Sonic The HORRIFIC MUTANT CAT spotted in a Chinese shop by vigilant reader. SEGA needs to get a crack legal hit squad out to China, it’s losing billions out there every day.

FROM THIS MAN: “I recently visited a friend in China when I spotted this distressingly familiar ‘cat’ in a department store, inexplicably facing the shoe section. The harrowing expression on the nearby mannequin’s face was pretty much akin to my own – Tom.”

“PS: I have some photos of ‘Sonic poetry’ which adorned the walls of a SegaWorld in Japan, if you’d be interested.”

ARE WE INTERESTED IN SONIC POETRY?
Shit yes.

This one is the best yet, as Sony Europe’s Ray Maguire amazingly manages to combine the words “thought out” and “plan” to describe the mass global confusion Sony has created around its Blu-elephant PlayStation3.

“This is all part of a very carefully thought-out plan”
– Ray Maguire, SCEE, today.

Exclusive images of the new, redesigned Phil Maguire and Ray Harrison supplied by “bored” reader Dan.

Only the problems with this are: (1) It’s a Nintendo game. (2) It’s a Wii game. (3) It’ll be another rubbish, hobbled version of Sonic that appears in it, because as we all know, the REAL Sonic would drill Mario’s fat arse into the ground in half a second, then smash his mushroom-faced fuckbuddies into a billion pieces in the next half a second.

Then he would fly off with Tails on a little red aeroplane, laughing about it, off home to see Cream, who’s very excited to see him and eager to hear his tales of victory (insert 500 words of erotic fan fiction).

This is NONSENSE. We clearly remember the end movie of Sonic CD, where Sonic had the ability to spin SO FAST he could smash robotic enemies in HALF. Mario’s fleshy belly would be spread to the four winds in a flash if this was the real Sonic and not some cross-promotional marketing-lead imposter.

The new, downgraded, slap-in-the-face-of-Europe, 40GB PlayStation3 has had its SACD support binned as well. Now while losing SACD support is about as worrying to us as losing ITV1 from the terrestrial TV listings, it’s still quite interesting to look at the parallels between SACD and Blu-ray.

SACD was released when CD was as the top of its game. Everyone owned 100s of CDs, everyone loved CDs and the sound quality of CD was perfectly good enough for 99.9 percent of the population. So Sony released the slightly better and completely incompatible Super-Audio CD – the Blu-ray of the music scene. It is now a dead format, as is its rival DVD-Audio. Everyone was happy with what they already had.

Now, all Sony needs to do is bin that awful, pointless, half-finished HD movie format they’re trying to force onto an unwilling world in the same way.

GOING/GONE THE SAME WAY:

Betamax

UMD

ATRAC

Blu-ray

And so, one by one, all the brilliant things that made Dreamcast so good are trickling down to Wii. Proof, if more was needed, that Dreamcast was eight years ahead of its time. If only SEGA had marketed it to four-year-olds, the elderly and the disabled, things could’ve turned out very differently.

Obviously the, er, amazing power of Wii has, er, made the game look much better than it ever did on Dreamcast. The font on that score is definitely a bit sharper.

And Wii has made the fishing line look a bit bluer.

Of course it’s hard to accurately compare modern games to Dreamcast games, thanks to the rose-tinted eye implants and the fact that denying Dreamcast’s awesomeness and the holocaust of its death, even in hindsight, is still considered a war crime.

As long as they don’t remake Daytona USA for Wii. Playing it on a small child’s plastic steering wheel would be one step too far for what’s left of our dignity.

WHEN WILL IT LEARN?

Here’s today’s insult, European PS3 fans! The Japanese get a white one next month. And it costs 39,980 yen which is slightly over HALF the UK price. And there’s a white DualShock 3 coming out at the same time, which you’re not allowed to give Sony more money for until next spring.

If you’re good boys and girls, Sony might let you pay twice as much money for a worse version of this in seven or eight months time. Think of all the Folding@Home you’ll be able to play!

The reason Sony charged so much for PS3 in Europe was, and we quote in SHEER HORROR, so early adopters could have six months of extra enjoyment out of the machine before it became cheaper. That 425 price included a Fun Premium, so PS3-buying cockmunchers had six extra months playing Folding@Home and botched Xbox 360 ports.

This is easily Sony’s most baffling and insulting statement yet. Here’s Sony Europe’s Ray Maguire spelling it out:

“One thing is common amongst the entire market for consumer electronics and that is that there are early adopters like myself who will spend GBP 10,000 on a plasma TV that is worth GBP 3000 within three years. That’s the way the market goes. What do they get for that? They get six months of enjoyment of the product before anybody else gets that ability to play those games.” – Ray Maguire , Sony Europe, last week.

ADDITIONAL RAY QUOTES OF WONDERMENT:

“We’ve been doing some research for the last few months” – WE’VE BEEN LOOKING AT THE INTERNET AND SALES FIGURES IN ABJECT HORROR.

“…the hub market is really wide and the prices have come down significantly” – SONY’S NEXT BUSINESS EXPANSION WILL BE IN THE LUCRATIVE USB HUB SECTOR.

“…if you’ve got a strategy and you’ve got products on a boat which takes six weeks to get here and there’s been a three month lead time to get the product in, our business has to go on and we will go on with the strategy that we want” – THERE ARE SIX MILLION UNSOLD PS3S OUT THERE ON BOATS.

“The difference between our industry and many other industries is that if you’re selling cars or houses the price goes up steadily. Consumer electronics only goes one way and that’s downwards” – YES, BUT, USUALLY EQUIPMENT GETS BETTER AND HAS MORE FEATURES ADDED TO IT RATHER THAN GETTING WORSE AND HAVING FEATURES TAKEN OUT. NO ONE TAKES A ROOM OFF YOUR HOUSE ONCE YOU’VE AGREED TO BUY IT.

So now Sony’s fire sale, disaster-averting, feature-stripped 40GB PS3 doesn’t have backwards compatibility at all, despite this:

Amazing what you can find on the web. Here’s Sony’s blundering Phil Harrison laughing at Microsoft’s decision to offer more than one hardware configuration.

“I think we wouldn’t take that strategy. We wouldn’t create confusion” – Phil Harrison, Sony, August 2005.

Sony today announced a low-spec 40GB PlayStation3, following in the footsteps of its 20GB PS3, its 60GB PS3, its 60GB “Value” Pack and its 80GB PS3. Sony is beyond saving and way beyond comedy.

SONY’S REMAINING OPTIONS:

A 30GB hard drive and three USB ports

A 120GB hard drive and five USB ports

A 320GB hard drive and one USB port

No PS3 with no hard drive and no USB ports

Shit sales of PS3 blamed for magazine closure! Raging editor slags off Sony strategy in press release! Good times had by all! (except several hard-working, under-paid Imagine freelancers, who are now wholly dependent on Google Ads revenue from their cynical industry blogs to pay bedsit rent).

From the press release:

Nick Jones, Editor in Chief of Imagine’s PlayStation titles commented, “The fact is that the PlayStation market is at an all-time low and this has been reflected in the sales of PlayStation magazines. With a lower than expected PlayStation 3 installed user base, no price reduction of the hardware, and few triple-A games until much later next year, we have taken the decision to merge PSU3 with Play and focus on our most long-standing games brands and also our new launches.”

We would miss it, had we actually been aware of its existence.