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.

And the mighty Sonic pogz have some mighty fine retro Sonic artwork on them, from back when SEGA didn’t try so hard to be cool – and was therefore a million times cooler.

Genius war propaganda. Mock the enemy. Ha ha, look how stupid he is! Next time we fight him we won’t be so scared!

Tails, as ever, looks suitably retarded.

“Dear everyone at UK:R, I found these some weeks ago: Sonic pogz. God knows why I kept them all these years, but you seem to have quite a fondness for the blue hedgehog, so I thought, maybe you’d like to have a look at them. Four reasons why you could like these pogz: (1) They have Sonic characters from the 2D era all over them. (2) They’re plastic pogz, not rubbish cardboard ones. (3) You can connect them to build stuff. (4) They also GLOW IN THE DARK (which, in my opinion, is the bestest thing about them).

“Best of all, if you want them, I’ll post them to you. Free. Because you are the greatest SEGA worshipers of them all… if you are the kind of Anglais who have nothing against stuff coming from France, of course. Just give me your address. Yours sincerely, JF Capdevielle, biggest UK:R French fan ever ever.”

In all their majesty. And thanks for the offer, JF, but we’ve reached that stage in life where it’s becoming just a little bit embarrassing to sleep in a bedroom surrounded by plush toys and merchandise of cartoon characters.

Sony’s 10 year plan is really taking shape – after seven months on sale in Europe, release a low-spec, cut-down, cheaper model to avert a total sales disaster. No doubt this course of action was planned out in Tokyo, back in 2004, as part of Sony’s amazing Ten Year Third Reich of gaming.

Un-be-freaking-lievable. This just makes launch day buyers look even more monumentally fuckwitted. Bend over, PS3 owners, you’ve officially been shafted.

That’s just over 300 quid. Cheaper, but don’t forget to set another 30 quid aside so you can buy a rumbling controller in 2008. Truly despicable.

This is NiGHTS on Wii. NiGHTS would seem to have a bit of a fetish for touching the bottoms of very large birds. It’s quite a disgusting sight.

He’s not shy about getting in there. Perhaps he’s just consumed six pints of Stella? That’s usually the minimum requirement for touching the bottoms of big birds.

At least he’s wearing white surgical gloves.

He ought to roll his sleeves up first, though.