Megaton News

…and for you rich Europeans 250.00 euros!!

From Bloomberg: 

PlayStation 3 SalesChief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda said Oct. 25 that the company may miss its target to sell 11 million of the consoles during the year ending March 31.

Today Sony managed to simultaneously deny, and draw attention to a rumor that their new 40GB PS3s have a 40% failure rate.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) can categorically deny that there is a 40% failure rate on the newly release 40GB PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3) as has been reported on a Dutch website. Having launched in October, the 40GB PS3 has encountered the same industry leading, very low failure rates, comparable to the low level failure rates of the 60GB PS3.“We are very proud of the quality and reliability of PLAYSTATION 3 and are disappointed that such extremely sloppy journalism has resulted in this totally inaccurate story,” said David Reeves, President, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. “Since launching the 40GB PS3, we have experienced a fantastic jump in sales and the failure rates have remained at the very low level that we not only strive for, but have been achieving since the launch of PS3.”

From timesonline.co.uk:

Like many middle-class, suburban American parents, Shannan and Joey Troiano worried about their son’s behaviour and his bad grades at high school. And like many wayward teenagers, Cory Ryder was grounded for weeks at a time, had a PlayStation confiscated and was banned from watching TV.

Less typically, this 16-year-old was plotting to murder his parents by hiring a hitman, while his mother was organising a sting operation involving a police officer posing as a contract killer.

Cory’s trial is scheduled to begin today at the circuit court in St Mary’s County, Maryland. His mother is expected to testify as a witness for the prosecution.

At an earlier court hearing Mrs Troiano, 35, explained how her emotions were torn between being an agonised mother and a murder victim. “I miss him being at home,” she said, “and I miss us joking around and kidding around. And then in the very same breath – I don’t know what this kid will do, because it’s not my son. That can’t be my little boy sitting there.”

Mrs Troiano remembers the night on June 2 when she discovered that the vague threats her son had made were serious. A woman Cory trusted, the mother of one of his friends, took him to a hotel room where he met an undercover police officer pretending to be a hitman.

At home in southern Maryland, Mrs Troiano told her husband that Cory would never go through with it and began frantically tidying the house, according to an account in The Washington Post yesterday.

After a few hours’ waiting, the policeman called: Cory was in custody and would be charged with attempted murder. Mrs Troiano fell to her knees in the bathroom she was cleaning and burst into tears.

Police say that Cory offered the undercover officer his stepfather’s new pickup truck as payment for killing his parents. “Two bullets is all it takes,” he is alleged to have said.

His mother, a financial manager at Patuxent River naval station, and stepfather, a computer specialist, had lived an ordinary life with Cory and his two stepsisters. Mrs Troiano had left his father when Cory was little more than a year old but, by the time she remarried, her son’s behaviour was getting steadily worse.

He walked out of lessons at Spring Ridge Middle School in Lexington Park, smashed a fire extinguisher case and then broke into the county fairgrounds, where he vandalised property. A judge sentenced him to supervised probation and his parents attended no less than 36 meetings with the authorities about him.

But Cory dropped out of school and then, after stealing $45 (£22) from his sister’s piggy bank, had a fight with his mother, which led to him being kicked out of home. He has since told officials that he was upset about being thrown out of the house and that he felt pressured to talk to the man in the hotel.

Cory insists that he never intended to have his parents killed and that he wanted to call the police that night in the hotel room. A judge has ruled that he should be tried in the juvenile system, which means that he cannot be held beyond his 21st birthday.

He has also been writing to his mother, saying: “You know I love you with all my heart mom!” Mrs Troiano fears that he is being manipulative. She wanted him tried in an adult court where he would have faced a much longer sentence. “He needs to understand what he did was wrong,” she told the court in September. “I’m scared to death that if this kid is serious, and they put him in a three-month programme, they’re going to release him to the street.”

Sounds like entrapment, unlike the Halo 3 kid who beat up his Mom and the cops.

From MCVuk:

MCV can exclusively reveal that this ‘compact’ PS2 will hit the US at just $99 in the New Year – a reduction of $30 from its current selling price of $129.

The new version has a built-in power supply – unlike the current Slim model – allowing the platform holder to manufacture it more economically and sell it at the bargain price.

So far only announced for Europe/UK the new PS3 will be priced at €399 and £299, and will include one SIXAXIS wireless controller, Wi-Fi, HDMI, two USB 2.0 ports rather than four and no longer includes the multi memory card port.

One more little thing the new PS3 is no longer backwards compatible with PS2 games. No software backwards compatibility or hardware backwards compatibility. With Sony saying this is “reflecting both the reduced emphasis placed on this feature amongst later purchasers of PS3, as well as the availability of a more extensive line-up of PS3 specific titles”.

Sony already ripped out hardware backwards compatability with the 80gb, there is no justification whatsoever for removing software backwards compatibilty for the 100 million+ selling PS2. Stupid moves like this are why the Wii continues to piss on the PS3’s rotting corpse. Hopefully this Playstation Tard Pack (the PTP) never makes it’s way to North America.

IGN is reporting:

Big shocker at today’s Electronic Arts pre Tokyo Game Show press event. While playing a demo of Burnout Paradise, we felt something that we never thought we’d feel from a PS3 controller — shake!

That’s right, Burnout Paradise is the first rumble-equipped PS3 game we’ve ever played. Which made us think at the time, if the game is making the controller shake, the controller must be a new version of the Sixaxis!

In fact, the controller we were using to play the demo looked exactly like a standard Sixaxis, except that it had a sticker on the bottom that said “RUMBLE.” It also felt notably heavier than the standard Sixaxis.

We presume this is a prototype of the PlayStation 3’s new rumble controller, whatever it’s going to be called.

The rumble itself felt around the level of PlayStation 2 rumble. We’re not sure just yet if Sony is using any of that next generation technology Immersion has been talking about for the past few months.

Expect more info once the Tokyo Game Show really gets goin’.