A student relaxes in a Lazyboy in the center of the football field.

Around him 300-pound linemen glare into the eyes of the enemy. Perfect, glassy raindrops mix with the salty sweat beading off their foreheads. But the student isn’t wet, nor is he afraid.

He takes a sip of soda, glides his hand over the sleek piece of plastic in his hand and begins another round of Madden football.

The third generation of gaming consoles has arrived.

The Microsoft Xbox 360, released last year, and the Sony Playstation 3, due out in November, are state of the art, cutting edge, drool-worthy gadgets, which can serve as digital entertainment hubs in the home.

The last generation of gaming consoles, Playstation 2 and the original Xbox, were released about six years ago. At that time, thanks to its much wider game base and fan base acquired through the original Playstation, the PS2 dominated the console market.

But even if the PS2 sold more, many people preferred the Xbox to the PS2.

“The Xbox has a hard drive which makes it faster,” Ken Wyman, a sophomore in political science, said. “And the controller is a lot more user-friendly.”

Justin Sigmon, a junior in accounting, agreed with Wyman that the Xbox offers better game play.

“One of the things I hated about Playstation 2 was the load screens,” he said. “But it’s all about personal preference. There has been infinite arguments about which is better.”

The debate of last generation of systems is quickly coming to a close as the new systems begin to dominate the market.

Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 hold enormous amounts of computing power under their sleek hoods. And both will compel students to submerge themselves in a gaming wave made of HDTV resolutions and 5.1 channel surround sound.

The 360: rev your dual core processorsThe Xbox 360 hit the shelves on Nov. 22, 2005, and is an all-arounder in every sense of the word. Not only does it play games, but doubles as a movie and music player. It can read almost all the media formats, in almost any form. It doesn’t matter whether someone pops in a CD or DVD — or even a custom burned DVD.

If someone has a digital camera, a thumb-drive, or a music player that is Windows compatible, he or she can plug it into the 360’s USB port and browse photos or listen to songs. Or they can stream music and photos from a remote PC by installing Microsoft’s Windows Media Connect software on any PC running Windows XP.

To put it simply, the 360 is about three times as powerful as most of today’s high-end PCs — which come with single dual core processors. All this translates into games with dynamically rendered real-world environments, razor sharp images delivered in high-definition HDTV resolutions of up to 1080i.

“The graphics are intense, everything looks so real,” Sigmon said. “Like if you’re playing Madden the people look so real that it’s like watching TV.”

Game designers are still learning how to harness all the power of the 360. There are many titles, like Project Gotham Racing with its photo-realistic Ferraris or ,i>Call of Duty 2 which has players ducking for cover as they navigate through World War II, or Fight Night Round 3 whose boxers are so life-like that players can actually see their sweat-covered faces spit blood as they take a punch.

These games really showcase the difference between next-gen and current-gen consoles.

“It’s going to be hard to make games user friendly because they are going to be so complicated because the systems have so much power … and 360 fails to have a huge title to push sales, like Halo did for the original Xbox,” Sigmon said.

The PS3: players, power your wireless controllers The PS3 houses a specially designed processor called a Cell processor with eight synergistic processing elements. Every one of these elements is comparable to a 3.2 GHz processor. One of these eight SPEs is a standby, ready to jump in just in case one of the other seven happens to fail.

Having seven simultaneous processors means that an astronomical number of floating point operations per second can be performed — precisely 216 billion. Combine this with a custom made GPU for the PS3 and it creates a staggering total system performance of 2 Teraflops.

The PS3 controllers use the same Dual Shock design as the PS1 and PS2 controllers. However, Sony has kicked out the old force feedback technology to include a new motion-sensitive movement as a method of control. The PS3 can also connect to a PSP via USB – a feature utilized in F1 06, a racing title where the PSP acts as an external real-time rear-view mirror.

While the PS3 boasts graphical power, what will possibly give the PS3 an edge over its competition is its support for Blu-ray.

“Blu-ray technology is going to be huge for PS3 because that is the industry changing,” Wyman said. “Essentially, the way CD players work is that they have a laser that reads the information, but with blu-ray the same laser is much smaller. So the CD can hold like 50 times the amount of information.”

Sony believes that by incorporating Blu-Ray support in to the PS3, game designers will be able to layout massive games with HD content, expansive environments and maybe even some game extras. The PS3 will also be able to play Blu-ray disc movies, which will save a PS3 owner an additional $1,000 for a Blu-ray player.

Final TakeBoth the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have their pros and cons.

As a consequence of a later release date, the PS3 will be more powerful than the 360. The 360 on the other hand has the advantage that PS2 had — of already possessing a game and fan base before the PS3 comes out.

The Xbox also has an expansive online gaming community where fellow gamers can meet and compete against each other.

“Xbox Live is huge for a lot of gamers,” Sigmon said. “It totally changes the feeling of the game.”

What might further shift the tables towards Microsoft is that the PS3 is much pricier than the Xbox 360. A bare bones Xbox 360 costs $299, while an entry level PS3 prospectively will cost $500. The premium, fully loaded version of the Xbox 360 costs $399 as compared to $600 for a similar PS3.

But the actual cost of these systems can be more than the price tag.

“The PS2 was the demise of my first semester at state,” Smoak said. “I have an addiction where I can’t put it down until I’ve beaten it. I’m weaning myself off the idea of getting a new system.”

Wyman suggests having textbooks formatted into Xbox 360 games as a way to solve the potential problem threatening his future.

“It just sucks you in,” Sigmon added. “Gaming is the new American pastime.”