Game On!

(CBS)  For thousands of devoted gamers, the waiting will finally come to an end at the stroke of midnight, when the Sony PlayStation 3 goes on sale. There are long lines trailing around electronics stores from coast to coast — and some people have been waiting in line for a week, in all kinds of weather.

In Manhattan, CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason stood in line with a few hundred anxious future PlayStation 3 owners.

"When did you get here?" he asked Angel Paredes.

"Monday night at 8 o'clock," Angel says.

There are now hundreds of gamers behind him in a line that stretches for a full city block. And the list for those in line is long.

"It's about six pages so far," said Sean, who is keeping watch over the sign-up sheet.

"We take names. We gettin' 'em in order. Everybody gotta fair chance to get their game," he said. "That's all."

So what is it about the PS3 that's worth spending three nights on the street for?

"It's the most wanted piece of technology right now," a girl says.

But the new PlayStation is not the only game in town. Nintendo's new Wii console comes out this weekend.

"So for the business, this is as big as it gets. This is the huge monumental shift that happens once every five years to the next generation of consoles," said John Broady of Gamespot.com.

Microsoft's XBox 360, already out for a year, has sold 6 million units. But Sony, which still has 60 percent of the market, spent billions to create the PlayStation 3. Most of that money was spent on a set of revolutionary microchips that generate its incredibly detailed graphics.

Kaz Hirai, head of gaming for Sony USA, says in its new basketball video game, a player's sweat is actually calculated according to his exertion and the contours of his face.

Of the six years it took Sony to develop the system, were they working on the sweat the whole time?

"No, we were sweating the whole time," Hirai says.

They were sweating because the states are high in this $10 billion gaming business.

"It's undoubtedly the most advanced piece of electronics that anyone's ever tried to mass-manufacture," Broady says.

And Sony literally can't make them fast enough. That's why there are lines all over the country tonight. In California, two kids even offered their places in line for sale on the Internet for $1,300 apiece — double the price of the PlayStation 3. But most of the crowd isn't budging.

[kwlambi]

ya know this story dominated things,this is the reason Bush continues, we divert from things, now he is in Vietnam, a texan in vietnam, I am saddened, as the thing about War and things is about stupid Texans, JOhnsons and Bushes.. Jebus,.,Games. thats it , its all about games... Gee I feel better

[finny06]

As the years go by, I find myself rooting for Microsoft more and more. Shocking, I know. Maybe it's just because their the home team.

[lost_seraph]

You could simply wait untill the market is flooded and they cant giv the things away. I dont mind occasionally playing video games as well but I wouldnt go as far as stick a big label on myself saying "geek" by waiting inline for a week for an expensive paper weight. Which, in essence is all the PS3 will become once the PS4 comes out.

As for me, I'll probably get a Wii.

[subscriber_]

Funny!
As X360 and PS3 developper, I know that the PS3's cell is marginally better than the X360 chips. PS3 has less available memory than X360 (SONY OS is less efficient than X360 OS).
Graphically the X360 is far superior than the PS3, ATI did an awesome job where NVIDIA just adapted one of their PC card.
Very few games will use the real capacity of the BluRay.
At the end, there won't be noticeable difference between X360 games and PS3 games. The X360 will look better, the PS3 will have slightly better physics. In both cases, the games designed specifically for one of the console will look awesome but won't be portable on the other console. At the end, it won't really matter.

But here is the funny part:
Game developpers are not talking about buying a PS3. Sometime they are talking about buying a X360, but most of them are talking about buying a Wii!!!

Even funnier:
People buying a SONY two times the price of a X360 are going to say that their console is much much better! And at the end there is almost no major difference, they will just have the satisfaction of a bigger ego and just wasted some of their money.