I’d like to focus inward a bit for this edition of the Pixelante Nationalist. Not introspection and personal revelation, oh God no. I mean industry internal politics. And by that I mean I have to get some elucidating commentary out of my system and into yours.

In the wake of Sony’s enlightening “we have no idea what the hell we’re doing” announcement last week, Nintendo stepped up to a few major news sites to say that they had some exciting news of their own. This news was hush-hush until exactly 12:01 am Thursday morning, when they finally and officially dropped this bombshell:

“Everything is on schedule. Nintendo is very happy.”

Stop the presses. Jesus Christ. Nintendo? Schedule? Happy? Very?

On?! Good lord, on?

I ask you, Nintendo, how in the hell I’m supposed to get any sleep with this revelation weighing so heavily on my shoulders...

According to Nintendo’s ominous press release, Wii chips have been in production for at least three weeks and more and more are arriving in New York for system manufacturing as we speak. The console’s production is apparently moving on schedule; while they won’t confirm or deny the status of full-on console assembly, we can expect it’s starting immediately if it hasn’t already.

Seriously now; this is, for all intents and purposes, non-news. Nintendo making modest promises, and then living up to them at a respectable pace? That’s only slightly more show-stopping than the headlines Sun Expected to Rise Tomorrow, Rag-tag Band of Unlikely Heroes Save World From Certain Doom, and ‘Fire Hot,’ Claim Experts. I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s the same old song and dance. We haven’t been too worried about the Wii launch and this isn’t changing that.

What DOES make this interesting is the deep, precious subtlety in the way that Nintendo chose to blatantly and malevolently ram Sony’s failings forcibly up its arse. Only in the wake of Kaz and Ken’s utter failure to launch does this morsel of Nintendo goodness really have the desired impact. 

That impact, of course, is that fact that Sony’s antics since E3 have steadily made Nintendo’s work easier and easier. Nintendo hyping the announcement that “everything is going good, we’re A-OK, pardners,” is nothing more than taking the cozy hand that Sony dealt it. The blatant underlying message here is “we’re on track to deliver what we said we’d deliver, unlike those crazy bastards over there.”

The evidence of Sony’s failure to market and appeal to the consumer is clearest in the hitherto unseen advent of its new, self-created rival; the “Wii60” camp.

Sony’s overpriced, underdelivering hunk of crap is pragmatically the financial equivalent of having BOTH the budget-priced Wii AND the well-established 360, and many gamers have realized this duality and chosen to stand by it. Here is some insidious cabal of bloggers going about their business in our society while secretly planning to own not one, but two consoles of different brands this fall, and they use the shrewd portmanteau of ‘Wii60.’ They believe that the Playstation 3 is a failure of such epic proportions that both other ends of the market can’t be anything but successful by comparison.

Good God, Sony, have you put the pieces together yet? Do you have, how they say, a clue? Your embarrassing antics, God-awful planning, and outright awkward verbalizations of these past months were bad enough. With your latest failure to launch, your dysfunction has reached a level even Pfizer can’t correct. In your haze of Blu-ray induced fantasies you have taken your two competitors and fabricated a third, utterly non-corporeal opponent of some ectoplasmic composition.

Sony’s god-awful PR has simultaneously drained its own life-force and empowered that of its enemies, giving earthly manifest to its own dark shadow. What you’d expect to be some gaunt animated cadaver of horrors is in fact both fleshly and supple; this “Wii60” is some kind of taunting succubus, beckoning you into its world of limb-swinging multi-player-ing hedonism. 

Melodrama notwithstanding, Sony is digging some amazing hole here. They have established themselves as some kind of notorious, laughable paragons of senility among gaming press, and no amount of good news (Xfire! And… Xfire!) can make any impact at this point. Sony is its own worst enemy, and is rapidly approaching the rank of Nintendo’s PR bosom buddy. 

With their crapshow at E3 bolstering the 360, and Nintendo’s good show plus healthy launch schedule looking that much better, it boggles the mind how Sony can’t even notice their feet lodged firmly in their collective jaw. Maybe if there were licensed Sony ActiveFeet Ambulators lodged within some kind of Universal Respiration-Digestion proprietary format-reader they could detect the error and strive to correct it.

My whole point here is, Sony isn’t just hurting itself anymore. As evidenced by Nintendo’s adorably callus behavior last week, they aren’t afraid to be outright empowered by Sony’s failures. Every humiliating time Kaz opens his crazy mouth, the thought of your family and friends seeing you swinging a Wii controller like a magic baton seems a lot less embarrassing. I’m no economist, nor do I have any credible ability to make any market analyses, but I can say mathematically and without a doubt that every syllable Ken Kutaragi utters into a microphone brings Nintendo stock up exactly one point.

This isn’t a constructive editorial. I’m not sure it’s even a very informative one. It’s simply a look at the current state of public relations between the biggest companies in this industry. If I had to reach any kind of conclusion with this malicious ramble, it is this: Sony needs a complete miracle to restore faith in their ability to compete in this market. 

With shortages somehow starting months in advance and exclusives jumping ship, it’s clear that their bag of tricks has run empty. If they’re going to pull that miracle out of anywhere, it’ll have to be their own ass.