Both Microsoft and Sony have made press announcements regarding their latest generation of consoles. The PS3 will get a bigger hard-drive and the Xbox 360 will get a price-cut - read more.

Rumor has it that Sony wants to reposition its PS2 on the market by making some sort of Wii-like system out of it by fitting the system with a new Wii-like motion sensitive controller. All this is supposed to be happening by Christmas 2007.

Going bananas here... A long time after the release of the Playstation 3 in Japan en the Americas in November 2006, next week the console will be 'introduced' in the European territories.

Sony's PSPFor $20, Electronic Arts plans to release the following games on one UMD disc for the PSP: B.O.B., Road Rash II, Budokan, Road Rash III, Desert Strike, Syndicate, Jungle Strike, Ultima: The Black Gate, Haunting Starring Polterguy, Virtual Pinball, Mutant League Football, Wing Commander, Road Rash, and Wing Commander: Secret Missions.

Sony PSPI was thinking about the relentless Sony bashing of late, which has been brought upon in big part by Sony themselves. Frankly, they have certain company representatives who simply can't help but mouth off in the most inane manner with a ridiculous amount of bravado and disregard for basic common sense. To put it bluntly, no one likes the 800-pound gorilla (especially in America, we prefer to root for the perceived underdog, justified label or not) or the "dick", and Sony has been both for some time now.

Wish I could scan in the most recent copy of famed Japanese magazine Famitsu Weekly, because it is a 20th Anniversary Issue which contains several retro-gaming articles, including a large supplement with mini-reviews on the best games up until the end of the PSX era.

Although my knowledge of Japanese is fairly limited, it's still very interesting to flip through the photos and see what games Japan's most popular gaming magazine considered significant (hint: every Dragon Quest game ever made is on the list).

Data like this has been supplied by others before, but this is a particularly impressive charting of select console system prices over the years from the first programmable videogame system, the 1976 Fairchild Video Entertainment System (VES, later Channel F), to the latest to release pricing data, the 2006 Sony PlayStation 3. What I like about this is that two charts are supplied, one for the absolute retail prices and one for the inflation-adjusted prices. As I've argued elsewhere, while paying $60 for a game stinks, relatively speaking we've been paying that and more for countless years. Same thing with modern consoles. While it's a difficult pill to swallow a $600 PlayStation 3 (my recommendation is don't even look at the crippled $500 model), relatively speaking it's not so bad, particularly since it pulls additional duties as a hi-def media center.

Click here for the original post on "Curmudgeon Gamer" and the links to the two separate PDF files.