News- 22/08/09- PS3 Slim and price slash

Sony slaughtered the competition at Germany's Gamescom event this week by announcing both the PS3 slimline and immediate worldwide pricedrop for the platform during Tuesday's press conference. The latest PS3 SKU will be replacing all other PS3 models once their stock depletes. The new model is 30% lighter, considerably smaller and uses less energy than the current models. It will also include a 120GB hard drive and support Bravia Sync, allowing the console's movie features to be controlled via a Sony Bravia TV remote.

The real deal maker for many potential buyers was the price cut- the Slim has been priced at £249 (£50 cheaper), putting it in direct competition with the Xbox 360 Elite and it is only £70 more than a Wii. It is still a viable Blu Ray player, since standalone players still go for £200.

Sony also announced a deal with several comic publishers (including Marvel) to release regular digital comics uploads via the PSN. The service will be launched later this year and apparently the number of issues available initially will be in the thousands.

Sony also showed off the firmware which is rolling out alongside the Slim, version 3.0. While it may not be the goliath of an update many had hoped (cross game voice chat is a no show), the XMB has been cleared up, shortcuts to the store are abundant for ease of use and quick launch icons are shown at startup. The update also lets us Brits watch the BBC iPlayer directly from the video section and PAL territories finally get the video rental store. People are still bitching, but you have to remember that it IS free, guys.

Multiple games have been shown on the show floor including Heavy Rain and GT5 (which now contains headtracking- WIN), but you're better going to sites that are able to report directly from Germany for more details.

While Microsoft's conference wasn't quite as grand, a fairly major announcement in the form of Fable 3 did get blurted out. I suppose it had to when the entire conference was done by Peter Molyneux.

There was also a Nintendo conference, but at this point I no longer care.

See you next week guys.