BrokenDesign's Blog - 2old2play

Extra Life Webcast

At long last, here is the post containing the link to my webcast of the Extra Life event. I will begin casting promptly at 12:01AM on Oct 18th (just under 5 hours!) and will cease [to exist?] around 11:59PM. I think I have the best angle possible set up to not only show what I'm playing, but also a bit of myself. The plan is to do some commentary and not just sit and play, but I'm not a terribly interesting person so we'll see how that all works out. Talking for near 24 hours could very well kill me. A friend of mine, Brian, tracks182 from the site, is planning on stopping by in the wheresabouts of 3:00, so that will likely make some things more entertaining to watch. And hopefully my dogs behave, that's probably the part I'm most worried about. So between taking care of them, eating, occasional bathroom trips and such, it sure won't be 24 hours of solid gameplay, but hopefully enough to appease those who would be critical. See you all there, I hope. :-)

Webcast - http://www.justin.tv/brokendesign

Update tweeting - http://twitter.com/allaboutdolph

*Disclaimer: Due to the nature of some of the games I will be playing, the Justin.tv site asks you be over 18 to watch the stream.

Projected game list: for PS3 I am planning to play Wipeout HD, Burnout Paradise, Dead Space, Calling All Cars, Pixeljunk Eden, and possibly more arcade type games here and there. For 360 I will be playing Call of Duty 4, Castle Crashers and Halo 3, in addition to maybe some arcade games here and there, but not sure.

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Extra Life

On October 18th, I will be taking part in the Extra Life 24 hour gaming marathon to help raise money for research and treatment of pediatric cancer. The event is being organized by the group at SarcasticGamer.com in partnership with the Texas Children's Hospital. I've been looking forward to the marathon ever since first hearing about it, and am proud to be donating my time and hopefully doing my part to help raise donations to help those children afflicted by cancer.

For more information on the event, you can visit the official website for Extra Life. If you want to make a donation, please visit the donation page that I have set up through Texas Children's Hospital.

On another note, I will be webcasting my entire gameplay experience, starting at 12:01AM on the 18th and concluding at 11:59PM. A few nights ago I set up a page and did a bit of a trial run for quality and network stress testing, having a game of Crackdown online at the same time as streaming out video. I am happy to say the test was successful in every way, so the webcast is on. I will be posting the link to the cast page a few days in advance, so stay tuned. Thank you to all who donate and to all who offer their support by offering up any stories they may have, tuning in to the webcast for support, and any well-wishes that I am able to make it through. There will certainly be Bawls flowing like water that day to keep me up and keep me powered.

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Live is free! .....for PC.

So Microsoft announced what everyone knew they had to do if they wanted to compete with Steam in any way, shape or form... they made Games for Windows Live free. That means they get all the features they did before, including cross-platform play with 360, for no monetary value whatsoever.

Ok, so, where does that leave us Xbox gamers who still have to shell out every year? I mean, I was ok with it for awhile because a majority of the games I want to play online are 360 exclusive. But now just because I have a white box I have to pay where PC players don't have to? Say what you will about the features of Live, they certainly are robust and they exceed those of the PSN in general, but truth be told all online PS3 games I've played have had little to no lag in them whatsoever. Any lag there has been has never been a killer of the experience. However, on Xbox Live, the service I'm paying $50 a year for, every single Halo match I play has some sort of lag to it. Every single big team battle I play, forget about it, is tremendously laggy to the point of making me downright enraged at people that I'm trying to shoot literally disappearing from my view and appearing a couple inches to one side or the other and suddenly I die without having any real registry of being shot, screen flashing or controller vibration. So you're telling me that I'm destined to give money to Microsoft for pairing me with people who kick my ass up and down the block in laggy matches of up to 16 people when I can get a less laggy experience with 32-40 players (more when some of the new games come out like Resistance 2 with 60 players and MAG with 256) for free? Call me crazy but I'm willing to give up some luxuries like sending game invites to people and voice chat that doesn't carry over into games for better online play without a $50 price tag attached.

PS - You may wonder if I just have a crappy connection, so I'll put that to rest. First and foremost, it seems unlikely it's my connection if I'm having a completely different experience on a different console using the same connection. Second, I'm getting 12-15mbps down and about 1mbps up. Well surpasses the minimum requirements for online play. Am I just being a whiney little baby? Let me know.

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When is a survey not a survey?

So in the past couple days I had 2 survey invitations pass through my inbox—one from Microsoft regarding Xbox Live, one from Sony regarding the Playstation Network. The timing was certainly interesting, considering they were literally a day apart, but I digress. When I had clicked to take the XBL survey I had a fair amount of ideas about what sort of feedback I was going to leave, mostly due to my frustrations lately of the seeming lack of matchmaking that has been in effect for the top games I've been playing with friends, namely Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. You know, just like everyone else with a 360. Anyway, long story short, my experiences in both games has been less than satisfactory since in almost every single match my friends and I have literally been paired with the worst players against the best players and have been losing by tremendous margins. When looking at the player ranks before a match it's no wonder it happens. My question is: seeing as how I'm paying $50 a year to play games online in a friggin' PEER TO PEER setup, how is it that my $50 isn't at least being well-implemented with great matchmaking, as is one of the supposed advantages of Xbox Live? There have been times I thought to shut off my console and sell the games on Amazon because I'm not having any fun getting completely slaughtered by people immensely outranking me. It's not fun. I don't feel I have to win all the time, but hell, at least once in awhile, or at least not lose by margins of 200+ points in a COD4 match of Headquarters (and for eff's sake, can I never ever be Op4 ever again? I've been stuck on that team 7-8 times out of 10 and it's getting ridiculously irritating to hear that guy yelling at me. Can we not hire more than one voice actor per side? Cripes).

When the XBL survey page loads I'm pretty put off to discover it's a whole whopping 3 questions long. These questions are over such topics as what do you spend your Microsoft Points on and what is your favorite feature of Xbox Live. I can't remember the third one, but it was very similar to the other two. So essentially, instead of being a survey to help better the Xbox Live experience, it was a PR's wet dream. A survey that can be spun in many ways to hail how great users find the XBL service to be. There was no real feedback, no possible way to help improve things, just questions that someone could say "Xbox Live is amazingly popular and our users are happy to spend $50 a year to connect to friends and *insert most popular survey answer here*!!" It was a complete joke.

On the flip side, when I took the PSN questionare I was presented with several pages of no less than 5 questions per page regarding such things as what I felt about PSN, what I felt about PS3, what features I liked most, what features I wanted to see most, and how I felt about the competition. For each of these questions there was a feedback scale of 1-5 with the range of extremely *satisfied* to extremely *dissatisfied*. It was a survey that easily can be used not only for PR (as any survey usually becomes, no doubt), or more importantly, to be used to improve upon a service and make it better.

The thing that really gets to me about this whole experience is that Xbox, the console and the experience that's supposed to be by gamers, for gamers, and have the best position of any of the consoles, seems to care the least about improving their service. They've officially gone the way of EA Sports' Madden series, essentially being the only show in town and resting on their laurels until they don't have a choice. To me, this was apparent in the last few dashboard updates which gave me next to no additional features I gave any care for. Windows Live Messenger integration? Gag me. Last thing I want is to be playing a game and have to pause every 5 minutes or less to respond to a message someone has sent me from their computer. Forgive me for wanting to play games on my game console instead of chat. DivX support? Shoot me in the face, why would I want that? The latest MPEG4 codecs including H.264, which have been supported much longer, have better picture and smaller file sizes anyway. And where's my private group chat? The feature that has been, in my experiences, the single-most requested feature on blogs and message boards each time an update is released that lacks it. This just screams "we will release minor features that no one really cares about, but one fairly big feature that some people have been requesting, but save the big guns for later on if there's actually some competition raised, that way we can get a big press release and try to steal the thunder of our competitors." Screw that. Meanwhile, Sony seems to be aware that online functionality is something they should've delivered but really haven't to its fullest and are making an effort to see how they're doing and see how they need to yet improve. Say what you will about how the PSN is in its current state, but for a first-time outing on a system as complex as the PS3 I'd say they're doing a damn good job. After all, I have my group chat in the XMB, something I can't do on 360. And, rumored to be in April but confirmed to be coming is the XMB update that will bring nearly full functionality of the PS3's UI in-game. Once that drops and we can do private group chat, messaging and custom soundtracks in-game.... where will XBL be? Sitting tall with its matchmaking that doesn't especially work? I can understand people's adversity to PSN in that it's a server-based mode of play so the servers could be shut off at any time, but with P2P you can play the same game for as long as you can still find people, but I've experienced far less lag on my PSN games than I have XBL in general and most of the time when a newer game comes out I tend to shift focus to the new one and not play the old much, if at all. Usually by the time servers have been shut down I don't play the affected title(s) anyway. I'd rather things be that way than in Halo 3 when I'm trying to shoot someone and the lag is so bad that their character is flashing from one side of my screen to another. And yes, I checked, it's not my connection. Unless for whatever reason it needs more than 7mbps down and 800kbps up (hint: it doesn't).

Dear Xbox Live division: just because you're on top doesn't mean you can have a nap. I'm paying you an annual fee and you're making more money in advertising than you need to fund the operation yourself, so how about you put that money to use. Sincerely, BrokenDesign

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Unreal Tournament 3

News has just dropped from MacWorld online that MacSoft Games officially announced Unreal Tournament 3 for the Mac will be available in "early 2008". Rock the eff on! Can't wait to drop my cash on it and see how my Mac Pro handles the awesome! Still no word on the release of Gears of War for Mac, but presumably it will be forthcoming shortly after the UT3 release. After all, why pump out old bones before the new hotness?

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Episodic original IP coming to the Playstation Network

Yesterday there was an announcement on the official Playstation Blog of a new episodic IP that's incoming to PSN called Rat Race, developed by SuperEgo Games. Rat Race is a comedy/adventure game, I'm thinking probably along the lines of such classics as the Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango. The announcement was made by SuperEgo co-founder Greg Easley and is described as a "labor of love".

"Rat Race is set in an office - an extremely dysfunctional one. The company is called BiggCo, and the people who work there make the Enron guys look like Nobel Prize laureates. Your job is simply to make it through the day as bombs go off all around you. As the clock ticks toward quitting time, you’ll encounter a rogues gallery including: Joy Chung, an impossible, and impossibly hot, PR exec; Chip Bratsby III, a pompous jerk whose career focus is getting you fired; and Dr. Ron Durfman, a research scientist who may or may not be intimate with his lab monkey."

Easley explains that the goal of SuperEgo is to make a game that gives you "the feeling of 'playing' inside an episode of your favorite TV show", and says they oftentimes describe it as an "interactive sitcom, but that doesn't do it justice."

I'm quite excited for this title. To me, the hard drive in the PS3 (and 360, as long as you didn't pick up the "Tard Pack") is for content like this. Episodic games that doesn't make sense to be pressed to Blu-Ray (or DVD) and instead have a rapid release schedule and gives short but satisfying gaming experiences. My hope is that we'll see a release schedule very in line with that of the Sam & Max episodes on GameTap and not that of Half-Life 2 Episodes or especially SiN Episodes. If it indeed plays with the humor and brilliance of the Monkey Island games and feels like you're playing an episode of The Office, you can sign me up for the duration of the series. I'll keep the space warm on my PS3 hard drive for its arrival.

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For the love of god...

Stop calling it the iTouch!!

>.<

That is all.

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Halo 3 (in progress) review

Busted into Halo 3 for the first time last night. Seems that I'm in the camp who got a copy of the Collector's Edition that came all scratched and stuff, but it still worked. But that's beside the point. So last night I got through the second act of the game (out of nine) and felt like blogging my initial impressions of the game. Mostly because with all the hype of the "Jesus game" I figured it couldn't hurt to have a less than glowing review out there.

It might be the ridiculous amount of hype and marketing that's all around, irritating the crap out of me (yes, Microsoft, I know that Halo 3 is coming, please stop with the marketing campaign bigger than Star Wars), or perhaps it's just the way things are, but as of right now I'm not amazingly enthralled in the game. It feels like Halo. It feels like Halo 2. It is exactly what the tag line says. "Finish the Fight". It plainly states that this is exactly what you've played twice before, just in different maps with some new weapons and gizmos that don't particularly change the way the game is played. When a Brute throws down a bubble shield (which seems to be fairly often) it's not much different than an Elite stepping behind a shield or box, except you can't use an overcharge shot or grenade to take out the bubble shield like you can those portable shield things. Granted, having a bubble shield is awesome if you're out in the open, gives you a chance to recharge, but there's no big change here.
The way everything feels is largely the same, except for the complete gimping of the pistol, but yeah. So far the single player campaign feels like an expansion. It's just there so that you can finish the storyline that couldn't (or at least wasn't) in Halo 2. In one review I'd read they pointed out that there were many fewer parts where you had to backtrack through an area you've already been through and I was ecstatic, reminiscing at how I wanted to shoot myself going through the Library TWICE in Halo. However, the second act features one such level where you run to the end, run back almost to the beginning, run back close to the end, and then run to an area that might as well be the beginning. Artificial level length sucks.

Playing through the beta I'm quite convinced that the multiplayer is largely more of the same as well. Weapon balancing, new maps, polish, etc abound, but it's just more of the same. Does it make the game less fun? No, certainly not. Is it overhyped? So far, IMO, yes. Graphics are better (though not to the degree that Halo 1 & 2 were in their time, Halo 3 is quite behind many other titles in terms of graphics, especially character models for everyone but Master Chief, the Arbiter and Sgt Johnson) and the environments are more engrossing with some pretty nice foliage effects in the opening level. We'll see how the game ends, if the story turns out to be fantastic, but for now I'm not particularly surprised that I purchased the end of the story mode with some entertaining multiplayer and undeniably awesome 4-player co-op. I'm sure it'll be worth it, but I'd have to say there are titles coming that I have a higher degree of anticipation. Game on.

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Wet and Wild never sucked so bad.

Last night was rather not cool. (Obligatory flashback: earlier in the week, I'd gotten the entertainment room set up with a new device stand, so things were looking pretty nice down there. Even got some zip ties to do some hardcore cable management. Very nice) Just before I'm about to go to bed, I go into the laundry room to see if the water line had backed up at all. Didn't look like it, but then I noticed there was some water on the floor that, interestingly enough, was flowing down to the drain instead of coming from it. Eventually discovered out that it was coming from the wall. Figured there really wasn't much that could be done at 1 in the morning so I put some towels down and figured I'd take a look again in the morning. Just out of curiosity, I checked the entertainment room right next to the laundry room. All appeared well, until I stepped on the floor close to the wall and water came out of the cracks. Further exploration showed that the west and north faces of the entertainment room had water leaking in, which was under the food and carpeted parts about 1/8 of the way into the room. So then I was up until 2:30 moving electronics upstairs and some furniture around to make sure there wouldn't be any water damage. Ugh. And here I thought that finishing up the basement was just going to involve finishing up drywall and painting on the south wall. And that it would be cheap. Ain't that a kick in the head.

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Some proof that a HDD should be required

I've been listening to the 1up podcast and they've shown just how disruptive the lack of a HDD can be in the console space. At some sort of a conference there were some announcements made regarding MMOs on the 360. Apparently, there's been the decision that an MMO title should reserve 4gb of disk space on a hard drive for patches, extra content, etc. Sounds cool, right? Well, MS is really shooting themselves in the foot on this one. 4gb is not only what a game should reserve, it's *all* a game can use. If a developer creates content that pushes the space necessary to 6gb, guess what? They're going to have to cut down on what's in there to fit within 4gb. Developers were told they need to plan to have a scaler in their games so that when the 4gb cap is exceeded, content of some sort starts getting cut out, whether that be texture quality downscaling, areas becoming unaccessible, character models losing polys, etc. They attribute this cluster to the fact that there are x amount of systems out there without a hard drive and how MS gauges a person with their absolutely ludicrous hard drive prices. The Core system is a device for MS to hit the $149 price point as soon as possible. And not only is it most likely to hit the low $$$ amount quick, it's most likely to take the gamer's experience down to all-time lows quickly as well. Good job, MS.

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Office 2008 for Mac looks purdy!

Came across a news story this morning announcing the delay of Office 2008 for Mac to January 2008, presumably around the date of MacWorld San Francisco. With this news story were some images posted of the Mac version which, oddly enough, I haven't been able to find up until now even though they've been around since MacWorld San Francisco '07, which happened way back in January.

But I digress.

I am pleased to announce that the Mac version looks infinitely better than the PC version that has that dull and heavy deep blue to it in Windows XP. According to Wikipedia shots, when it's installed in Vista it looks a great deal better, so I'm wondering if that's some sort of trickery incentive to upgrade to Vista....? Who knows. All I know is that the blue in XP is SO. EFFING. UGLY.

The UI of Office has changed quite a bit in 2008 for Mac as well. The ribbon appears to still be there, but almost more at a fundamental level, options are flipped all around, there's a floating pallet, returning from Office 04 for Mac. For any people coming over to Mac from PC it looks like there may be a fairly steep learning curve, but the same was probably true for Office 2004. I never used the previous versions of Office for Windows so I'm certainly not he authority. :-) I'm just looking forward to making the whole 'New', ' Open', 'Save', et al go away, leaving only stuff that's useful, taking up far less space and having good functionality. Definitely an improvement over Office 04 and should be worth the wait. Not sure if I'll get it though, I don't much word process. Maybe I can convince some college student to get it for me, they get it for frickin' $7 at major universities. Only get it in a sleeve, though, no box or anything, but that's ok because I hate the packaging that has been used for Windows and Office for awhile now. Huge, not all that attractive and it's a pain in the ASS to stock. >.<

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The Way We See It

Was up nice and late last night playing some Crackdown (you know, that game that came with the Halo 3 beta) with my friend 'Bob' when we got on topic about the state of the nation for gaming. I found it to be an interesting conversation and figured I'd share some of our thoughts to get the opinions of you all.

With regard to Nintendo, the Wii is kicking loads of ass, but is it necessarily doing well? It may be purchased by a much more broad demographic than the 360 or PS3 are, but the 360 is leading the way with the most games sold per console. Considering that the Wii is much cheaper (disregarding the Core, which, does anybody regard it to begin with?) and the games are $10 cheaper each, why would this be? Likely because the games that are available for the Wii at the moment are largely minigames and shoddy ports. Kids and grandparents who want their grandkids to have things to play when they visit are getting these minigames but are only playing when family is over, those of us in the middle age bracket are getting them but they start collecting dust until we have a party and are looking for some amusement, or with kids who like playing it. To us, the Wii has some good titles, it's not a bad system, but it just lacks games that give it real longevity, that you want to pick up and play frequently. A lot of that has to do with the lack of online-enabled games. I was planning to get a Wii at one point, but backed out at the last moment because the novelty of Wii Sports had worn off, I took at look at what was out there and saw nothing really compelling. All that I could see were minigames that I'd bust out for parties or games that were on the horizon, should they come out at all. I don't have many parties, I usually go to them instead so that leaves a white Wii becoming gray with the mounting unuse.

Right now, where are we at? Wii Fit? Um, yay? If I want to exercise, I'll ride my bike. Having a screen with some cartoony characters doing some stuff isn't much encouragement to me to get any more physically fit than I already am. Announcing Wii Fit at E3 basically gave Nintendo the title of best press conference in the eyes of investors. They see a new product that will sell really well, perhaps move a number of consoles, so they have $$ flashing in their eyes. That's great, but what about games that I want to play? Haven't heard anything about them for awhile. Mario Kart was announced with a steering wheel that I care nothing about, and from the brief footage, I wasn't terribly enticed. Honestly, the only Mario Kart game I've really, really liked since the original is Mario Kart DS, but Mario Kart Wii looks like more Double Dash kind of stuff. The track designs are becoming a little too bizarre for their own good and they seem to have lost track of what gave the original its magic of a straight-up fun kart racing game with a mario theme and some creative elements but nothing tremendously over the top. There was no mention of Smash Bros Brawl, either, and we're still left wondering if it's going to have online play. If it doesn't, there will be a lot of Wiis up on Amazon and eBay for resale. Kids and to an extent college students don't need online, they have people all around them to play with, but what of me? I don't want to play it by myself, that's not that fun. Nintendo has demonstrated that they don't care about online play, both in the games that have been released, and the games that haven't been released but have lost the online it once had, such as Metroid Prime 3.

Ok, so now for the real kick in the head. When the Wiimote was first announced, there were many different reactions to it, spanning the whole spectrum. Eventually, everything calmed and it seemed as though the concept was accepted as being a good thing. Here we are approaching a year of Wiis in the Wild and it's time to ask: is it a good thing? Lots of games use the motion sensing to a very tacked-on end, some bring some creative things to the table but really doesn't depend on proper use of it.... I think that the big disappointment of the Wiimote has to do with how reality has set in. A game like Red Steel seems like it could be nothing but gold, but in reality it was anything but. Where this rude awakening is kicking down our door is how the Wiimote isn't a motion-tracking gateway into the games, but a different input method for the same standard stuff. For instance, a common complaint I read about with Red Steel was how there were only certain motions you could do with the sword play. I, like many others, wanted a game you could swing that sword all around, slashing the crap out of guys, but you can only do a few types of swings and it really takes you a step back to realize that it's no different from pressing left mouse to do a left attack, right mouse to do a right attack. One thing the Wiimote lends itself perfectly to is a fanboy's wet dream: Lightsaber game. And one is coming! But.... is it going to just be Red Steel with so many attack types you can do and not the full Jedi virtual experience that we all hope for? Whether we know it or not, we're hyping the game up to more than it could possibly be and it could just lead to disappointment. I know that I've already skipped to that stage and don't really feel a Wii is for me anymore.

Microsoft is bringing with with the 360 and a full hand of games, something the other systems can't claim at this point. But after this holiday season with Halo 3 and GTA IV, et al, what's coming up? Personally I can't really think of anything coming out next year that's an exclusive that I'm particularly excited for. Not that it's such a bad thing that there are likely a great deal of multiplatform games that will be good, but I can't think of many of those that I'm very excited for either. Hopefully we'll hear more about 360 games soon.

Sony, to me, had the best press conference this year. They showed off some of the big guns they have coming (which are almost all next year, but we're only now getting into the second wave of games for the system so it's to be expected), including Killzone 2 which looks very promising at this point. Graphics aren't up to the prerendered video, of course, but reports from people who were there claim that at times you really couldn't tell. That is very impressive. The character movements are some of the best I've ever seen in a game and I have a good deal of anticipation to see if the game itself lives up to the hype. Warhawk looks really awesome too, a good fun multiplayer game that has some really nice features, such as up to 4 players can play in a drop-in, drop-out fashion on a single console while the 1st player is playing online against others. Before it's even out, Warhawk is doing what many 360 titles (including Crackdown) claim to be able to do but ultimately fall short of true drop-in, drop-out gameplay. Home.... pass. LittleBigPlanet looks like it's just damn good fun and has a great creative outlet for those who want to design some levels but not really get too deep into things and with the recent announcement of there being enemies and bosses, it should have a good deal of longevity to the title. Lair looks really good, despite mixed reviews, Heavenly Sword appears to be impressive, Wipeout has something like 3 games coming out, 2 on PSN and 1 full scale title, and I am a TOTAL wipeout junky..... There's a lot to love coming up with PS3. Now they just need to make them affordable.

I have a 360, love my 360, hope my 360 doesn't die on me before those 65nm chips get integrated, and I want a PS3. Sorry, Nintendo, but by spreading your focus out to such a broad audience I really feel that you're losing your scope on my demographic. I fear that 5 years from now we're going to look back and see a tremendous amount of minigames spread all overtop the rare, more adult, more hardcore titles, many of which will be without any real good online multiplayer integration. That's not something I'm terribly thrilled about seeing firsthand.

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To HDD or not to HDD... (Part 3; Conclusion)

Xbox360Fanboy is running an article this morning clarifying the mysterious icon on the Call of Duty 4 box art about a storage device being required for gameplay. In an interview, Infinity Ward Community Relations Manager Robert Bowling stated that the icon was simply on the box to show what the artwork would look like with logos and icons applied. So.... I don't understand why just having the logos and rating on there aren't enough, seeing as how, I may be wrong, but, there are no other icons that would go on cover art? Whatever, way to rock the boat for no reason.

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To HDD or not to HDD... (Part 2)

So we had a bit of a back and forth about how necessary a hard drive was for a full gaming experience. I was told that a hard drive would do nothing for gameplay, so therefore is not required. I'm going to fire back with the fact that Joystiq and Kotaku are showing off cover art for the upcoming Call of Duty 4 featuring a little badge that indicates a storage medium of some sort, be it hard drive or memory card, is required. For what, we're not sure yet, but it does make you wonder why it would be "required". Could it just be "required" to save progress as has been the case since the start? Or will having a hard drive actually enhance the gameplay in some way? Hopefully we'll see more soon. On a related note, ever since Need for Speed Most Wanted (Xbox 360 launch title), there has been a note saying that the game was enhanced with the presence of a HDD. I haven't bothered checking to see what things are like without one, but it's an interesting disclaimer.

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Could a PS3 actually be in my future?

So the latest rumbling in the rumor mill, surfacing basically everywhere on sites such as PS3 Fanboy, Joystiq and Kotaku, is saying that once the 60gb Playstation 3 is taken out back and shot the 80gb model will drop in price to the same $499 price point. Not bad, eh? What really makes me a happy camper is the second part of the rumor saying that a new SKU will be introduced: 40gb at a $399 price point. It would be such a great decision on Sony's part and would more than make up for the killing of the 60gb build.

In an interview with Kaz Hirai, he confirmed the clearance on the 60gb model and made the comment that the decision came being mindful of the fact that the 20gb PS3 did not sell well, while the 60gb took a majority of the pie, eating it whole. Their analysis was that the US market didn't care for multiple SKUs of the console, which fueled their decision to drop the 20gb model in the first place from store shelves. This worries me that the rumor is false, but at the same time one mouth at Sony said the 60gb was going on clearance, another rep said that wasn't true, and then Kaz drops the bomb again, so there's a lot of one hand not talking to the other.

Just so I know for sure that someone has said something about it, just in case someone from Sony is watching and finds me particularly insightful... We didn't like the 20gb because the 60gb was a much, much better value. For another $100 you get built-in wifi, media card ports, and a good sized hard drive. Not that any of those were vital, it completed the home media server package. Hell, I'm sure some people spent the money for the built-in wifi alone. It's just a much better value, unlike the 360 where the only difference between the 2 models was a 20gb hard drive. I'm sorry, that's not worth $100. So there it is. Sony. Since I know you're reading this, give us a 40gb, $399 ps3. I can swing that. I want to swing that. Just don't strip out anything (except 40gb HDD space) and I'm all in.

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