The next-gen – now current-gen – console war has arrived and, already, the game has gotten dirty. For weeks before I acquired my PlayStation 3, I kept hearing a persistent rumor: when you get your PS3, don’t get rid of your PS2 right away if you want to play Final Fantasy XII – there’s a bug in backward compatibility and the game looks like crap on PS3.

The rumor had the desired effect, I guess. I hesitated to use my PS2 for trade credit toward a PS3. When I finally brought my PS3 home, however, being the natural skeptic that I am, I immediately popped in FFXII to see how bad it was.

Hear this now: the rumor is complete crap! After popping in the disk and playing a couple hours into the game, I can tell you that, if anything, FFXII looks better on PS3 than it did on PS2. Now, of course, if you have a PS3 connected to an HDTV and your HDTV utilizes only a 32Hz HDMI cable, then your results might be disappointing. But for most people, FFXII looks spectacular on PS2 or PS3. Don’t believe the anti-PS3 hype!

You know, Sony’s not perfect. Far from it. The PS3 launch was basically the PS2 launch on a weight loss program. Few of the launch titles are all that good. No one likes that the SixAxis controller doesn’t vibrate. The price of the system isn’t reasonable for the market no matter how you look at it. And Untold Legends just sucks.

Don’t folks think Sony has enough negatives going against it without piling on false crap? I mean, you have to buy a $15 card reader to transfer your game saves that you’ll only use once; there are some minor bugs on about 200 backward-compatible titles (which is a darn sight better than Xbox 360 not having backward compatibility at all for a majority of original Xbox titles); and you lose all your peripherals from the previous gen, meaning everything from your Karaoke Revolution microphone and dance pad to your $200 Gran Turismo 4 steering wheel are useless.

Is it really necessary to create lies on top of all that’s true?