Schoolyard rivalry

You hear a lot of talk about "Brand Loyalty" , the classic examples usually given as "urban" gimps who swathe themselves in Nike or Adidas or [insert name of sweatshop* using sports apparellel company] clothing and the like.

But I can think about a much better earlier example of loyalty to one brand. Computer/Console Brand Loyalty..
Trust me , even the most vicious,rabid,flame filled, no-holds-barred Mac vs PC debates has nothing ..NOTHING on a Commodore Vs Speccy debate when it got into full swing, we're talking people who were ready to defend their chosen platform physically if they had to.

*allegedy

The speccy had better games, the commodore had more games and you could control them with a joystick that did'nt involve mad professor style interfaces to plug them in. The Spectrum had higher resolution graphics, but the commodore users didn’t care as at least their computer could display proper colours and more than four colours at once too. The Commodore was an ugly breadbin, but the Spectrum came with a power supply that got so hot you could easily heat a decent sized semi detached with it, and so on ...anyway at this point the two debaters would be on the ground tearing each others hair out. Strangely enough get a few nerds drunk talking about games in a pub and invariably you'll get something similar to the above happening, only there’s less hair to pull now.
.....and this kind of thing didn’t stop with the early machines either ...forget Ali vs. Frazier or Tyson vs. Holyfield, we had SNES vs. Megadrive (nearly lost a tooth over that one) Amiga vs. ST, Saturn Vs Playstation.
You don’t really get the same thing now though (Mac Vs PC isn’t really about gaming to be honest) take a look at a Nintendo GameCube, Xbox and PS2 releases.... Half the time the 3 platforms get almost identical version of games and when they don’t: The Xbox has either watered down 6 month old PC games, or takes what should be a PC game, slaps shite controls on it and blocks the release on PC for six months to make it an "Xbox-exclusive". PS2 release are (with a few exceptions) "Generic fighter 4”, "sports franchise '05", and "driving s3quel", the only breath of fresh air is the eye toy, but that was done on the pc first anyway. The N: GC gets the odd decent game and sequels to Nintendo’s vast catalogue of older games (Zelda, Metroid, Mario etc) but there’s not a whole lot out there for it, its all so bland and uniform that there’s not much worth fighting over.
I think though, if you want to see what the rivalry is going to be over in the future look at the handhelds, The Sony PSP (when its finally released here) has mobile versions of some good older games (well Ridge racer anyway), some decent new ones, plus it brides the gap between console and the multimedia PDA's by being able to play Mp3's and Movies, from its rewriteable memory card and also proper movie releases on its disk system.
Nintendo have gone back to their roots and really tried to look at what makes games fun and new. What do I mean? , Well consoles normally have one screen, and rely on a standard controller and a few buttons .the Nintendo DS has two screens, one for the game and one usually for info, or a map, or as a controller ...yep that’s right controller.. Its a touch screen (again like a PDA) which allows games where you have to draw, or rub or scratch to win. Theres a mike built in to the DS too, some games involve you speaking or even blowing into it to play! There’s motion sensors built into some games (Warioware twisted -a GBA game) that involve you actually spinning and turning your console around to move control your character, brilliant fun! (Although it might look mad if you try it on a packed bus)
This is the kind of fresh thinking that'll have them fighting in the schoolyards over which is better, and long may there be something to fight over!!