It's not the political general election that really matters to us gamers next year, but rather which games console after this current generation will be first past the post- as the platform with the head start usually dominates for a considerable period of time, judging by the two Playstations so far.

While Sony and Nintendo are all geared up to pursue your pocket with the PSP and Nintendo DS as the next major platform war, Microsoft will neither confirm nor deny a delivery date of November 2005 in the US and then Christmas 2005 in Europe for the full sized non-portable Xbox Next. It would certainly steal a march on the PS3 (whose predecessor the PSX, only received its DVD Burning firmware upgrades in the past week in Japan).

As Playstation3 is slated for at least another three years away and that's just the Japanese date, Nintendo currently have a tunnel-wide gap in between these two releases to launch the follow-up to GameCube. As Nintendo announced the ‘Cube's continued retail presence alongside the follow up “Revolution” though, expect a longer than usual period of Japanese exclusivity, either for hardware, the most in-demand software, or both.

>> Microsoft - Official website of Microsoft