Sony dropped the price of the PS3 by $100, added a meaty blog, continue to enjoy an edge with their Blu-ray movie format, have some good looking games in the pipe, but still remain third on the next generation console gaming sales charts.

Consumers bought 425,000 Wii systems in July, an 11% increase over June, according to The NPD Group. That brings the total number of Wiis sold since its launch to 3.6 million. Sony sold 159,000 PS3s, up 61% from June. Microsoft, which dropped the price of its Xbox 360 systems (now priced $280-$450) earlier this month, sold 170,000, down 14% from June.

Ouch for the Xbox 360, no doubt wounded by bad publicity over their faulty hardware. Sidenote: still receiving intermittent blackouts on my Xbox 360 Elite here and there. I’m about on the breaking point of taking it in to get it swapped out — and making it Xbox 360 system #4 that will have been replaced in our home in less than 2 years.

The article points out that momentum is on Sony’s side for this coming holiday season. While I think they will continue to move more systems, I doubt they’ll be anything more than #3 through the holiday season. The real gaming console war will be waged in 2008 when the Wii and PS3 have an established library of games and the HOME online system is out.

Halo 3 is going to give Microsoft a huge sales bump, not to mention Two Worlds and Bioshock adding to the system desirability. The Wii is readying Wii Fitness which is bound to be a hit with a mass audience of overweight people (I consider myself in this group), both gamers and non-gamers alike.

Even if you don’t like baseball, you have to appreciate what the Texas Rangers did to the Baltimore Orioles yesterday. A 30-3 rout, are you kidding?!?!

No joke. It really happened.

via MLB.com:

Both the eighth and ninth hitters in the order, infielder Ramon Vazquez and catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia, notched two homers and seven RBIs. The last time two players had seven RBIs in the same game was when the New York Yankees faced the Kansas City A’s in 1962, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The two batters? Yankee greats Elston Howard and Mickey Mantle.

The eighth and ninth hitters got into the beating in a big way.

Two batters with seven Runs Batted In on the same team? Yikes! The closest to scoring 30 runs in the last century was Boston vs. St. Louis on June 8, 1950. Prior to the 1900s there were several 30 or more runs scored games including the all time highest major league baseball scoring contest on June 29, 1897: Chicago vs. Louisville (NL). In that game Chicago scored 36 runs.

What’s amazing to me is that if you look at the score (pictured right), 16 of the runs were scored in the 8th and 9th inning. Usually that late in a game, the bench and scrubs are playing. Also there is a sense of not rubbing it in that often prevents run-ups in a rout. I wonder if Baltimore will take this beating personally and some Rangers will be getting drilled in the ribs somewhere down the line.

If you check out the videos (see link) not that many people were at the game. Kind of reminds me of the great Wilt Chamberlain NBA game where he scored 100 points. Luckily for the Rangers romp, the cameras were rolling to capture the history.

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After spending countless hours playing Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, I was instantly transformed into a lifelong Jeff Minter / Llamasoft fan, the programmer behind the best version of the quarter chomper Tempest on any console system to date. So fanatical I was that I went out and bought every version of Tempest I could find for every system, including buying the Nuon system for Tempest 3000, also by Minter who uses the handle “Yak.” Minter was instrumental in the Xbox 360 visualizations.

Today to my delight and surprise, I saw Space Giraffe available in the Xbox Live Arcade for 400 Microsoft Points. This game shares some similarity to Tempest 2000/3000, includes tons of Jeff’s signature trippy visuals and llama humor. And here I was already stoked this week about Bioshock (yes, we bought that one too), and now this? There goes the reading time I was looking for in the last post this week.

Will we see Space Giraffe on the PS3? Doubtful, based on some of Yak’s past commentary, but I’d like to see him trick out the PS3 someday.

One of Hollywood’s major players Paramount has voted on the next generation DVD platform and HD-DVD is getting their nod. Sorry Sony but Blu Ray will only be an option for Spielberg films. Odd for them to choose one format over the other, particularly when Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD — although initially they said they’d support only the HD-DVD format and then changed their mind in 2005. Also, Blu-Ray is currently outselling HD-DVD by a 2-to-1 ratio: (1.6 million Blu-ray discs versus 795,000 HD DVD discs).

At retail stores in our local area — and I’d be the first to admit this isn’t very scientific and will vary from store to store and location to location — the selection at stores like Best Buy is about the same for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Compared to DVD neither format is in significant supply. In fact, I think there are almost as many PSP UMDs available and dying was the word on that format a year ago. Retail store shelf space, usually at a premium at least suggests availability, but as mentioned above, Blu-Ray is selling better. Only one of two local Wal-Mart stores here (about 40 minutes south of Seattle) even carries HD-DVD and Blu Ray. How is the selection in your area?

The decision will see movies from Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films available in standard definition DVD and HD DVD, exclusively … Paramount says that its evaluation uncovered two benefits to HD DVD. First, the format is less expensive to produce … Second, Paramount described HD DVD as being superior owing to “market-ready technology.”

As somebody who owns players for both and has no loyalty to either format (yet), the three benefits I can see for HD-DVD over Blu-Ray thus far are:

- combo DVDs. You can spend a few more bucks than the DVD and get both HD-DVD and Blu Ray. For folks who are building a DVD collection and are thinking about buying either Blu Ray or HD-DVD, this seems like a safe option for future proofing their purchase. You can’t play the Blu-Ray discs in any DVD player. That is if the HD-DVD option becomes a standard after DVD.
- easier name recognition with non-geeky crowd. Admittedly a bit weak, but HD-DVD does have the words “HD” and “DVD” in the format title, which gives a psychological edge over Blu-Ray to less tech-savvy consumers. With the move to HDTVs more and more consumers are understanding what ‘HD’ means (higher quality). Blu-Ray is new vernacular.
- more non-movie interactivity options. Looking at the pack-in for King Kong there are some curious options for mixing in the behind the scenes movie information while watching the movie. Maybe Blu Ray can do some or all of this too, but I haven’t seen it advertised or used in the Blu Ray movies as clearly. I can see HD-DVD specific games being something that tips the scales in that format over Blu Ray. Yeah, I know you can just buy a PS3 and play both, but Sony isn’t marketing Blu-Ray movies with games.

Imagine a new game being launched on the same disc along with the movie. It’s a marketer’s dream: target both passive and interactive consumers. Hey, you can pay a few more dollars and get a game with your movie too. The movie theater chains have been looking for a way to drive more people to the theater. I think they could use a lower quality DVD version of the film as an enticement to pay the higher movie ticket prices and then come out 3-6 months later in stores with the HD-DVD version complete with a game. Take a game like The Simpsons which isn’t going to be available for the Xbox 360 until September when the movie is already out of the theater. A marketing opportunity exists to give people a reason to spend a little more than the DVD. Right now, you pay a little more to get a higher quality version, but I don’t think that’s enough and the lackluster sales numbers for both formats are telling.

Tonight at midnight we’re hitting the stores for a couple new release Xbox 360 games and both will cost over $50. It’s not unimaginable to pay $50-75 and get both a feature length HD-DVD movie and a game. I’d do it if the games weren’t totally lame. I realize that’s not giving much profit to the game company, but as a package deal it could make it more desirable and help seal in the format. It could also help movie studios shoot the game and video footage at the same time and perhaps save some money. A lot of the movie to games suck, but there have been improvements in the genre.

There is decent potential here to create a gaming network around a movie. Mentioned recently are movie-type games like Dragon’s Lair coming out for HD-DVD and Blu Ray (Dragon’s Lair Blu Ray is already available), but these aren’t the type of games I’m talking about. And full motion movies like Dragon’s Lair have been out for 20 years (I’m feeling older just typing that). Movie watching is a passive activity, but it seems to me that HD-DVD is a little better poised to make it more of an interactive process on the same disc than Blu-Ray. Sony could hamper this HD-DVD momentum and thinking and start releasing Blu-Ray games that don’t require the PS3. Even better, leverage their upcoming HOME network with people watching Blu-Ray movies that have the PS3. This makes it even wiser to buy the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player.

What are Blu-Ray strengths
I’m still evaluating both formats, but my early opinion is that Blu-Ray looks better than HD-DVD. Maybe it’s the lower priced Xbox 360 HD-DVD player or 1080p TV we bought that leads to this conclusion, but I see a crispness and sharpness with the Blu-Ray images that I don’t see as well on an HD-DVD. I’m not saying HD-DVD is bad — it still looks very good — just perhaps a bit inferior. Being the best picture around means nothing if you don’t have the TV and movie title support and Sony can’t do it alone.

Also worth repeating: complete TV season support for both nextgen formats is lousy.

We just picked up the first season of Weeds on Blu Ray, but season two was already on DVD and not on Blu Ray (at least at the store we were at, is it available elsewhere?). This is one area the studios need to get together on and fast if they want either format to take off. Support complete TV seasons on Blu Ray and HD-DVD. None of that lame volume 1, volume 2 crap either, make them complete seasons with every aired episode. Why this isn’t a priority now is puzzling to me. When you compare a new release movie for $19.99 to something like Buck Rogers the Complete Series for the same price (pictured me holding both above) and you already own the player, which would you rather buy?

Back to Paramount making a budgetary decision to support one format exclusively. Can’t blame them there, and if the market continues to choose Blu-ray with their wallets, they can always change their minds down the road. Considering both HD-DVD and Blu-ray haven’t sold over three million titles to date, this isn’t a good sign of confidence from consumers for either format.

Finally, the article credits the sales of PS3 for giving the edge to Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. Sure, who would pay the same price for a Blu-Ray player when you can get a PS3 for the same price? Sony’s strategy was to handcuff their gaming console with a proprietary movie format. The PS3 has USB ports though and could someday support HD-DVD like the Xbox did with HD-DVD.

Official support for HD-DVD players on the PS3? Yeah, right, when monkeys fly out of your PS3 controller.

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Hmmcast #161 mp4

While the official Sony Playstation blog doesn’t name names, they do point to the same NY Times Xbox 360 unreliability article linked and discussed here yesterday.

Here’s the mild, but effective dig:

A lot of noise has been made recently about the reliability issues of one of our competitor’s systems … [PS Vault] put [the PS3] in a freezer at zero degrees for up to 108 hours and they put it in a sauna at 120 degrees for up to 64 hours — all the while running games and Blu-ray Disc movies on it. Did it fail? Nope.

No argument here that the PS3 is more reliable than the Xbox 360. Microsoft may have gotten it to market first, but it seems to have been at a great cost in quality control. Conversely, more Xbox 360s are being sold (and returned for repair). Which is the more envious position?

With the PS3 price drop and more good games on the way, I see a brighter holiday season for the PS3. It’s still going to be #3 (still a chump) this holiday season, but for gamers who already have the Wii and Xbox 360 and also a 1080p capable TV, the PS3 would look good under the tree.

The most telling holiday war for game systems will be in 2008 when all three systems have more established libraries and the PS3 has their HOME network in (non-beta) play.

Midnight Maddeniacs rejoice, it’s grid iron time again.

We pulled into a parking slot at Wal-mart and a guy was already sitting in his car reading his Madden 2008 instruction manual. Didn’t see any Madden 2008 for the Playstation 3 boxes on the shelves yet, but the Xbox 360 was in stock. Only one other person was purchasing at the same time as us shortly after midnight. Also didn’t see the Collector’s Edition on the shelves (behind lock and key?) like last year. I’d read earlier that the frame rate was better for the 360 than the PS3 so our mind was already made up.

No, Madden 2008 is not in 1080p on the Xbox 360. Yes, you can play QB Michael Vick (Atlanta Falcons) who probably is more worried about the despicable dogfighting charges surrounding him and whether he’ll ever play in the NFL again.

One quick observation on the first played game: more in game advertising. Snickers sponsoring the coin toss, post game results sponsored by Sprint and so on. How many more versions before we’re seeing banner rotators updated through the web? Since EA has an exclusive NFL license wouldn’t it be interesting to see what that agreement says about selling ads in game? NFL isn’t exactly NASCAR.

More on the newest Madden game later today.

Hmmcast #160 mp4

Last Thursday Sony released Piyotama the first puzzle game for the PS3 that’s available for download in the Playstation store. The price, a refreshing $2.99 rather than $4.99-$9.99 where most of the PS3 titles have been at to date. Piyotama has been added to the growing native 1080p PS3 games list.

Although I’ve put this in the humor category, the following is no joke. It goes beyond the process of listening to MP3 tunes on the toilet or using Sudoko toilet paper.

Piss-screen.de:

The Piss-Screen - a pressure-sensitive inlay set within urinals, enabling users to play while they pee. We installed this newfangled creation in male restrooms across Frankfurt, teaming up with a variety of bars, clubs and cafés. The game itself was displayed on a screen above each urinal, and would automatically start as soon as someone began to pee. The player could then control the car whilst relieving himself – if they wanted the car to go right, they simply peed to the right (and visa versa).

Now why don’t we see more Piss-Screens in the US? Sounds like a good way to combat drunk driving. Why not go further? Test the blood alcohol level in the urine and text message the cab numbers to their cell phone. And if the BAC is too high, cut them off.

Talk about all new type of game controller, eat your Wiimote out, Nintendo. I better bail from this one before it gets ugly …