This is a great email. It’s from a Toys R Us employee who points out that branches are making its employees pre-order PS3s to boost the numbers.

That’s TOYS R US IN PS3 PRE-ORDER LIES SCANDAL, if you want to use this as the basis of a news piece for your site or blog (which you should definitely do as it’s better than uploading today’s Sony America ‘GREAT NEWS!’ press release):

TOYS R US IN PS3 PRE-ORDER LIES SCANDAL
“I work at a Toys R Us store on the multimedia section, and our PS3 pre-order campaign is not going very well.

“We have big signs up advertising that you can reserve one, with NO deposit or obligation – that’s a FREE RESERVATION – and no-one wants to. At first our manager told us to approach customers looking at the display, but mostly they were just looking out of idle curiosity and what they really wanted was a Wii (sold out), Xbox 360 (sold quite a few of those!), a PC (actually sold a few of those too!), or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. For some reason people still buy those. But no-one wanted a FREE PS3 reservation.

“So, in mid-afternoon my manager got all the multimedia sales staff to put through a reservation (which I felt very dirty doing), so he wouldn’t get shouted at quite so much by the store manager, then told us to approach all the customers even if they were just looking at Hungry Hungry Hippos. Still no success, but we got more Wii enquiries and another 360 sale.

“By late afternoon my manager was getting desperate and started making announcements on the tannoy that customers could reserve a PS3 for FREE, but mostly they just kept wandering around looking at the Lego Gang Land sets, or the Bratz Prostitutez dolls, or whatever is popular with the kids these days. So the manager then canvassed all the staff members on all the other sections to put some pre-orders through the tills so it looked like people care about Sony.

“So, all in all on this busy Saturday, we did several PCs, a fair number of 360s, and we could have sold record amounts of Wiis if we had any – and a couple of PS3 orders from staff members who were forced into it.

“It was the 3rd best day of work ever (the 2nd being the time I worked for Game and read magazines in the stockroom all day, and the first being the time I played Unreal Tournament on my laptop at the railway station cafeteria when all the platforms were closed for maintenance but my manager told me to open it anyway)”

Great story, Mr Anonymous! We want more anecdotes from game shop employees like this, please! Mail them in. But bear in mind we won’t print any positive ones. We will keep your name a secret.

Instead of uploading a Sony press release verbatim like it’s actual news, let’s look at all the PS3-selling online stores and see who’s got some left. This is a proper investigation!

HMV: Yes

AMAZON: Yes

PLAY: Yes

GAME: Yes

GAMESTATION: Yes

WOOLWORTHS: Yes

ARGOS: Yes

TOYS R US: Yes

And so it goes on. This is completely unbelievable. Xbox 360 and Wii sold out in minutes – a week into the PS3 campaign EVERYONE still has piles left. This is total public humiliation for Sony.

Even better, poor old Play.com is selling so few PS3s it’s now started giving away Adam Sandler shitflick ‘Click’ on Blu-ray with its bundles. Sales going well then, Play? Maybe if we wait another week we’ll get a free Samsung LCD telly?

This is a graph we made to illustrate the facts, like Al Gore did in that documentary about the sun exploding. People believe graphs.

“PlayStation 3 in Europe will play fewer old games“

If you have pre-ordered in error this should be a good enough reason to cancel, seeing as you’re now getting something worse than was originally advertised. Isn’t this sort of thing against the law?

Last week GAME started taking pre-orders for PS3. This week, it has already reduced the price of its bundles, from offering two 550 quid “deals” down to a 477 quid bundle with just Resistance: Fall of Man and a cable that costs about 2p a unit from Taiwan.

And it is still taking orders.

This, obviously, is because no one’s INSANE ENOUGH to pay 550 Great British Pounds for a rubbish Japanese console. HURRY and place your order!

And that’s not just tonight’s wank fantasy – it’s a SOLID GOLD FACT:

January US sales totals:

Wii: 436,000
X360: 294,000
PS3: 244,000

And don’t go saying it’s stock issues – Sony’s got 25 million of the things clogging up store aisles out there right now. Six million sold by the end of March? Get real, dickwads.

Plus PS3 is still selling a ridiculously rubbish 20k a week in Japan. WELL DONE, WORLD! It’s now more important than ever that Europe doesn’t embarrass itself by bailing out Sony’s horrendous, half-finished console.

We got an email. It was nicely written, about no one buying PS3 and included an accompanying image.

This is the accompanying image:

It shows PS3 languishing in 93rd place on Amazon’s sales chart. We probably don’t need to once again point out this is because it’s shit and too much money.

THE EMAIL
Thought you might be amused to see that the PS3 is currently placed at number 93 in Amazon US’s top-selling Video Games list thingy, meaning that outselling it in 90th is Crazy Machines: The Wacky Contraptions Game on the PC and Mac, by the fine people at Viva Media.

Apparently “Crazy Machines gives you the chance to build your own unique contraptions. Solve more than 200 challenging puzzles, and put your machines to work”. I must admit, my slacks did begin to bulge somewhat while copying and pasting that, and already I’m more excited about Crazy Machines: The Wacky Contraptions Game than I am about that PS3 thing.

Other items currently selling more than the PS3 include:

– Cooking Mama on DS
– Karaoke Revolution Party on PS2
– Game Boy Advance SP Pearl Blue (yes, a GBA)
– Mario Kart Double Dash on GameCube (yes, a game on a “dead” console)
– Final Fantasy VIII on PSone (yes, PSone)
– Brain Training on DS (even though everyone has it now)

It would also appear that the window Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly leant from when
allegedly shooting JFK was also sold on eBay but the offer was then withdrawn:

http://www.nbc5i.com/news/11047996/detail.html

…but the fact that someone at some point offered money for it means that it’s technically sold more than the PS3 as well. And I bought a copy of Joe Montana’s Sports Talk Football 93 on the Mega Drive for £1.99 out of Gamestation the other day, so I reckon that means it’s now selling more than the PS3 too.

EMAIL REVIEW
This was a great email. The only ‘downer’ is that the accompanying image was a 150k jpeg, which is a bit big so needed resizing. For future reference, web pages are best screen capped, then cropped to 500 pixels wide, then exported as a gif from a pirated version of Photoshop. Had that been done this email would’ve got 10/10. 9/10.

That’s good news, isn’t it? It means Sony’s getting a large number of units into the retail supply chain. It certainly DOES NOT mean no one’s buying PS3 because it’s a big piece of overpriced shit with a load of broken, year-old games.

Amazon also has some (oh, only about a million) left as well, which it is selling for an amazing saving of 1p. That really puts PS3 within reach of the average consumer!

In other REALLY VERY STUPID PS3 NEWS today, GAME has decided to only sell you a PS3 if you also want to buy three games with it and spend over 550 quid. We can confidently predict that LITERALLY NOBODY will want to do that.

It’s almost as if they don’t want to sell any. Which is handy, as they won’t.

FAO SONY: OUR TERMS FOR SURRENDER
Dear Sony, we will stop mentioning PS3 if you can arrange to have ten boxed PAL PS3 consoles and ten collections of the entire launch line-up (all first and third party games plus peripherals) shipped to our home for selling on Ebay in time for launch day.

The number of PS3s we require will go up by one each day before our terms are met. No negotiations will be entered into. You have 24 hours before we need eleven.

So yesterday, popular European discount etailer Play.com sent out a press release to the world about its PS3 pre-ordering campaign. It boasted it would be able to fulfill all of its PS3 pre-orders and that it’d be taking pre-orders until its stock is taken.

Today, it still has PS3s for sale. It will be able to fulfill its pre-orders because it clearly hasn’t taken more than three, despite telling everyone it had “overwhelming numbers” of orders. That was just a lie then, in keeping with the general lie-about-everything PS3 grand scheme.

Whoops. Maybe it’s the ridiculous bundle, maybe it’s that one of the bundled games is Genji, or maybe it’s no one caring about Sony’s over-priced and unwanted “HD” shitbox. BRING ON MARCH 23. WE ARE NOT AFRAID ANY MORE.

WITH THANKS TO KEVIN
With thanks to Kevin, who sent us the following quite entertaining email last night pointing all this out:

So when I bought a Wii it involved rapidly refreshing amazon.co.uk at 9am and using my uni’s huge bandwith to press f5 fast enough to bring a lady elephant to orgasm before they all sold out.

Play.com’s been selling their launch allocation of PS3s and are stopping when they run out. I first checked at 12:30pm and as of now (9:30pm) they’re still in stock.

Ho ho.

Well done, PlayStation3. Well done on having lots of really old European launch games that don’t work as well online as they did a year ago. If only Sony was this inept in 1999 we’d all be playing Dreamcast 2 right now.

PS3’S GROUNDBREAKING UK LAUNCH LINE-UP INCLUDES:

Call of Duty 3

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Tony Hawk’s Project 8

Sonic the Hedgehog

World Snooker Championship 2007

NBA 2K7

NHL 2K7

Blazing Angels Squadrons of WWII

Enchanted Arms

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Fight Night Round 3

Need for Speed Carbon

The Godfather: The Don’s Edition

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007

F.E.A.R.

Not to mention Genji and the downloadable Sudoku game it had to mention to make the list look bigger. Never before has there been such an obsolete and unwanted games machine. It’s not even funny. It’s beyond comedic interpretation. It’s baffling and a little bit frightening what’s happening to Sony right now. We don’t even have to apply negative spin – the pure facts are disastrous enough.

SOME NEGATIVE SPIN JUST TO BE ON THE SAFE SIDE:

Oblivion! New on PlaySta… oh.

Fight Night Round 3! New on PlaySta… oh.

Call of Duty 3! New on PlaySta… oh.

Blazing Angels! New on PlaySta… oh. And so on. You get the point.

Hot off the brainwaves of the average European gamer:

FACT 1: No one really cares

FACT 2: It’s too much money

FACT 3: Shifting all the machines from unsold piles in American and Japanese warehouses to an unsold pile in a European warehouse isn’t going to help Sony’s ‘bottom line’ in the short to medium term

FACT 4: The best game is a free demo

FACT 5: ‘Best’ in the context of PS3 means ‘6/10 at a push’

FACT 6: The ‘Average Joe’ already thinks PS3 is an over-priced flop, thanks to low-level guerilla marketing by the New York Times and all of The Internet.

FACT 7: Virtua Tennis 3 will have online play on Xbox 360, so don’t go throwing that one back in our faces

FACT 8: Tell pikey Britain that it needs to replace its Only Fools and Horses DVDs with new Blu-ray editions and it will stub a cigarette out in your face.

FACT 9: 599 dollars actually translates to 303 pounds, NOT 425

FACT 10: 60,000 yen actually translates to 250 pounds, NOT 425

Figure a: Ken reveals genius Euro PS3 scheme. JUST SAY NO.