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Xbox Live Arcade Drops Select Prices For One Week

Posted by Paul Hamilton Categories: Casual, Downloadable Content, Sports, Xbox Live Arcade

Xbox Live Arcade SaleMicrosoft announced that starting at midnight GMT on Wednesday, they’ll be reducing prices for a select number of Xbox Live Arcade titles for one week, ending at 11:59 Tuesday October 2nd. This is similar to the Labor Day sale they ran earlier this month where they dropped the prices on Gauntlet, Zuma and Dig Dug.

The titles featured this time around are Bankshot Billiards 2, Hardwood Spades and Frogger.

The price reductions are less dramatic here, the earlier labor day sale halved the prices of the games while these are marked down less severely: Bankshot Billiards 2 normally goes for 1200 ($15.00) Microsoft Points but has been reduced to 900 ($11.25); Hardwood Spades and Frogger are both usually priced at 400 Microsoft Points ($5.00) but have been dropped to 300 ($3.75). Still, if you were considering any of these games as possible purchases, now might be the time to jump on them. Perhaps combined with the Best Buy/Halo 3 Live promotion you can have yourself a few days of super-cheap online gaming.

Read More | Gamerscore Blog

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Select Xbox Live Arcade Titles Get Price Reductions

Posted by Paul Hamilton Categories: Downloadable Content, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade

Gauntlet Title ScreenStarting on midnight Sunday four titles will be getting a brief 50% price cut. Small Arms and Zuma Deluxe, normally 800 Microsoft Points, are getting reduced to 400 and coin-op classics Dig Dug and Gauntlet are going down from 400 to 200.

The price reduction will last through Monday.

has had price reductions and these kind of limited-time sales before, but usually they have been reserved for game-specific . This is the first time they’ve extended price fluctuations to full XBLA titles, although the announcement does vaguely hint that this may be a semi-regular occurrence.

Read More | Major Nelson's Blog

Is BioShock a Perfect Game?

Posted by Paul Hamilton Categories: Features, First Person Shooters, PC, Reviews, Xbox 360

BioShock: 10/10?

The reviews have been coming in for a week now, and they have been phenomenal. Consider that according to GameRankings.com, BioShock is the 4th best game of all time. On Metacritic, has received more perfect 100 scores than even The : Ocarina of Time, usually the game cited as the best of all time. Clearly, ‘s Mature-rated, failed utopia FPS is a critical smash hit.
Perhaps then there is little need for another glowing review of the game. Except this is not a glowing review in the strictest sense, because BioShock is not exactly the masterpiece of perfection indicated by these scores. Instead, BioShock is a wonderful game that happens to draw to light the inadequacies of the way games are typically reviewed and the inherent inconsistencies of how games are judged.

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Sony Believes PS3 Price Drop Helped Boost Sales

Posted by Paul Hamilton Categories: PlayStation 3, Sony

Sale = Sales has examined the most recent numbers and, happy with what they saw, are attributing their 61% jump from the previous month’s numbers to the PlayStation 3 price drop they announced just prior to E3. They are quick to point out that anticipation for some actual exclusive titles like   and may have helped drive interest in their slow-out-of-the-gate console.

Despite the predictably upbeat tone of Sony’s blog post, some have had a less than enthusiastic response to July’s NPD numbers since many analysts predicted that Sony was going to beat the ‘s sales in July largely because of the price drop. That the PS3 was still unable to overtake the 360 in sales in spite of a comparatively more affordable price has some worrying that Sony just doesn’t have enough market draw to convince consumers to take the plunge. What is plainly obvious now is that Sony drastically overestimated the price the market would bear: It’s wallet-busting PS3 has lagged in sales from the beginning while Nintendo’s $250 has flown off store shelves consistently for almost a year and as soon as the price went down on the PlayStation, it saw an improvement in units moved.

Read More | PlayStation Blog

Sony to Consumers: Cost Drop Is Not A Price Drop

Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Corporate News, PlayStation 3, Rumors

Sony's Phil HarrisonIn an interview with 1up.com, Sony’s Phil Harrison recently clarified the talk surrounding the PS3’s price and the possibility of a price drop. In a nutshell, when Sony said they were looking for ways to “cost reduce” the PS3, that means they’re looking for ways to manufacture it cheaper, so that THEY lose less money on each PS3 shipped. As for a drop in the PS3 price for consumers, you may be out of luck for a while.

1UP: Recently, Takao Yuhara indicated that price drops are a part of Sony’s plan to expand the market when the timing is right. Is it damaging, this early in the console’s lifecycle and just ahead of the system’s launch in Europe to already be talking about price drops?

PH: Well, do you know what he said was, cost reduction, not price drop, and there’s a big difference between cost reduction and price drop. So, that I believe is where the confusion came from. Obviously, we are investing our money in making PlayStation 3s cheaper to manufacture—that’s part of our business plan.

1UP: You’re not going to pass the savings along?

PH: When we can, when there are savings to pass along to the consumer, we would obviously choose to do that. That’s the business model.

1UP: Wait? You guys are doing this to make money? Really?

PH: That’s videogame hardware 101.

Read More | 1up.com

Low-End PS3 Still $500, But Now with HDMI

Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Accessories, Corporate News, Mods/Hacks, PlayStation 3

PS3 System After Ken Kutaragi’s announcement that the Japanese low-end PS3 would now feature an HDMI port and see a price drop down to about $425 USD, us Americans became pretty curious about whether we’d see any benefit out of this. The answer is yes and no…

Yes, the rest of the world will indeed now be getting an HDMI port on their 20GB PS3’s and
No, we don’t get a price drop.

According to Sony, adoption of HD televisions has been much higher than they expected, leading to the reason for the HDMI port on even the low-end version. Still, with the 20GB version comprising only 20% of the shipped PS3’s, one wonders if the low-end version won’t be impossible to find anyway.

Read More | PSX Extreme

Nintendo’s Final Wii Press Announcement

Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Corporate News, Nintendo, Wii

Wii UK Launch

Nintendo’s final press releases dropped today for both the European and Australian territories. In the UK, Nintendo will be making the Wii available on December 8th for 249 Euros, £179 (roughly $330 US). Nintendo first party games will retail for between 49 andd 59 Euros or £34 – £39. The European package will be basically the same package as the US, including the console, a remote, a nunchuck controller, and Wii Sports Additional remotes will sell for 39 Euros (£29), nunchuks for 19 Euros (£14) and the Classic Controller will sell for 19 Euros (£14). In addition, Nintendo of Australia announced console availability on December 7th, for $399.95, roughly $299 US. The Australian console release also features Wii Sports, a single remote and nunchuck attachment. The full European press release continues below.

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