A Nintendo Wii, spare controller, and six games.

Three months rent.

Half my yearly car insurance.

My share of tuition for a semester.

A semester and a half year's worth of books.

Dinner at Chipotle every night for more than 3 months.

...What are all these things you ask? To me, they are a list of things that I could potentially buy for the price of one Playstation 3. Why do I bring it up? This past week, stores began to take preorders for the system (set to release a few days prior to the Wii...don't recall the actual date)

I hate to sound like a Nintendo fanboy, but from a stritcly enconomic standpoint this is not the system for me. $600 smackaroos, and that's before I even get games to play on it. I'm barely scraping together enough guts to buy a Wii at some point this year. I really hope that the consumer sends a message to Sony that they've stretched the pocketbooks of gamers just a smidge too far this time around.

A few years back, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But now that I'm in college, looking at the price tag and seeing three months rent is just...well...a rude awakening. Sony has essentially priced me (a guy supposedly in their target demographic) right out of the market.

Will Sony's system have pretty graphics? Of course. Will it have the franchises I love? I've only seen screens of FFXIII and I'm in love! But looking at that list I made. There are so many others things I could have instead. Things that would last me a lot longer, and do me much more in the long run.

Because there's one thing I haven't put up there yet. I go grocery shopping once every two weeks. I usually spend around 8-10 bucks. I shop cheap, and don't eat much of the fancy or snacky stuff. You can see the math. For $600, I could spend $11 a week on groceries on myself. That'd be almost twice what I spend now. That's right, I could eat for two years on what it would cost me to buy one PS3. It sounds riddiculous, and people don't believe me. But it's the truth.

And that is why I wasn't lined up outside Gamestop a few days ago. Unfortunately, it's also why part of me wants to see Sony fail this time around.