playstation

PS3 is tops in Australia and a failure in the US

Michael Ephraim, managing director of Sony Australia, has officially announced that the Playstation 3 is the console war king - in Australia. According to Ephraim, sales figures in the Land Down Under have shown the "PS3...outselling Wii and Xbox 360 every week, except for last week."

The recent stories like this one out of the Sony camp are becoming pathetic at best. The company who formerly touted its dominance over the video game industry is left touting a 50,000 unit sale for March and a sales lead "for every week, except for the last week.&… Read more

Wii Controls Gaming Market: Surprise of the Year?

At this very moment, I am looking at a paused Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess game while an Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are perched alongside the Wii collecting dust. Does that mean the 360 and Playstation 3 are inferior to the Wii or provide a less gratifying experience? No way. But what it does mean is that Sony and Microsoft underestimated Nintendo as well as the consumer base they try so hard to impress. The Wii's success may not have been a surprise to Nintendo fanboys out there, but it becomes more apparent that the Wii's success … Read more

Layoffs hit Sony's PlayStation unit

At least 80 employees in Sony Computer Entertainment of America's Foster City, California PlayStation unit have been laid off, according to a report in the popular video game blog, Kotaku.

But Kotaku quoted SCEA spokesman Dave Karraker as saying, "In an effort to accurately align the company to meet the changing needs of our consumers and our industry, (SCEA) has found it necessary to...restructure the company as necessary to continue our standing as the market leader."

And in an email to CNET News.com, Karraker confirmed the report Wednesday morning.

Given Sony's troubles--the much-hyped PlayStation … Read more

Nintendo Wi-Fi service reaches 5 million users

Nintendo said Wednesday that its Wi-Fi Connection service--which allows Nintendo DS users to play wirelessly against each other--has surpassed 5 million users.

All told, the video game giant said, users have initiated more than 200 million sessions, playing games like Animal Crossing: Wild World, Mario Kart DS, Metroid Prime Hunters and others wirelessly.

And despite the attention paid to next-generation video game systems like the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, the DS is currently the best-selling system of all, having moved 470,000 units in April, according to NPD Group.

PS3 DVD upscaling: A big improvement

Before yesterday's firmware update, the PlayStation 3 couldn't upscale standard-definition DVDs to high-def resolutions--a once high-end feature that's now built-in to nearly all DVD players with HDMI outputs. But what's the real benefit of upscaling (or upconverting, as it's also known)? Despite some of the marketing hype claiming that upscaling will make your DVDs appear in true high-def quality, the increase in picture quality will never come close to matching that of native HD material (HDTV broadcasts, HD DVD, and Blu-ray). Moreover, the video quality improvement is completely dependent on how good the upscaling and … Read more

When remotes are out of control

We've given up: The endless proliferation of remotes in our household is out of control. We've tinkered with so-called universal models, but they either don't seem to work or, more likely, we're just too "challenged" to figure them out.

The only solution, at least in the near term, may be a reduction in their rabbit-like numbers by consolidating them in sub-categories. To wit: The new "Universal Gamer" may not take care of everything in the house, but it at least claims to work with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 (if not … Read more

PS3 1.80 firmware upgrade adds media streaming, DVD upscaling

Slowly but surely, Sony's beginning to unlock more and more of that multimedia horsepower under the hood of the PlayStation 3. The 1.80 firmware upgrade--available as an automatic download to PS3s everywhere--adds a variety of features to the console, most of which bolster the system's AV prowess. The main upgrades are as follows:

upscaling of games and DVDs: DVD movies, PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 games can now be upscaled to HD resolutions up to 1080p (games can upscale via component or HDMI, while DVDs are only upconverted via HDMI). streaming of digital media to PS3 via … Read more

Will U.S. get 80GB version of PlayStation 3?

Sony said Wednesday that it is considering putting out a new version of its struggling PlayStation 3 game console in the United States with an 80GB hard drive. That's the storage capacity that will come on the South Korean version of the PS3.

To date, the PS3 has come with a 60GB hard drive. A 20GB version was discontinued in the United States but still sells in Japan.

According to the Associated Press, Sony Computer Entertainment representative Satoshi Fukuoka said that the company is thinking about adapting the storage capacities of the PS3 for different regions.

"Increasing capacity … Read more

A cab with a view: two TVs, a laptop and a PlayStation 2

If New York is the business center of the United States and California is its imagination, then Austin, Texas, is the home of its tinkerers.

Exhibit A: cab driver Ricky Gray. Gray owns his cab--a minivan--but he doesn't want it to be ordinary, so he's outfitted it with a widescreen LCD TV in the backseat area that lets passengers watch TV shows, surf the Internet (with assistance with a wireless laptop beneath the front passenger seat) or play games on a PlayStation 2 wedged in the well between the two front buckets. There's also a flat-screen TV … Read more