Once again, Nintendo appears to be the clear leader in game console sales for August beating out rivals Microsoft and Sony, according to the latest NPD numbers for United States sales in August.

The Kyoto-based company last month sold 403,600 Wii game consoles, along with 383,200 units of the Nintendo DS handheld game console. According to the Financial Times, the Nintendo Wii is now also the number one best selling “next-generation” game console in the world, pulling ahead of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 despite it being released a full year before the Wii. Nintendo has sold over 9 million of the Wii units total, with the Xbox 360 trailing slightly but falling further behind with 8.9 million. The Playstation 3 has around 3.7 million total units sold in its lifetime.

To …

Logitech has announced a new wireless keyboard and headset designed for use with the Playstation 3 game console coming to shelves yet this fall. Both PS3 accessories will use Bluetooth technology to connect to the game console.

The new keyboard from Logitech connects to the PS3 wirelessly and runs on two AA batteries promising up to 200 hours of use. The MediaBoard Pro Bluetooth Keyboard comes in a thin, glossy black finish with many features designed specifically for interacting with the PS3. The keyboard has a built-in touchpad on the right, similar to a notebook touchpad with scrolling and left and right button clicks in the place of a mouse. It also has dedicated keys to simulate the controller buttons such as circle, square and triangle, along with shortcut keys for web browsing and movie menus. And of course the full keyboard works well for fast harassing during gaming and eases the setup of profiles and entering URL’s.

The Messiah Darklite PS3 has a sleek slider design making it look quite a bit like a mobile phone when in fact its only function is as a remote control for the Blu-ray player on the Playstation 3. Since the PS3 doesn’t have a built-in infrared port a person can’t use a standard universal IR remote, but the Darklite connects to the PS3 through a USB port and provides an IR receiver for the remote and also acts as a dock to recharge it.

The remote is backlit to allow easy use in the dark when watching movies and has some basic functionality through a control ring on the front of the remote. More advanced functionality can be accessed by sliding the remote to expose the additional buttons.

This remote brings a nice convenience instead of using a a game controller and looks as slick …

The Nintendo Wii again has lead the game console sales in Japan selling 245,653 units in the first four weeks with the Sony PS3 trailing at 81,541 units. That’s about a 3 to 1 lead that Nintendo has over Sony’s console sales which is actually good news for Sony as that ratio has been shrinking the past couple months.

In June Nintendo sold around 6 times as many Wii’s compared to the Playstation 3 in the Japanese market, and in July that ratio dropped to about 4 to 1. The PS3 with its Blu-ray player has been behind Nintendo in console sales since they were introduced last year, likely due the PS3’s higher price and lack of popular game titles, but Sony’s plans for the coming months may help keep this trend going. The company is planning to add a number of games towards this holiday shopping season to hopefully entice more PS3 sales, including the very popular Gran Turismo 5 which will go on sale in October.

Today at the Leipzig Game Convention in Europe Sony announced that they will be launching PlayTV sometime in early 2008. PlayTV brings not one but two high definition (1080p) TV tuners to the Playstation 3 game console along with DVR capabilities allowing you to record one show and save another, both in high def.

This is pretty cool in itself (especially if you’re in Europe since this uses European Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial only), but there’s more. You can also transfer these videos from your PS3 and watch them on your PSP while on the go and even use the Remote Play feature on your PSP to watch what’s on your PS3 and to program in your recordings. Just how well and fast this will actually work remains to be seen but …

Sony made it official today with an announcement today of the larger capacity 80GB Playstation 3 game console for sale now both online and in stores in the US and Canada. The new system comes bundled with the off-road racing game MotorStorm for $599 USD or $659 CND.

The larger capacity allows users to download and store more games and media through the game console as the number of games and multimedia content from Sony continues to grow. The 60GB PS3 is still available along side this new high-end version retailing for $499 with an recent increase in sales after the recent $100 price drop, according to Sony. There was no mention in the press release about the 20GB models, but they are likely to be going at some reduced rates while they last.

The MotorStorm racing game included with the 80GB PS3 is …

The latest firmware update 1.9 for the PlayStation 3 was just released in Japan and will most likely come the U.S.’s way in the very near future. Kotaku has the details of what’s available in the new upgrade which looks like nothing real spectacular; a few menu changes and minor tweaks. The ability to change the video settings mid-game is pretty cool and it’s nice to see some customization available with the different background and emoticons. Here’s a breakdown of the additions/changes for the latest PS3 firmware upgrade:

• Ability to rearrange games on the XMB
• Option menu now includes "eject disk"
• Press triangle to eject games/CDs/movies in the XMB
• XMB backgrounds
• Change the folder classification
• Emoticons
• Change CD output to 44.1/88.2/176.4kHz
• Force 24Hz output for Blu-ray over HDMI
• Change video settings in-game
• "Bit Mapping" in the "Music Setting"
• Save AVCHD …

Reports are in that Sony has sold just over 1 million Playstation 3 game consoles in Japan since its launch last November. According to a report from Reuters , publisher Enterbrain said that Sony had sold 1.01 million PS3 consoles as of the 15th of July.

This rate is still a little behind the Nintendo Wii which reached in the 1 million mark in one fourth the time and has sold 2.9 million consoles in Japan as of the 8th of July. The Wii launched in Japan almost a month after the PS3.

The Xbox 360 which is another of the big, current-generation game consoles launched towards the end of 2005 and has been trailing the Sony PS3 in sales in Japan having sold only 420,705 units.

Images of what appears to be a new design of Sony’s PlayStation 3 Sixaxis controller appears on Yahoo’s official site for “The Force Unleashed”, LucasArts upcoming next gen game that lets you kick much good guy ass as an apprentice of Darth Vader. The talkback sections on gaming sites exploded with readers commenting on what it could mean; did someone at LucasArts accidentally leak a forthcoming design for the PS3 controller? Further compounding the mystery the image of the strange PS3 controller then vanished from the original site. Did Sony ask LucasArts to remove the design?

It now looks like that the PS3 controller image was in fact a fan-made mock-up of a PS3 controller from a couple of years ago posted on a gaming forum. What may have happened was the web designer for the “Force Unleashed” page grabbed the bogus PS3 …

There’s been a lot of talk and speculation lately in the current generation game console market, with Nintendo taking a significant lead in console sales over Microsoft and Sony. Many analysts have predicted that both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 would see some price cuts to make themselves more competitive with the Wii, and Sony recently knocked $100 off of their 60GB PS3 game console.

Most thought this was indeed to make the PS3 more competitive price-wise with the Wii, but we’ve learned now from David Reeves, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, that the $100 price reduction is only to push more of the 60GB models out the door since Sony is doing away with them to transition to the 80BG model. Reeves thinks that all …

It’s only been a few days since Sony announced a $100 price cut to their PS3 game console, bringing the 60GB model down to $500. But, even with the price reduction this is still more than twice as much as the Nintendo Wii and $20 more than the priciest version of the Microsoft Xbox.

Due to competitive pricing and the idea that more PS2 owners will soon be upgrading to the PS3, Capcom Chief Financial Officer Kazuhiko Abe feels that it is likely that the Playstation 3 will see another price cut before the end of this year in an effort to increase the consoles user base.

“But, the price has been cut once and it is likely to be cut again towards the end of the year. I expect the (PS3’s) installed base to grow gradually”, said …

After reports of select Target stores dropping the price of their PlayStation 3s by $100 last weekend, Sony formally announced today that it will drop the price of its 60 GB version of the gaming console immediately. That means a 60 GB PS3 will now cost you $499 if you want to get one right away. However, if you can wait until August then you can get your mitts on a 80 GB PS3 for $599 and it will come with a free copy of “MotorStorm”, Sony’s ultra-pretty racing sim that shows off the capabilities of its Cell processor.

Sony is third in the next gen console war and desperately needed to do something to reverse its course. A price drop is a good start but what the PS3 also needs are some killer titles to get gamers lined up to buy the console. That …

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi said in an interview with Reuters on Friday that the company has no current plans for a price cut of the Playstation 3 game console. The PS3 has been trailing the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Xbox 360 in game console sales for months, and in May the PS3’s sold were less than a 3rd of the number of Nintendo Wii’s.

Due to lower sales, a price that’s more than double that of the Wii and a limited number of popular gaming titles, many analysts have speculated that Sony will be coming out with a price drop in order to make the PS3 with its Blu-ray disk player more attractive to customers. Analysts polled by Reuters expected to see price cuts from $100 to $150 on the game console. This would bring the price of …

Larger drives for more non-gaming media is the trend as Sony has confirmed talk that they did indeed have an 80GB Playstation 3 model in the works and its heading to Korea on the 16th of June. Along with the bigger drive this version will also have the cost-saving emulation software that Europe got in their version of the PS3 instead of the original Emotion Engine.

The PS3 launched in the US and Japan back in November with a 20GB and 60GB model, although the company decided to drop the 20GB version in some markets including North America in April and only offer the larger capacity 60GB version which was getting better sales.

According to Sony, they made the decision to launch the 80GB version in Korea due to an already-heavy use of online multimedia by consumers combined …

Sony will be releasing the PlayStation Eye this coming summer so all those PS3 owners will be able to see each other playing “Warhawk” when it streets later this year.

Based on its specs the Playstation Eye sounds impressive: it will have two zoom features (one for close-ups and one for seeing full body images), low-light level enhancement, noise reduction technology for the four-direction microphone and up to 120 frames per second frame rate (640 x 480 at 60 frames/sec and 320 x 240 at 120 frames/sec.) Sony also has a type of software called EyeCreate that allows gamers to edit and save photos, video and audio files including time lapse and slow motion techniques (so you can make your own music video, of course.)

It definitely sounds like Sony is going head-to-head with Microsoft’s social gaming model now, and in the company’s spin they stress that …