Bill Gates rubbishes rival consoles

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has rubbished Sony's and Nintendo's console game systems, and claimed that the strategy for the Xbox 360 is "working perfectly".

In an interview with reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Gates stated that the Nintendo Wii lacks the resolution for sustained play.

"Look at the resolution you get with a controlled experience like that," Gates said of the Wii console.

"Ask yourself what kind of accuracy and capability you want in terms of using a game for a long period of time."

Gates also claimed that Sony did not know what it was doing during the development of its Cell processor.

"Sony was going to have the Cell as the video processor, but they did not know what they were doing," said Gates, according to a report in the San José Mercury News.

"They took their year and burned it by not having a decent CPU strategy and then turning to nVidia at the last minute. But nVidia cannot do embedded DRam. It's a very unusual thing. Those processors are isolated from each other."

Gates said that he was determined not to make the same mistakes as when the original Xbox launched against the PlayStation 2. He also claimed that the Xbox 360 is "20 per cent better" than its rivals.

"It didn't matter that we were a year late, and didn't have the best games. We had this bigger box," he said of the Xbox 360.

"It's working perfectly. We wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less. We wanted to have the most games. We wanted to play to our software strength, and tools and online.

"We wanted to swap positions with Sony. We wanted to not be a year late, not be a big box, not be a more expensive box. How are we doing on that?"

However, Gates did praise Nintendo's close relationship with game developer Rare. "In my household, everybody plays Viva Piñata," he said.