18 months on from shortages, it’s still hard to pick up a WII in europe or the US.

Speculation is that it’s a delibrate shortage - to heighten demand and maintain price point.

Meanwhile the WII Fit comes out - more on that next post!

The D2C chipset replaced the old solution for playing backups on Nintendo WII

WIIKey with it’s 5 wire connection was the obvious choice.

But now the Argon chip is available from Infectus which plays all backups fine on D2C chipsets, including Paper Mario which gave wii-key problems.  The Argon chip is also flashable and plays Gamecube games.

Theoertically, as the Argon chips fools the DVD ROM drive, it is unaffected by firmware reflashing unless it’s possible to re-flash the DVD Rom drive also.  But modified WIIs work fine online as a result.

Looking for a gaming HDTV was a painful process of researching which models suffered from game ruining scaling lag and then trying to find a cheap deal. These days  the big manufacturers are all about giving gamers what they want- Sharp’s many new releases at CES, the second-generation GP3 series is  engineered just for gaming purposes.

The 32-inch 1080p LCDs are available in  black, wine red, and white casings. More importantly, the displays are equipped with Sharp’s Vyper Drive gaming mode the company claims fully eliminates scaling lag. Three HDMI inputs, including one on the side panel, are a great feature, as is the specially designed remote that allows lightning fasr input selections. Sharp’s 4-wavelength backlighting system allows for a 10,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, refresh rates of less than 6ms prevent ghosting, 24p support for HD and a DVI-I terminal will let PC gamers enjoy the displays as well.

It seems that ebay is the only place where you can pick up a Nintendo WII.

Tesco, Amazon, John Lewis - all sold out.

Prices on ebay are only marginally above retail - £180 for basic package…£195 on ebay.

I myself have given up on buying one in such a short time period.  I will no doubt have one fitted with WIIKEY for playing backups in the NY.

 The price drop announced is in line with the Playstation 3 price drop in Japan also.

A new value pack will be launched with the 360 giving away two free games.

This may be futile - Japanese users are extremely loyal to Japan and Japanese brands.  Microsoft should maybe focus more on USA and Europe.

The PS3 is in fact $599 but will be cut to $499 in US and Canada.

Compare that to $850 for the UK version and it’s plain to see we’re getting stung in Europe.

As the consoles are not compatible, there won’t be a cross-import scenario.

Sucks!

The new GTA Special Edition will feature artwork, game, sound track, safety deposit box (?!?!) and a duffel bag for $90.

How the contents are going to be deployed to stores, we’ll never know because this just isn’t the usual thing video game shops carry…a total nightmare for mail order too.

10/10 for originality, but I would prefer such items as a jacket (they made a GTA3 jacket for insiders only) or a baseball cap.

Apparently so…and the best seller in Oz right now is Pirates of The Carribean for the PS2.

That doesn’t really say much about the PS3 uptake….which is probably slow.

If I was a proper PS2 gamer, the PS3 would be a must have.

So I guess Ozzies don’t all surf and have barbeques every day!

PS1 and PS2 games can now be upscaled to 1080p thanks to the release of firmare 1.80 for PS3.

This will definitely improve the look of games on plasma screens etc.

In addition the new firmware allows you to print photos from the PS3 harddrive to a printer which is connected by USB.

Just announced is the exceptional Mortal Kombat for WII.  It’s still in development but will be released shortly.

It will use the WII controller as well as the Gamecube controller.  Online functionality has been removed as the components were not ready in time for the developer.

Hopefully Midway can make another excellent fighting game.