Saadi: Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good book
December 3, 2013
Believe the Hype: LSU men, women succeed in tournaments
December 4, 2013
Floodlights washed out the glow of a rising gibbous moon, in the Best Buy parking lot where Joey Lirette and more than a dozen other people waited patiently for midnight to arrive.
Some leaned against the Martin Luther King Blvd. store’s façade, others sat on the cold concrete beneath it. Lirette and a buddy, Jay Liner, were among those. They had arrived at 3:30 a.m. Nov. 21, determined to be first in line for a new Xbox One.
The same scenario unfolded a week before, when Sony unveiled its newest gaming and home entertainment platform, the PlayStation Four.
The world of gamers and next-generation home entertainment aficionados appears evenly split throughout the tri-parish region, with various features on each system appealing to one side of the divide or the other. Microsoft’s Xbox at $500 costs about $100 more than the PS4, but that didn’t affect the loyalties of those who showed up for the Xbox debut.
While not decked out in gear related to their favorite brand – or tattoos bearing its logo like the one proudly displayed at Best Buy by Xboxfan Jay Liner – the PS4 fans equally expressed statements of enthusiasm.
By the time Liner, Lirette and others lined up on Nov. 21, the PS4 crowd had already been using their devices for a week.
“I am loving it,” said D’Vaghn Hadley CQ of Raceland, a 30-year-old offshore worker. “I love the newness of it.”
Hadley bought his PS4 at the GameStop store in Galliano, where a queue began forming about two hours before the special midnight opening.
When the Xbox One premiered, the lot at GameStop in Houma, a half-mile past Best Buy, filled up with cars whose occupants lined patiently outside the doors just before Midnight.
Like their Microsoft counterparts, Hadley and other PS4 owners tout superior graphics and game flexibility as the reasons for their choices. Xbox fans said they like the Microsoft chat-gaming features. Hadley said that for him the gaming controller of the PS4 takes easily to his hand.
Both game systems have the capacity of working as home theater conduits, streaming movies from Amazon, Netflix or other online venues, as well as music.
“It was exciting and fun,” Best Buy store manager Charles Roe said of both game system release nights. On the release nights, Roe said, most customers were upgrading existing platforms, meaning the Xbox One buyers already had Xbox systems, and that PS4 buyers already had a prior generation of the Sony offering, either a PS3 or a PS2.
The game systems sold out rapidly after their respective releases but managers at stores said they fully expect to have more in stock by the time holiday shopping hits hard.
“This first round knows what they want,” Roe said. “Now we will start getting the moms and the dads who are making decisions.”
James Loiselle contributed to this report.
– john@gumboguide.com
Students Brennan Mobley of Galliano and Coley Gaspard of Cut Off sport Xbox shirts and caps while waiting to purchase their new gaming systems Nov. 21 at Best Buy in Houma. The Playstation 4 was released one week earlier.
