I’m starting to feel a little left out.

I live in a console free environment, mostly because I don’t have enough entertainment hours to play all the PC games I love or enough entertainment dollars to really justify more games anyway. There’s also the issue of being not sure what console to pick (and Xbox so I can play Jade Empire? A PS2 so I can play Romance of the Three Kingdoms? A Gamecube so that at least one person in my circle of friends has one?).

Plus, strategy games are making tentative steps onto the console mat. Shattered Union will be released on the Xbox and introduce a whole new audience to the beauty of the hex map.

And now there’s the Next Generation crap.

I understand passion for gaming, but passion for hardware is beyond my ken. Fans of all the systems are slavering over the tiniest hints about the Xbox 360 or the PS3 or the Revolution. You get the usual concomitant declarations that, this time, PC Gaming is finished or that we’ve been through all this before or that there aren’t any titles worth getting excited over, yet.

And I completely don’t care.

Here we have a major gaming industry moment coming up and I will have no position on it whatsoever. What’s the point of blogging if I can’t hold forth on why one console is clearly superior? Or, like many blogs, not state my opinion on this issue of importance, but skew all my commentary and links to one side or the other.

The good news for me is that the new machines should drive the old ones down in price and I can begin to catch up on a few years of gaming. But, regretfully, I will sit the Next Generation out for now.