Last week, I bought a PlayStation 3. I never thought I would, but this is gaming. Things change fast.

You're+pretty.+Please+don't+break+my+360.

It started at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, as these things usually do. I wastwo years back, the one where Duffy bombed her own Lips song and everyone pretended the lack of a new Halo announcement was no big deal.Goldstein can sleep through anything. Then, in between laptop battery swap-outs, I heard it. Final Fantasy XIII would be released on Xbox 360 as well as PlayStation 3. It was the announcement I never expected. The series that – for me – had come to define PlayStation was no longer a Sony exclusive. As the trailer played on the giant plasma screens, I tried to picture myself playing Square Enix's upcoming role-playing game on an Xbox 360. But I just couldn't wrap my brain around it.As a hardcore 360 player who covered the console as part of IGN's Xbox Team at that time, I was heavily invested in Microsoft's machine. The 360 was my sole home console and I had a desk full of them at the office. I'd been an early believer, jumping Sony's ship when the original Xbox was released. There was something radical and refreshing about Microsoft's approach to the console biz, and I dove right in. That bet seemed smart when the Xbox 360 was released a few years later and the great games started rolling in.But despite my heavy investment in Microsoft's gaming platform, something about a proper new Final Fantasy game appearing on the Xbox 360 felt horribly wrong, like dropping a Ferrari engine into a Buick body. Sure, she'll run, but the soul of the machine would just be off somehow.In gaming, we deal with hardware and software, absolutes and ones and zeroes. In all our talk about graphics, versions, specs and framerates, we sometimes forget that so much of gaming is purely emotional. Why do we respond to some games and not others? Why does IGN editor Greg Miller celebrate the PlayStation 2's birthday every year, complete with cake and ice cream? It's because games talk to us, even if we sometimes can't understand what they're saying.I was surprised by my reaction to the Final Fantasy XIII But the same company that gave me an incredible library of games and the most robust online console gaming experience to date also let me down. With a wink and a nod, it sold me a poorly constructed piece of hardware that consistently failed me. The Xbox 360 feels cobbled together. It breaks down and leaves me with a pile of unplayable games for weeks at a time. It's clunky and inelegant. It's Microsoft Windows all over again. And it makes me feel like a fool for relying on it.But even my disappointment with the quality of the Xbox 360 doesn't completely explain my reaction to the Final Fantasy XIII announcement. I've been playing games long enough that I shouldn't be emotional about hardware anymore. Didn't my personal attachment to game consoles die when the Dreamcast did? Or did it just go dormant when Microsoft took over the world of hardcore gaming?Microsoft is many things, but cool isn't one of them. There's a cloud of insecure awkwardness hovering over Microsoft's Xbox persona, and there aren't enough Kudo Tsunodas and Ryan Paytons on Earth to change that. Watching Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb on Inside Xbox is like watching your dad showing off his new propane grill. "She's a beaut, ain't she? There's Fanta in the fridge if you and your friends want some."