KEY POINTS:
One thing I noticed on my trip to Tokyo last week was how popular Nintendo's Wii console appears to be. There was a heck of a lot of joint marketing stuff going on with the Wii and other Japanese companies at the Ceatec show and the Wii has
a commanding presence in stores in places like Akihabara, one of Tokyo's electronic districts.
The Japanese figures are certainly looking good for Nintendo - the Wii outsold Sony's Playstation 3 last month by almost three to one.
What is it about the Wii that has the Japanese so enthralled? Well, it has been considerably cheaper than the PS3 and is a much more compact unit so perhaps better suited to those boxy Japanese apartments.
It also has that cutesy appeal that goes a long way in Japan and led Sony to create its ludicrous dancing music player the Rolly. But that doesn't explain the huge success of the Wii around the world in general. I think the potent mix of price, form factor and innovative new gameplay involving the Wii remote is what is working for Nintendo.
Having said that, the price cut that comes with the new PS3 (the new 40GB version will sell for $799) is likely to shake up the market. At $1200 the PS3 is grossly overpriced. At $799 it's an attractive proposition given the Blu-ray drive, the wireless networking and the sheer gaming power it offers.
Still, some of the sacrifices that have to be made when you buy the new console are frustrating. For instance, you can't play any of your old PS2 games on the cut-price PS3 as hardware-based backwards compatibility has been scrapped. That's a huge inconvenience for people with big PS2 libraries of games.
The $799 version also has a fairly puny 40GB hard drive. The price difference between 40GB and 60GB hard drives is negligible, so its puzzling that Sony decided to opt for a smaller drive.
At least you can easily remove it and swap it for a bigger version. There's also no multimedia card support. That I can live with, but again, those are fairly standard features on a wide range of consumer electronics devices - why not include them and make the PS3 a more attractive proposition?
I think the Guardian has it right.
When you buy a PS3 today you buy into the potential of it delivering something big next year - better choice of game titles and Blu-ray movies and access to the delayed Playstation Home.
The question is whether Sony can afford to lose any more ground to Nintendo in the intervening period which includes the crucial Christmas sales period.
