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It appears that one of the largest PS3 retailers are going to stop stocking the 20GB PS3, meaning customers will only have one option and will need to pay $600 for the 60GB edition.

The PS3 has appeared to still be falling behind the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii in terms of recent sales and popularity - Best Buy not stocking the 20GB model could hurt those figures even more.

According to Joystiq, they have checked with numerous Best Buy locales and have confirmed the “Discontinued” status that was recently printed out from a BB computer system, which means that the flow of 20GB units into Best Buy stores should all but stop here in the very near future.

If this is correct, I find this very disappointing on Best Buy’s half. What happened to customers being the number one priority?

Via [Joystiq]

At least, that’s what the sales figures for American consumer games market share in February shows as compiled by NPD Group. Nintendo blew away competitors by the thousands. The company sold 485,000 DS units and 335,000 Wii consoles in the month. Microsoft, on the other hand, only managed to sell 228,000 of its Xbox 360, while Sony was struggling to move 127,000 units of its PlayStation 3 out of its stores.

The popularity of the Wii console was evident in the impact its sales had on the company’s supply chain, Nintendo said. Gamers were “snapping up virtually every system available in America,” the company added.

Combined, Nintendo game systems “represented 54 percent of all hardware sales in February, more than those of all other manufacturers combined,” noted the company.

Nintendo’s success was attributed to the simplicity of it’s products.

“The DS has games that go down to pre-school level and the Wii has games where you don’t even need to crack the instruction manual at all to play.”

Xboxers and Playstationers.... what say you?

Read [Tech News World]

Sony announced at CES 2007 that they shipped 1 million PlayStation 3 game consoles to North America by the end of 2006. They further explained that the PS3 reached the 1 million mark faster than either the original PlayStation or PS2, though some reports indicated only 800,000 units sold. Also, 1 million is only half of Sony’s original, promised goal of 2 million shipped by last year’s end.

The announcement was not a big consolation to gamers who still don’t have the pricey system or who paid a small fortune to get one close to the initial release. The Xbox site naturally claims PS3s are just sitting on shelves while the Wii is consistently selling out. The good news is that Sony is committed to each of their products for 10 years, so you’re likely to get a semi-affordable PS3 before then. Oh, and the European launch is still on track for March 2007. (Whoopie for that.)

See Gadgetell’s Sony Press Conference recap for more PS3 and PSP details.

Read [Home Media] Read [Blogging Stocks] Read [TeamXbox] Read [TechSpot] Read [PSU] Review [PS3]

I4U is reporting that the following PS3 games have a March 30th release date for European countries: Warhawk, Resistance: Fall of Man, Formula 1, Gran Turismo HD, Eye of Judgement, Heavenly Sword, Genji 2, and Killzone.

The catch is that the PS3 has yet to be released in Europe. It was supposed to be released back in September (like in the US and Japan), but that was eventually pushed back until November, and the last we were told was March of 2007. If we believe that they will hold to their word and actually release the console within the time period given, “March,” the 30th seems like a best bet. They are not going to release games prior to the console and Sony is having enough supply issues that it could not hurt them to use the entire month to build product.

Still no release date [Amazon UK]

It seems that in the near future, PS3 users might be able to get up really close and personal with their gaming friends and foes. Brian Crecente at Kotaku found out while filling out a PS3 users survey that a high definition Eye Toy might be in the works.

The current Eye Toy allows you to be in the spotlight of the game, captures movements, and has video messaging capabilities. A high definition one will probably allow much more detailed input signals to be captured, and allow much more interesting applications in gaming experience, such as PS3Focus’ idea of using movement as input instead of controllers (kinda like Wii, but without having to grab the Wii-mote)

Of course, many people will end up using this just to chat with one another, (trying to find out the number of pores on their friend’s face or something like that), but having real life faces in games would be such a cool thing. Can’t wait to see this once it’s out, and what kinds of games come out to make use of it.

Read [Kotaku]

Product: Sony PlayStation 3
Price: $499 or $599
Overall: The PS3’s price does seem a bit out of whack, but remember that it includes Blu-ray, a hard drive, a web browser, the ability to boot Linux and a kickass graphics card. The online gaming features are still playing a bit of catchup to Xbox Live, but the system is otherwise solid.

There were a few minutes after I installed and booted up Genji on the PS3 when all I could say was, “There’s friggin’ fire on my TV!” After that, the initial thrill of the system’s amazing particle effects was gone and it was game-on as usual. Unfortunately, Genji is a pretty standard sword-slashing game that gets dull after 30 minutes. Of course, one game does not a system make.

Resistance: Fall of Man proved that a game can look great and play well, while including much more detailed environment damage. Shoot a window in Fall of Man and the bullet hits that exact spot and cracks around it. Shoot it a few more times and the window actually breaks into pieces according to the bullet damage instead of some predefined pattern. Impressive.

Jaggies, those annoying little square corners and odd borders between colors, have almost been eliminated, and human characters now have nearly complete feature depth instead of an outline with a shaded skin overlay. It certainly makes for more realistic characters, yet they still have a bit of rubber robotic action in them.

The PS3, which looks to me like one of those old, cassette-playing telephone answering machines, is packed with PC-style features, including the ability to run Linux. Yep, it’s a friggin’ dual-boot system. I likely won’t use it that much except to maybe find a hack to install Windows XP without any slowness issues. Now wouldn’t that piss off Bill gates?

It has 7 USB ports, which means you can stack on a keyboard, external storage device (I suggest flash thumb drives) or more wireless controllers. Each controller as an internal rechargeable battery must be charged using a short USB cable, so you’ll play face-to-screen for a little while.

The PS3 menu system is set up exactly like the PSP, with mini icons that open drop down menu items and make the same sound effects. You can also wirelessly sync the PSP to the PS3, but it requires that you upgrade to the latest PSP firmware. To get to image, video, and audio files on a removable card or device, plan to tunnel down a little to actually play them. Also, it’s a bit picky about proper encoding, so don’t expect every file to work on the first try.

The PS3’s wireless controller is nearly identical to the PS2 controller, except it lacks the drag caused by the lengthy wire and the bottom trigger buttons are easier to press, thanks to some removed plastic. Sony did toss in 6-axis motion sensitivity but it’s doesn’t even come close to the quality, precision and ease of the WiiMote.

There’s been a small fuss made over the PS3’s incompatibility with 200 PS1/PS2 games. After doing the math, that’s less than 2.5% of all the available games, it’s unlikely you’ll much care. The most annoying backwards compatibility issue I have is with the controllers and memory cards. To get the saved data from your PS2, you’ll need to buy a Memory Card Adapter and then save it to a virtual Memory Card on the hard drive. The Virtual card, however, works like a charm, cutting down save/load times to a quick blink. The controllers, however, are completely incompatible, so plan to either make your friends buy their own or drop a few more greenback Grants.

There is also the small issue of a very, very lengthy system update you will need to perform. To use the online features, such as online multiplayer (which works well for PS3 and PS2 games), plan to watch a load bar crawl along for quite a while. Although you can perform the update from a game, I suggest doing it through the online connection since that will be the most up-to-date version to avoid conflict errors.

Sony has attempted to cut back the load times not only with a faster processor, but also by allowing you to pre-load chunks of the game. Of course it does not eliminate load screens altogether but they are much shorter than on the PS2.

The PS3’s price does seem a bit out of whack but remember that it includes Blu-ray, a hard drive, a web browser, ability to boot Linux and a kick ass graphics card. The online gaming features are still playing a bit of catchup to Xbox Live but the system is otherwise solid.

Need another reason to purchase a PS3 (besides the super cheap Blu-ray player, it essentially costing the same as an Xbox 360, or the other very good reasons)? How about the weekend challenge of loading Windows XP onto your machine? It already has an awesome photo viewer, plays movies, accesses the internet, now you can run your favorite OS as well. The video is pretty long, but what else are you doing today?

Via [TechEBlog]

Nowadays it seems that the accessories can often outweigh the core product. We have seen the huge iPod accessory market explode with gadgets ranging from speaker docks to gel skins to Bluetooth transmitters. Even before the Zune was released, there were many companies, including Microsoft, planning their accessories.

With this huge trend and even bigger margins you would think that Sony and/or Nintendo would offer a whole host of gizmos for their shiny new systems. From the Sony side the options are extra SIXAXIS controllers or memory card adaptors, and Nintendo’s offering are as lame: extra Wiimotes, original controllers, and a Wii stand.

So the question remains—where are all the accessories? Who will come out first Belkin, Griffin, Logitech? What will be the accessory that changes the system around? Last year it was super chilling the Xbox 360, what will come next?

It looks like the folks over at G4 put together a Mac vs. PC like ad for the next-gen game console war.  The Wii vs. PS3 competition started on Thursday night at midnight when the PlayStation 3 got announced.  The Wii is due out on Sunday, so get ready to wait in line.

Note: Questionably not safe for work (NSFW), but hey, it’s the weekend...so who cares.

After PS3 taking over the news the past few days, all you want to do is smash the damn thing, isn’t it?  Sounds good to me, as long as it’s not mine that I paid 600 bucks for.  The guys from SmashMyPS3 took their brand spankin’ new PS3 outside of their Best Buy, and smashed it to pieces - in front of the others in line.  I’m going to close my eyes now...it’s just too hard to watch.

See also: Gadgetell’s other PS3 coverage

Via [Gizmodo]