The Sandbox

The au courant love to dish on the PS3: sales have been less than hoped for, Sony's losing money on each console, Kutaragi was moved out as CEO and chairman, and the vaunted performance over its rivals hasn't been as much of a differentiation as hoped. It has produced insecure fanboys, and fanboys who mock them.

But what's the real problem?

Of course, I'm not calling you on an iPhone, I don't work with one of those. But oh, I want to. Get back to me about that, will you?

Yeah, the iPhone needs flash in the worst way. Why? Games, man, games. It's all about the games. Give me games on the iPhone. Imagine what you could do with that touch interface....

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

Ten months after release, Sony has sold its millionth Playstation 3, something that I don't think anyone – anyone not a PS3 developer, that is – would have predicted twelve months ago. But the release of Hot Shots Golf 5 spiked sales, and the PS3 has only taken one month longer to one million sales than the Zune took.

I am one of the few people I know to have bought a PS3, and I have to admit that I'm enough of a geek that one of the turning points was that it's mega-fast at processing Folding@home data. Having a game machine able to devote spare cycles to helping find cures for Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, that's something real. That, and Virtua Fighter 5.

Author's Note: yes, I know the 360 version of VF5 will have full online play. But that's a value of "better" that doesn't include "playable right now".

This week, the annual Consumer Electronics Show starts in Vegas. And the bloggers at Gizmodo have dispatched footage of what may be the coolest gaming gear yet: Alienware's sexy beast of a monitor. It's three feet wide, and this 2880x900 mean screen machine is curved.

Of course that means we need even better graphics to watch. And word comes via Kotaku that Turbine has some sweet new eye candy in store. The company's Lord of the Rings Online game now supports Microsoft's DirectX 10 as well as Nvidia graphics cards.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

Thanks to Gamespot for pointing out a compelling new survey by Greenpeace. The environmental group has issued its latest "Guide to Greener Electronics," which includes a look at how well (or poorly) the three main console makers are cleaning up.

Among other things, Microsoft gets spanked for having PVC in its gear, and Nintendo gets chided for not informing consumers on how to dispose of mobile wares. That latter point is thought-provoking. Just where do all our old videogames go to die? In my community, I can go to a fire department once a year to throw out old electronics - which they burst into flames or something for training exercises. Oh well, another reason for digital distribution and a single "Super Console" to take hold.

[via 1up] Microsoft may be looking to unload its crushing hardware cost burden onto other folks, and license other companies to produce XBox consoles. As an exercise in expanding the brand, it's a brilliant move: XBox consoles are expensive, and Microsoft has already established a serious presence with the console and with XBox Live. Now they can continue to make the pie bigger by inviting hardware competition in increasing the platform's spread, driving costs down, and hopefully resulting in better quality (not to mention quieter, sheesh) consoles. Let's hope it happens.