has an excellent overview of the console gaming arena for this holiday season, including a review of the Xbox and its competition.

Compared to the Xbox, Nintendo's new console offers as much computing power, but at a lower price, with an unimpeachable brand and the heft of a game design genius. And looming even larger, Sony has quietly spent the interval since its 2000 debut to take real chances, fostering a palette for artistry and innovation on the Playstation 2. Xbox now competes against a massive library ambitious enough to accommodate a game based on Dante's "Inferno" and wide enough to slip in a game that lets you solicit sex acts from streetwalkers.

In opposition, all Microsoft really has is a horde of mediocre titles -- and $500 million to spend on a megaphone loud enough to bellow "Give it up for me!" into a quickly emptying auditorium.

I'm impressed that I can't stop hearing about the Xbox, yet I know nothing about the new Nintendo GameCube. Not that I'm actively considering taking the plunge into the console world (grown men don't sit in front of televisions to play games; grown men sit in front of computers, so we can pretend there's a difference), but I'm interested in reading post-hype comparisons of Xbox and Playstation 2. Seems like Sony could benefit from re-introducing the PS2 with a marketing blitz in the face of Xbox hype, lest the millions of kids who couldn't get PS2's last year believe they can't compete. From this article, it sounds like this year Sony is letting the growing game library do the talking.

In terms of branding, [games like Grand Theft Auto III] have helped position the Playstation 2 as something like the HBO of video-game consoles-- full of graphic violence and sexual content, yes, but also displaying a high degree of sophistication and a willingness to take creative risks.

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I don't know if Sony actively pursues these unique projects or not," Geoff Keighley says, "but I wouldn't be surprised if these games appearing on the PS2 is simply a result of developers knowing it has the largest installed base."

Which would partially explain the presence of the Lost, a literate, survival-horror title with role-playing elements that's on the PS2 release list. "It was clear to me that the PS2 would be the leading console when the Lost debuted," says Ken Levine, general manager/creative director of Irrational Games. A loose adaptation of Dante's "Inferno" (it even includes a Virgil figure, though in this version, the Roman poet looks more like a bipedal lizard), it's the story of a young single mother who must travel through the nine circles of hell to retrieve her dead child. In hell, Amanda is assisted by corporeal embodiments of her soul (for good and ill), and each ring of the underworld is actually a manifestation of modern evil -- violent sinners, for example, are condemned to a plain resembling a World War I battleground, and the greedy are confined to a perverse Las Vegas.

Also catching my interest is the sheer dominance of Gameboy Advance in the handheld game market. Cheaper than full consoles, fully portable, and backward compatable with all Gameboy games. Sure, they don't play DVDs or render realistic hair, but at $99, they don't have to. And GBA's can hook up to GameCubes.