If you’re an owner of a PlayStation 3 and worried that you are excessively pushing your machine’s heat tolerance (or just one of those people that want to push those pretty Cell processors under the hood), Pelican’s Air Flo Cooler has arrived to meet your needs.

Drawing its power from a separate AC power adaptor, the cooler slides alongside your PS3 and blows a gust of cool air into its innards from its five fans, lowering the PlayStation’s internal temp by as much as 15 degrees. The really nice features are the device’s ability to cycle up or down depending on how hot the machine is running currently and that its looks are just as sexy as your PS3’s contours.

Pelican will serve up the Air Flo Cooler for $29.95 and in black and chrome swappable tops to match the color scheme …

With lagging sales and the decision to stop making the smaller 20 GB version of the PlayStation 3, Sony is now facing the unenviable position of playing catch-up in the race to be the number one selling next gen gaming machine.

Microsoft is also playing hardball with Sony by announcing the Xbox 360 Elite which gives users a 120 GB hard drive to play around with, besting the largest PS3 drive by a factor of two. Now two strong indicators have surfaced that show Sony is preparing to also up the size of its PS3 hard drive.

The reports stem from a March 2007 Sony request to the FCC to change the hard drive capacity on its PS3 gaming system from 60 GB to 80 GB. The report, practically a smoking gun, was given further strength when a Sony executive commented …

Sony has confirmed rumors and officially announced that it will no longer be offering the 20GB version of the Playstation 3 to consumers in North America. The 20GB PS3 has similar functionality as the 60GB model aside from a few features including WiFi capabilities.

Apparently a very significant number of people have been willing to shell out the extra cash for the more expensive model of the PS3, and according to Sony, retailers have been requesting the 60GB version with WiFi over the 20GB console at a ratio of 10 to 1. This fact has prompted Sony Computer Entertainment America to just discontinue offering the model with the smaller drive all together and focus their production on the more expensive 60GB version.

“At launch, we offered two separate models of PLAYSTATION 3 to meet the diverse needs and interests of our PlayStation …

According to a Bloomberg report, sales of the Nintendo Wii Japan continue to dominate over its Playstation rival.

Back in January SlipperyBrick reported that Wii sales were already significantly ahead in Japan after its launch on December 2nd, even though the PS3 launched about 3 weeks earlier on November 11th.

As of March 25th, Nintendo has reportedly sold 1.95 million Wii game console units in Japan, which is more than twice as many compared to 812,000 PS3 consoles sold by Sony in Japan since each of their respective launch dates.

The PS3 is a little more pricey game console, however. Actually sales yen makes the difference not quite as great with the PS3 having 47.6 billion yen in sales versus Nintendo’s 48.7 billion yen during the same period.

[Image via BBC news]

If this doesn’t tell the Sony executives that they better get a killer app game out for its PlayStation 3 sooner rather than later, we don’t know what will. Over at the North Carolina State University an associate professor of computer science went out and bought eight PS3 units and then clustered them together to combine their processing power. Apparently the demos for “Resistance: Fall of Man” wasn’t enough to impress Dr. Frank Mueller about the PS3’s gaming ability, but he can get a decent level of supercomputing processing power out of the 64 logical processors that are banked together.

Mueller admits that his Sony supercomputer solution is constrained by the 256 megs of RAM and networking hiccups, but for $5,000 the Cell chip architecture gives high enough performance for a relatively cheap cost. And, Mueller says, if he had 10,000 PS3s …

A new Home Beta site has been launched shortly after the announcement of the new virtual and interactive universe called ‘Home‘ from Sony at the annual Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco.

The Home Beta site (www.homebetatrial.com) is a domain registered to ‘Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited’ in London, and was purchased less than two weeks ago. The site describes the new Home virtual world and urges viewers to check back in order to register for a chance to take part in the Beta Trial of Home.

“Home™ is a real-time 3D, networked community that serves as a meeting place for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) users from around the world, where they can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share content and even build their own personal spaces. Home™ will be available as a free download from the PLAYSTATION®Store and will …

In a recent interview with IGN, Eric Ellis, the Multiplayer Team Leader of Insomniac, announced that the most popular game on the PS3, Resistance: Fall of Man, will be receiving a couple new maps in time for the Australian and European launch. Thankfully, these two maps are going to be completely new ones based somewhere in England.

Along with these maps are two new modes: Team Conversion and Assault. Team conversion is exactly like Conversion, but just with teams. Assault will be based around attacking and destroying nodes to try and reach the other team’s base, to destroy that as well.

Hopefully, these new features will help to keep us going until we get a few more games in our PS3 library. As an added tidbit, while Eric and the guys over at IGN were in discussion about a possible …

According to a report from Reuters, Sony is planning to ship 2 million PlayStation 3 game consoles to the US by the end of March with hopes of resolving the shortage issues by May of this year.

Despite rumors of PS3’s sitting idle on store shelves, a Sony executive cited that some areas of the country still had no consoles on their shelves months after the initial release. “It’s a testament to the fact that we’ve been able to manufacture and ship units on a greater pace than any previous console,” said Jack Tretton, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America in the report.

This statement seems contradictory to a recent study showing that the PS3 console was bringing up the rear in sales recently in the new generation of game consoles, falling behind Sony’s own PS2.

“Our goal is to …

Europeans may see a disappointment with the launch of the Sony Playstation 3, as some hardware revisions to the console being launched is expected to be even less backwards compatible with Playstation and PS2 games.

The PS3 has already launched in the US and in Japan, and is expected for a March 23rd release in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia with at least one slight change in the hardware configuration. This change, specifically replacing the “Emotion Engine” with emulation software, will save costs in production of the PS3 and help pass savings onto consumers, but it also makes the PS3 even less compatible with older PS2 and Playstation games. “The Emotion Engine has been removed and that function has been replaced with software,” said Nick Sharples, a spokesman for Sony in London. …

In a recent interview with 1UP Phil Harrison, president of studios worldwide for Sony, said that the long term plan for the Playstation3 is to add digitally downloaded content to the existing built-in hard drive, including movies and TV shows.

Harrison stated that having the downloaded content was part of a 10-year plan, but also noted that the technology is already there to make this possible and its likely that it will come to fruition soon. This media download service would put the PS3 in direct runnings with the Microsoft Xbox which currently has a similar service, and could help its running against the Nintendo Wii which does have internet based interactive content through the Wii Channels, but does not download media to the game console.

“Well we made a very conscious decision in putting a hard drive in every machine and …

So you’re a Japanese gadget guru, what do you have in your house? A 200-inch theater screen of course. Even wonder what a PlayStation 3 would look like on a giant screen TV? Well here are the amazing pictures.

From the English version it appears that the only down side was that the text in the game was hard to read. This is probably because even the game designers didn’t have a 200-inch monster TV. The PlayStation 3 was connected to the projector via a $1200 US HDMI cable. Oh and by the way, who says everything in Japan is smaller? Apparently the Japanese are sizable where it matters, in the Audio/Video realm of course. What do you think I meant?…

Sony has announced a March 23, 2007 launch date of the Playstation 3 game console to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. This launch comes a little over two months after the PS3 release in Japan and in the US.

The release had been rumored for some time in March of this year, but until now an exact date for the release had not been set. The console will go on sale priced at €599, £425, AUD 999.95, NZ 1199.95. This price is for the 60GB model of the PS3 which is the only model that will be available initially, and that UK price equates to over $840 USD which is quite a bit more than the $600 consumers have been paying in the US. Sony plans to make around 1 million …

Sony just can’t catch a break. Recent Japanese sales data on the PlayStation 3 indicate that the expensive console has had its worst week since its launch in Japan. In the week ending January 14th, Sony sold a paltry 25,531 units.

Overall, the console market has slowed. The Wii turned in its second worst week with sales of 93,708. The Xbox 360 sold a meager 9,035 units. The source of the sales data is Media Create, Co., a Japanese console gaming research company.

The big news is that while Sony claims to have shipped a large amount of consoles the sales reported by retailers is fairly low, indicating that once well publicized shortage is being replaced apathy on the part of consumers.

PlayStation 3 games are slow to sell also. …

The PlayStation 2 and the Xbox 360 had a pretty good year with game sales. This news comes on the heals of PlayStation 2’s surprising sales showing.

Of course Madden topped the charts as usual. Of some surprise is the number of Super Mario Bros. games sold for the Nintendo DS. The Super Mario franchise continues to shine and Mario apparently ages very well. Another interesting sales figure is for the Brain Age title. Not a game so much as a series of brain teasers and mental exercises developed by Japanese neuro-scientist Ryuta Kawashima, the title’s strong showing gives us evidence that video games do make you smarter!

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The gaming industry did well in 2006, however the real king of the consoles may surprise you. You know that the Wii beat the PlayStation 3. You also know that the Xbox 360 beat the Wii. But who beat the Xbox 360? The PlayStation 2.

Yes, the best selling console of 2006 appears to be the six year old PlayStation 2. Why did a ancient (in gaming terms) console outsell all the brand new rigs? It’s probably the availability of excellent games and the often overlooked economics aspect.

Sony has an incredible lead in game sales. Four of the top 10 games sold in December were for the PlayStation 2, including the number two game, Guitar Hero, which sold over 800,000 copies. The PlayStation 2 also had the number one …