Well, it won in my house anyway.

It’s really nice when your wife asks you several times what you want for your birthday and happens to remember rather than giving the ol’ standby of tube socks and “Old Spice.” The funniest part is realizing that boys will be boys and boys love toys (now they’re just more expensive). At a kid’s birthday party, you can always tell if they got a good gift because all of the other kids will cheer or go “Ooooo, cool…” That happened at my party when I let my son open this gift. Upon the unveiling, I threw both hands in the air, saying “Yes!!” and all of the guys (in their thirties) went “Ooooo, cool.”

Here are a couple of reasons why I selected HD-DVD over Blu-ray: price and TV capabilities. Assuming you already have an Xbox 360, the external HD-DVD add-on is the cheapest HD-DVD player out there. For around $180, you get the drive, and universal remote and “King Kong” on HD-DVD. Later, you can send away for five free HD-DVD’s. Upon checking the specs on my 60″ HDTV, I discovered that it can only display up to 1080i. So it doesn’t matter if I buy a Blu-ray player which also plays PlayStation 3 games, my TV won’t do 1080p.

While we’re on the subject, based on reviews and exclusives, I don’t think there’s even any room in my entertainment center for a PS3. I’m too busy with the 360 - I couldn’t imagine having time for two systems. Especially with most games coming out on both consoles anyway. Sure, I’ll miss out on some Sony exclusives like “Metal Gear Solid” and the eventual “God of War III,” but I own “God of War II” and I’ve barely played it. And I L-O-V-E-D the original. I don’t think it’s the lack of achievement points, I think it’s because I’ve got other games on the 360 which look awesome in high definition. Yes “GoW II” looks great on PS2. But that’s for PS2. Wait, this is a whole different subject…

While I didn’t watch the full movie, I did skip to the big face-off between King Kong and the T-Rexes. Any shot which was full CGI looked incredible. My only small issue now is that because the resolution is so much higher, you can really tell when an actor is on green screen. It looked a little fake, but this is also because I was specifically looking for an issue like this.

The title I can’t wait to watch next is “300.” Even though the entire movie is green screen, they’ve done so much post-production work on the final look of the film that I suspect everything should be seamlessly blended together.