Gaming

It’s hard to tell if those awesome consoles up above are artists renditions or very real pieces of gaming technology that will shake the industry at its core. So hard to tell. We won’t humor Piicron enough to actually describe their ideas (okay, just one: Ubercron, a $500 console that can play “any game ever released to any console” with its 3.2GHz quad-core processor) but we do recommend clicking on over to the website, where you can easily squander an afternoon reading through all this insanity. To be honest, we’re almost a little disappointed none of this is grounded in reality, or even vaguely aware of reality: at least Phantom was trying.

It wasn’t any secret that the Xbox 360 was getting a price cut in the next week or so, and now it’s official — Major Nelson just confirmed that as of September 5th, the Arcade will be $199, the Pro will be $299, and the Elite will be $399. No motion controller, goofy Live starter pack, or tweaked controller to be found, but we’re not arguing with price cuts.

According to a GameSpot interview with Sony’s US director of hardware marketing John Koller, that new PSP-3000 screen may look a bit better… but it’s going to cost you about 20 minutes of battery life. Luckily for you gamers with endless pockets out there, Koller assures that minor wrinkle will be offset because, “We’re going to have the extended life battery that’s still available for consumers, so we’re still going to get the eight-to-ten hours out of that battery.” So just to make that clear, the regular battery life will be diminished, but you can buy a new, larger battery from Sony to extend your gaming time. Got that? Good. Watch him say it for real in the video after the break.

[Via T3]

Nintendo might be cranking out new DS Lite colors left and right, but IGN says something bigger’s brewing in Kyoto — a third iteration of the DS with dual touchscreen displays, one of them widescreen. Those are pretty significant changes, so we’d actually say that sounds more like a second-gen DS rather than another rev of the current hardware, but IGN says the rumored release date of April or May 2009 doesn’t jive with a whole new unit. We’ll see when we see — hopefully we won’t be waiting long.

PS.- That’s just IGN’s mockup, don’t get too excited.

Getting the Wii to run backup disks has never been quite as easy as running homebrew, but that might be about to change — there’s apparently a secret recovery mode that can be accessed with a special GameCube memory card. Not much is being revealed yet, but apparently if a “device” with a unique ID signature is present in the slot at boot, the Wii will drop into recovery mode and happily run whatever you throw at it, from backup disks to homebrew code. Hopefully we’ll find out more soon — video after the break.

Update: It looks like the recovery mode is only good for fixing “certain bricked consoles” — so much for that.

[Thanks, brakken]

Value likely isn’t the first word that comes to many folks’ mind when they think of the PS3 (especially given other recent console goings on), and Sony is now admitting that’s partly its fault. No, it’s not saying that the price is too high, but it is fessing up that it could do a better job of marketing the console’s value. In an interview with Gamasutra, Julie Han of Sony corporate communications cited the PS3’s ability to put PS3 downloadable content onto the PSP in particular as one feature they could do more with on the marketing front, adding that they also “don’t talk enough” about Sony’s “future-proofing” strategy. Of course, a price cut wouldn’t hurt with that value message either but, as you may have suspected, Han would only reiterate that Sony has “no plans to do any price cuts,” and that it’s sticking with its strategy.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

According to an interview with Epic Games’ senior producer Rod Fergusson, developers for the Xbox 360 may be reaching the outer edges of what is graphically possible with the console. In an interview with Gamasutra, the Gears of War / Gears of War 2 head says that recent advances and refinements are pushing the system further than expected, though he still believes there’s some room to grow. In Fergusson’s words: “I think we’re certainly approaching the upper end of it, as far as what developers are able to do with it, but just looking at all the demos we saw today — ours and others — it’s clear that all the games just keep improving, and keep pushing that bar.” Of course, there’s a long gap between pushing a system to its limits and starting to look around for its replacement, though since we all know another iteration of the Xbox is inevitable, none of this news should come as any surprise. They have a name for things like this… progress.

[Via GameDaily]

It’s Friday the 5th, that means that the $200 Xbox 360 just became the lowest-priced console in the US (as it is in Japan) compared to the perpetually “sold out” $250 Wii and 80GB PS3 selling for double the price of a diskless Arcade. With no new price cuts expected from either Sony or Nintendo, the holiday console wars are officially on. Picture proof of the $199.99 Xbox 360 Arcade in the wild after the break.

[Thanks, JerkyChew]