Dave

This is news? As opposed to that price cut in Japan (and hopefully in the other territories as well), the HDMI components being included in all models, Sony telling Immersion to shove it with a rumble-free controller, and an actual halfway decent lineup would be what I thought passes for news these days. Guess it just must be a slow day. :P

Very welcome and unexpected news. I hope the cut is across the board, if they hope to capture the hearts and minds of American and European gamers.

@ #20:

Because it's a console from a major game company that's been in the market since 1985, was tinkering with games via phone lines and satellite back in the days of the NES and SNES, and managed to drop the ball with three of their last five offerings in the market, costing them dearly (N 64, Virtual Boy, and GameCube- despite how much fun they were/are) in terms of revenue and marketshare.

Now they're marketing a system as a family machine, minus DVD-playback (no biggie) and restricting the number of players for their initial offerings (...why?) AND have expensive controllers, to boot (sold separately, naturally)? This is the same crap that Sony or Microsoft would get called out for on, and rightfully so- it runs counter to the message they're sending with the system. Or maybe big N's marketing department is just hitting a period of "suck" as evidenced by the stream of bad news coming out of them recently.

Regarding the comments about Sony's region locking, that's for their blu-ray movies only. In fact, regions are now redefined as "Japan & U.S.A.", "Europe", and "Asia". As of now, the software and games are slated to be region free.

Back to the topic at hand, this sucks for a lot of nice little gems that never made it out of Japan before during the days of the NES, SNES, GB/C/A and Virtual Boy (had to throw that in there- Dragon Hopper and Bound High looked so awesome :P). On the other hand, I'm somewhat nervous about what else the company hasn't revealed yet, since it's doubtful that the bad news lately is limited to controller pricing, region encoding or USB port limitations. By comparison, Sony doesn't look so bad after 9+ months of crap PR. But that's just the expectations game being played.

Nice job with the spoilers there, fellas.

Seriously: What the hell were you thinking? >:(

"So what this means is that Kutaragi admitted something that even sony fanboys cannot."

What, that Sony has more competition now for hardware manufacturing, meeting consumer demand for a system launch, and crappy PR? Coupled with unrelenting fanboyism attacks on THE INTERNET, etc., I find this shocking, SHOCKING, that someone might consider report after report after report on this site about the crap Sony does wrong to be a bias. It may very well be, but for the record, wouldn't the reaction to what Sony has to show at TGS be more indicative of whether or not the site here is expressing an overt bias?

I can't exactly think of any Sony related articles coming from Joystiq here regarding an actual strong lineup for the PSP, a decent Winter lineup for the PS2, or clear explanations that blue-ray diode manufacturing isn't something controlled by $ony (argh! grr!). Again, without them actually having their crap together to showcase, I would imagine they'll try to lowball expectations as much as possible before the TGS. PR certainly isn't going their way right now...

Now considering ALL that, this launch for the PS3 wouldn't be any different from other system launches, except Sony had very high expectations, which they can't follow through with. Does that really give carte blanche to a site that considers itself (and it's content) to be unbiased, informative, and accurate? Weren't there the exact same problems with shortages and software complaints at the launch of the 360? Isn't it true that the Wii controls might not be as fine and dandy as people say/think they are? They may very well be- and it's something that people will learn once the hardware starts making its way into people's homes. But again- I don't expect the tide of bad news/perception by a lot of people out there to turn favorably towards Sony before the end of the month, provided they're pulling out all the stops. Barring something insanely positive to critics' perception in general coming to light before then, naturally. But we'll see.

Uh, by a lot of the comments I hear, the redesign for the DS was awesome, save for the weaker speakers, the hinge problems, and the big-handed folk that weren't sure how to best hold it.

A PSP redesign that adds flash memory, smaller specs, and a retractable screen cover would be quite awesome, especially coupled with all of the new software, hardware, and downloadable stuff coming out for it. Hell, even the battery life could probably be improved by now (not that I've ever had any problems with it), so to not try to entice new buyers to look at a newer PSP (a lower price tag would help, as would discounts for UMD movies. I keep hearing $10~15 dollars for a film, these days) and consider the system worth getting.

And finally, again, having some actual software out. About time. :D

Just to bring this back on topic:

Clinton was #42, Bush is #43. Canadian schools generally don't use the SAT scores, and by most standards, I'd think the original N-Gage with it's user-unfriendly design would seem to be "second rate".

Perhaps some kind of rewrite is in order here?