A special 'One for the road' written by our resident blogger 'Paul the Elder'

Sony has backed a winning format at long last! Forget Betamax (Left), forget Mini disks, Blu-Ray has won the HD disk format war. This is all old news now and you are probably thinking "What has this got to do with gaming?". Well I've been following this story since the two formats HD-DVD and Blu-Ray started the battle.

You see Microsoft put it's faith into HD-DVD, they even made a nice little add on player (add ons never succeed but that's a whole other blog). That player is now retailing for as little as $50. A Microsoft big wig as gone on record as saying that Disks aren't important. That Movies and games on disks are going to be
a thing of the past.

This may be true, I sincerely hope not, but then again I am now more likely to download my music from I tunes than buy a CD. I thought that I would never give up my CD's.

The thing that is bugging me about this is, if future consoles rely on downloadable content. What is going to happen to the retro market of the future? Who is going to want to buy a console with games stuck on a hard drive? It will take all the choice away from the retro game buyer. It will be like buying an arcade plug and play console.

It's a little ways off I guess but I hope that MS are barking up the wrong tree. I hope that this retoric from the guys at the top of MS Games, is just posturing due to them smarting from losing a format battle.

I still think it is possible that we may see a Microsoft console with Blu-Ray inside. Games are getting bigger and bigger. Metal Gear Solid 4 is rumoured to be nearly filling a Blu-Ray disk, so MS needs to think about this issue and quickly.

But for now we will have to wait and see. Goodbye Retro, hello download?

Paul the Elder.