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.