It has been a long time coming, and I very nearly gave in and bought both an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii along the way, but I can reveal the answer to the questionnn ‘what will be the next games console to grace the happygeek living room’ is: a PlayStation 3. And it will grace that space on the European launch date of 23rd March because I have pre-ordered one, safe and sound and paid for and guaranteed for delivery on the day itself. I will even tell you where I bought it, Dark Planets, because it doesn’t take orders over their allocation and has methods in place to weed out the multiple unit pre-order speculators that spoil it for everyone just to make a few quid on eBay during the inevitable post-launch furore.

Unfortunately, for you, it has long since exhausted that launch allocation and withdrawn the buy button from the site.

I’ll tell you where I didn’t buy one from though, and why. HMV Online, a huge high street record and entertainment media retailer in the UK. The reason was simple, I don’t like getting ripped off. Here in the UK it is hard to avoid of course, considering that at launch a 60Gb PS3 (there is no 20Gb option shipping here for the time being) costs £425. Yes, you read that right my American friends, £425 (or US $800 if you prefer.) And that’s for the console and, err, nothing else. No games, no extra controller thrown in, no bundling, not even the HDMI cable required to squeeze the HD imagery out of the box.

But anyway, back to HMV and why I didn’t pre-order from it. Instead of paying that £425 price tag, HMV wanted £675 (US $1300) because you could make a priority order of one of the 5000 or so units it has been allocated by buying a 4Gb Sony PSP at the same time. Trouble is, I don’t want one, I’ve already got one. Worse yet, there are no guarantees that your PS3 will turn up on launch date or thereabouts, and if it doesn’t you are left with the PSP no money back on that one.

So why didn’t I have a Wii instead? No HD, more a toy than a serious bit of living room home gaming and entertainment kit, and I prefer not to look like a total plonker while playing games thank you very much. Mind you, according to a posting at The Inquirer the Wii actually has everything required to output in HD, it just can’t do so at the right frame rate and would have upped the retail price beyond what Nintendo thought people would pay so it kept the functionality stuffed away and hidden.

OK, but what about the Xbox 360? A true next-gen console that is currently leading the global sales charts by some margin? What’s wrong with that? Well, apart from the fact that I already have a huge library of PS2 games which will play on my PS3 but not an Xbox nothing much. Apart from the fact that it sounds like an aeroplane taking off which rather spoils the ambience when using the multimedia features, nothing much. Apart from the fact that a small family could live happily in the PSU, nothing much. Apart from the fact that they are as reliable as a political promise if the number of reports of units breaking down out of warranty are anything to by, not a lot. Apart from the fact that it can’t do proper 1080 HD via a HDMI cable, not a lot. Apart from the fact that you have to add yet another peripheral and pay even more money in order to get an HD-DVD player when the PS3 has a Blu-Ray device built in, nothing at all.

So there you have it, a happy chappy waiting for the 23rd March when his new gaming console arrives and his wallet shrinks to the tune of, well I’m not telling you exactly how much in case Mrs Happygeek is reading this. Let’s just say that by the time I added a second controller, a handful of launch games and that HDMI cable I could have taken Mrs Happygeek and the kids away for a nice vacation and still had change…

See my new posting here on the latest PS3 news which has changed my opinion on all of this.