Finally. After months of speculation and general acknowledgement by all except Sony that the PS3 is too expensive for the market, and that no amount of brand loyalty, Blu-ray cross-marketing or theoretical performance advantages were going to outbalance that inconvenient fact, the inevitable has happened and the PS3 is now £50 cheaper in the UK. That’s actually pretty good; we usually get stiffed on prices in Europe so despite not quite being on par – a $100 cut in the US should mean about a £60 cut at current exchange rates, but they do have to hedge their bets there – it’s a healthy amount and I’m sure will help sales.
The new 120GB Slim is interesting too, especially since it’s priced at the same level as the newly-reduced 80GB ‘fat’ edition (as it will no doubt be known from now on); I’m not quite sure how they expect to clear the old stock when they’re priced the same with little difference except a bundled game. Although, I think aesthetically the old machine, despite being bigger, has a nicer looking design; the new one looks a bit plain, having gotten rid of the shiny looks presumably to save on dusting.
I’m semi-tempted, but right now I already have too many games to play for the time I have available – some of that is Fallout 3′s fault; I play a lot of co-op multiplayer games with my wife & friends so I only spend a couple of hours 1 or 2 nights a week playing ‘traditional’ single player games and F3 has gobbled that up for months – and I haven’t even touched the DLC yet. We’re still playing through new Gears 2 content (Horde rocks), and new Rock Band 2 tracks (we buy something almost every week), so really we’re getting loads of play time for our money these days. On top of that, XBLA fills in the remaining slots – if you don’t own Peggle, you have not lived, Trials HD is great, and Shadow Complex is out today too. I’m just about finding time to play Dead Space a bit – I’m 8 hours in after a month! There are plenty of games I haven’t played yet, and the end of the year will supply more – L4D2, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age maybe. So, I don’t really have time for another games machine right now – I already have 2 I’m not using (DS & Wii). Maybe if my queue dies down a bit….
I wonder if the emergence of the slim edition might finally push MS to produce a slim 360 soon though. Come on guys, the 360 has remained fat, noisy and hot for almost 4 years now, with some improvements but not really enough. The PS3 slim makes it look like even more of a sweating hulk – time to get that machine’s ass on the treadmill! 
[edit]I’m disappointed to read they dropped the Linux support with the slim though. It’s the ‘official’ support they dropped, I don’t know if it will continue to be possible to do it anyway (preferably without firmware hacks), but despite the RSX lockout it was quite a nice idea, and I’m obviously always in favour of giving developers tools to play with rather than keeping people at arms length. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, I wouldn’t have thought it would be that onerous to maintain the status quo. Hmm.
August 19th, 2009 at 11:50 am
I’m also interested in that they’re dropping OtherOS support on the new model, particularly as the guy who got Linux running on the 360 pointed something out: The fact that the PS3′s copy protection has yet to be broken (Or has it now?) is likely at lest partly because the Linux-on-X people haven’t been working on it.
The other part is of course likely because Blu-Ray media is still ridiculously expensive.
(I am now curious as to whether the copy protection is anything like BD+… If thats the case, it’s gonna be particularly onerous)
As for if I were picking up another PS3 today… I’d be tempted to go for the 80GB one simply because the Slim’s design is IMO quite ugly.
August 19th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
If you’re a fan of co-op gaming, and Horde mode in Gears 2, don’t forget to look at Halo ODST in late September.
They have a mode called Firefight that’s analogous to Horde mode, but with some differences, and obviously the main campaign is also playable with 4 player co-op.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Come on… You know you want one
Seriously, it’s worthwhile just if you use it as a blu-ray player and the occasional exclusive game (LBP?)
I personally would have like to have seen a slightly lower price in the UK (especially as we have always been way above the US), but still £250.00 is still a great price for what you get.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
@Falagard: Yeah, we were pretty underwhelmed by Halo 3 so this hasn’t really been on my radar. But that was mainly because although the campaign was fun enough, multiplayer for fairly casual players like us was a frustrating waste of time. We preferred the Gears 1 campaign to Halo 3, and Horde & Left 4 Dead has made traditional multiplayer experiences just about obsolete as far as I’m concerned. I’ll keep an eye out for the co-op elements of ODST to see if they look appealing.
@Baz: I watch maybe one or two films a month tops so Blu-ray is mostly irrelevant to me, and while LBP is nice I’m not sure I’d spend that much time on it (love the creation tools, but the ‘floaty’ controls bug me a bit). Unchartered looks good too. I’d say PS3 is the right price now (I spent 220 on my 360) but when it comes down to it I have too much to play already to spend £250 on even more games I’d have trouble finding time for on top of the ones I already have on my list – I’d rather put that towards a drum kit
Like I say, maybe when/if the 360 / PC game pipe dries up so I have some spare time to justify filling it with another console. If it had been this price 2 years ago with the game selection it has now it would have got in first, but it missed my boat and now has to wait for the next one 
August 19th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
“I’ll keep an eye out for the co-op elements of ODST to see if they look appealing.”
Yeah, it’s the Firefight mode that I figured you’d enjoy if you liked Horde. Essentially it’s the same idea as Horde except your team shares a pool of lives, and difficulty modifiers (called Skulls in Halo 3) are switched on as you defeat each wave. Enemies are dropped off in drop ships, and on some maps there are vehicles you can use. Every 5 waves your lives are replenished. Skulls include things like “enemies dodge grenades like ninjas” or “enemies more likely to throw grenades” in addition to the standard “enemies do more damage” and “enemies have more health”.
There’s other things like a bonus round that happens after you defeat 5 waves, as a reprieve, where if you die it doesn’t reduce your number of lives.
Sounds pretty fun.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Hmm, sharing a pool of lives replenished only every 5 waves sounds like a stupid idea, it will make less proficient players feel bad for using more than their fair share and promote resentment. Gears’ DBNO and reviving all team members each wave, and L4D’s rescue mechanics are much better approaches for co-op – players who die more don’t stay out for too long, and the remaining team members feel even more triumph if they make it through despite missing players for a period.
Sometimes the problem with co-op games is that they’re designed by people who think like competitive players, when in fact they’re very different.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
“Hmm, sharing a pool of lives replenished only every 5 waves sounds like a stupid idea”
In general, I agree. The DBNO mechanic in Gears and L4D are perfect for co-op play, and I hope that more games, including Halo, adopt the mechanic.
However for a game that has no inherent DBNO/revive mechanic, the options were:
a) Have a single life per wave.
b) Have your own pool of lives every that replenishes every N waves.
c) Share a pool of lives amongst the team that replenishes every N waves.
Option c) promotes teamwork more than the other two, where the stronger players will need to protect the weaker players for obvious reasons. It also promotes resentment, so it’s a trade off I guess.
Personally I play with friends and wouldn’t resent my wife or friends if they lost a life.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
“Option c) promotes teamwork more than the other two, where the stronger players will need to protect the weaker players for obvious reasons.”
I don’t agree. It’s inherently in the team’s interest to assist the other players regardless, so I don’t see a shared life pool as promoting any additional teamwork at all – rather it’s punishing the weaker players with the guilt of being the one taking resources away from others. I think an individual life per wave would have been much more sensible, with the option of assistance from other team members when things get dicey (the DBNO / rescue mechanic).
“Personally I play with friends and wouldn’t resent my wife or friends if they lost a life.”
Nor would I, but I *know* they’d feel bad if they were the ones using up the shared pool more often, which isn’t a good thing. With co-op games I’ve learned it is good to make players feel good for exceptional play, but not to make them feel bad for doing poorly. This is something that hardcore multiplayer gamers fundamentally do not grok, because they see punishment for failure as merely a way to encourage you to practice more. This is not a mentality more casual players share, they’re there for the entertainment and if it’s making them feel bad for not being as skilled, they’ll just go do something more fun instead.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
“I don’t agree. It’s inherently in the team’s interest to assist the other players regardless, so I don’t see a shared life pool as promoting any additional teamwork at all – rather it’s punishing the weaker players with the guilt of being the one taking resources away from others.”
I don’t see how you can disagree that it promotes teamwork more than options a) and b), and you haven’t convinced me otherwise. However, I completely agree that it is punishing weaker players with the guilt of taking resources away from others. Again, trade off.
I personally think they should have just allowed both options.
“With co-op games I’ve learned it is good to make players feel good for exceptional play, but not to make them feel bad for doing poorly. This is something that hardcore multiplayer gamers fundamentally do not grok”
Probably. I think that in general hardcore multiplayer gamers are competitive, and it’s up to the developers to design games that can cater to both camps.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
“I don’t see how you can disagree that it promotes teamwork more than options a) and b)”
Because I think L4D promotes team-work more than this will, with a single life per character. It’s going about it a different way.
“I think that in general hardcore multiplayer gamers are competitive, and it’s up to the developers to design games that can cater to both camps.”
Of course, and there are a ton of games already catering for the competitive types. My point of view is that if they come up with some halfway-house for this mode then that makes me less interested in it. Horde & L4D (non-Versus mode: that’s the one for the competitive types) put their cards clearly on the table in one camp or the other, and I like that.
It’s funny that all the talk online about Gears 2 is generally people bitching about the competitive game modes (never played em personally), and Versus mode in L4D, and yet the people I play with don’t like those modes at all. It’s therefore hard to tell where the majority is – the competitives are certainly louder on the net, but I suspect there’s an awful lot of silent co-op types.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
“Because I think L4D promotes team-work more than this will, with a single life per character. It’s going about it a different way.”
I’m not disagreeing that both Gears and L4D promote team-work more than this with a single life per character, but they have revive mechanics.
I said for a game that has no revive mechanic, they had three options, and the third option promoted teamwork more than the other two.
“It’s therefore hard to tell where the majority is – the competitives are certainly louder on the net, but I suspect there’s an awful lot of silent co-op types.”
There are definitely a lot of people who play co-op. You can still search for a Horde game on Gears and find people to play with rather quickly. I don’t think they number the same amount as people who play competitive modes, and I also think (and this is my own personal opinion) that the co-op game modes that are currently in Gears and L4D would get boring quicker than the more varied competitive modes. Hopefully in future games, the developers pick up on the fact that co-op gaming is important and put in more game types to support it.
For example, L4D has a “get to the end of the level” goal, and Gears Horde mode has a “get to the end of the wave and subsequently to the last wave” goal. However, I hope we see more variations.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
“I said for a game that has no revive mechanic, they had three options, and the third option promoted teamwork more than the other two.”
Ok, but I see this as a somewhat engineered situation. It’s their game, they could have added a revive mechanic for the purposes of this game mode.
“the co-op game modes that are currently in Gears and L4D would get boring quicker than the more varied competitive modes”
Well, we’re still playing them approaching a year later which is a good sign. Epic in particular have been smart in releasing periodic content and tying good new achievements into Horde which always gives you something new to aim for, which is good fun. Hardcore players probably chew through the content at double-quick time so need the extra randomness that vs. modes bring more.
I think L4D had the most innovative set of co-op mechanics, but Gears has delivered more frequently.