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PS3 on fire

An analyst (don't you love those guys, sitting around and having opinions for money? Wait, that's what we do... for less money) has released a report that PS3s were overheating and crashing at the Tokyo Game Show. You wouldn't think it was big news - but it's caused Sony's stock to dip, and Sony's PR team to fire off an angry retort toNext Generation.

Now the question remains... does this even matter? Was it due to badly-ventilated kiosks and overcrowding? Probably. Wesaw the crowds in Japan and they were intense. Does Sony have a bad track record for hardware reliability? Yep. Are we worried about the PS3? Well... we just want the damn thing, thanks.

Better or worse?

Chris Kohler, over at hisGame|Life blog, has posted up a handy translation of the PS3 launch games list for Japan. Originally from the website of Famitsu, the most popular game mag in Japan, the list only lists six launch games making the November 11 release (the machine hits the US a week later.) Good news: Resistance: Fall of Man is making launch. Bad news: there are two mahjong titles. We have a really hard time believing this is the full list, but it's all we've got so far - until maybe October, when we expect Sony to nail down the US launch list.

Little people

Joystiq has come up with something really cool: one of its readers has cobbled together an accurateweb-based version of the Mii-makerfor the Nintendo Wii. If you've ever seen pics ofWii Sports, you've seen a Mii; it's a little caricature of yourself that lives on your Wii remote and hops into games you play. According to Joystiq, its Mii-maker is missing a few features, but is based entirely on what Nintendo itself has revealed so far. And just like Joystiq, we're not having any luck making Miis that look remotely like ourselves. C'est la Wii.

Wiigion lock

Before we launch into this story we'd just like to point out that it's about five minutes past when taking "Wii" and replacing it for a "re" in random words was clever or funny. Wiiplacing, you might call it.

That out of the way, Eurogamerreports that Nintendo Europe has confirmed that the different regional versions of Virtual Console will have different selections of games. Is that a shock? Apparently so, judging from fan reaction: forum kiddies are crying over the fact that we won't receive games that never made it to the US back in the day.

But that's exactly not what Nintendo said. There's nothing stopping it from electing to release games like action-RPG Terranigma, which hit Japan and Europe but not the US, down the road. So that's our second lesson: don't jump to conclusions... except when they're as obvious as Virtual Console having a different selection in Japan, Europe and the US.

Falling for 360

Fans of the 360, your time is now! The PlayStation 3 is about to come out, but that hasn't kept the spotlight off of Microsoft's lean and mean machine. Witness Next Generation, which chimes in with bullish sales predictions for this fall's 360 games. Every game that's coming out this fall - give or take, anyway - is included in the wrap-up. No surprise that Gears of War is number one; Next Gen expects it to shift around a million copies. We believe it. But Viva Pinata at 350,000? Unless Rare fans go ballistic, like those Michael Jackson freaks who buy multiple copies of his albums, we just don't see it. This isn't the year for kiddies on 360.

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October 3, 2006