Final Fantasy XIII coming to Xbox 360. My god. This is the best news ever. This saves me close to $500. Well, no, I guess it only saves me the $400 I would have paid for a PS3, since I still need to pay for the game itself, regardless of system. But yes, I would have bought a PS3 just to play Final Fantasy. Just like I got my first Sony system, the original Playstation, just to play Final Fantasy. And just like I got a PS2 just to play Final Fantasy. And if I hadn't already had one, I would have bought a DS to play the Final Fantasy remakes. So this is great news to me. No need to overcome my strong desire for Sony to fail and buy a PS3 (Sony called the Wii an expensive niche product today, even though it's sold more units and costs less than the PS3. Now that they don't even have a Final Fantasy exclusive, what is the PS3? Expensive without a niche?)

And as reports come in, it looks like the release will be day-and-date with the PS3 release. Holy fuckin' shit, indeed. Honestly, did this leak out at all? I hadn't heard any Final Fantasy XIII port rumors in a long time, am I just not following the video game blogs as obsessively as I should? Or did my inattention actually make this happen?

Other than that, nothing too groundbreaking, but some cool stuff still came out from Microsoft's E3 presentation. Portal: Still Alive coming to the Xbox arcade, pretty much a port of the original Portal, with a few extra levels. This would have been exciting at launch, had it spared me purchasing the Orange Box just to get Portal, but too late for that now. I'll probably buy it again, though, as long as they add a reasonable amount of new content to the single-player mode (new online modes don't interest me). A massively-multiplayer online version of 1 Vs. 100 has the potential to be awesome, especially with real prizes on the line. And at last the Netflix partnership we all knew was in place is official; I'd be more excited if I wasn't already streaming Netflix Watch Instantly to my Xbox with an unofficial plugin, but it will be nice to have an official solution that actually works well (vmcNetflix is great, but freezes up a lot).

But, yeah. Final Fantasy XIII. Wow. I've been getting bored with these big new product presentations, like the last couple Apple announcements, because there's no surprises. And then, bam, Final Fantasy XIII goes multi-platform. Amazing. I recently started playing the original Final Fantasy, with the intention of playing through the entire series. Now that will be a lot cheaper to pull off.