For those who can wait, the DualShock 3 will sell for $54.99 on its own in April.

With all the talk of the PS3 being too expensive compared to the other two consoles on the market, it seems Sony is still cashing in on sales with the high price. Sony plans to manufacture a white, 40GB PS3 for the American market, with pictures of the all-white version recently released. If they really needed to increase sales they would either lower the retail price or include more extras with the console, rather than simply changing the colour of the outer plastic. This proves to me that even with the lack of interesting titles currently available for the PS3, Sony has no intention of lowering the cost of the console any time soon. And with great new titles yet to be released, gamers will have all the more reason to purchase a PS3 for its ridiculous price. Black or white outer casing, it’s up to you to pay as much as Sony is asking for its PS3 with Blu-Ray capabilities.

The ceramic white PS3 will sell for $499.00.

Nintendo Wii (Tuesday Release):

• Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers (SNES – 800 points)
• Adventures of LOLO 2 (NES – 500 points)

Xbox 360 (Tuesday Release):

• Undertow (XBLA – Free, see below) **Edit: Undertow is simply free this week, it’s been out for a while**
• Rock Band DLC: Oasis Pack (440 points)

Playstation 3 (Thursday Release):

• PixelJunk Monster ($10)
• Rockband DLC: Oasis Pack ($4.49)

This weeks releases on the Nintendo Wii are nothing special. I wouldn’t doubt that you might even own the originals of these games, assuming that you not only purchased your own Wii, but also drove to get it yourself. Unless your parents raised you solely on Mortal Kombat, you’re at least aware of what Super Street Fighter 2 is. This game is a more limited than the Xbox 360 version as you can’t play any Wii downloadable content on Nintendo Wi-Fi, so call your buddies up and get back to some of the best 2d fighting action around. With Adventures of LOLO 2, nobody really cares about the first one, and I doubt many could tell you the difference. This was the game I would play at my friends house if his mom was the one buying video games. Your not missing anything if you haven’t played this. It’s like Bomberman…..without the bombs…..and slower.

To make up for the instability of Xbox Live in December, Undertow will be free to download between Wednesday January 23rd to Sunday January 27th. Apparently if you already paid for the game they want you to call customer service and they will see what they can do for you. I haven’t had a chance to play this game yet, but be assured that I’ll download it and fully enjoy all zero dollars it cost me. From what I gather, this game involves you scuba diving with some form of underwater rocket launcher. You can do single player missions or race/compete with player online. They say that the graphics are great, but the pictures I’ve pulled up don’t seem to be anything spectacular, even for a free XBLA game.

PixelJunk Monster for Playstation 3 is yet another “tower defense” type game. This time around they’ve decided to hand draw 2D images and put it in 1080p HD to make you forget that you’ve been playing this style of game for the past several months. Like all the others of this rapidly growing game-style, your character is placed in the middle of an area to prevent things from getting off the screen. Replace character with monster, area with forest, and things with monsters. If there is really more depth to this game than that it clearly has to be in the fact that its 1080p HD. PSN downloads may be nothing special, but they are Nothing Special 1080HD (copyright coming soon).

I left Rockband for last as this is by far my most often visited game since it’s launch. Each week they offer 3 new songs and I usually download at least 1. This week I’ll be downloading the whole pack. Oasis, the washed up British band of my MTV youth, is releasing 3 songs into the Rockband Library: “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Live Forever,” and “Wonderwall”. If you don’t at least remember “Wonder Wall” I’m going to assume that your playing Bass on easy, unplugged in the corner, as your parents don’t think your old enough to play the game. Why are you reading this? Oasis has a few fun songs, and these are some of them. There really isn’t any British bands in the Library and I’m more partial to rock/alternative/punk than the metal side. If you like the real song’s you’ll like playing them on Rockband, so if you download them send me a message through Xbox Live (GreenxxLantern) and we can jam out to a song or two. Just remember, I play drums.

After Warner Brothers put the kibosh on their HD-DVD production effective this March, the final two studios backing Toshiba‘s format, NBC Universal and Paramount, have dropped their exclusivity and will be producing on Blu-ray as well. This huge slant in the format war came as a surprise to nearly everyone during this years CES 2008 where Warner Brothers made their decision public. The HD-DVD group decided to sit out of the rest of the show to recoup as best they could. Apparently NBC and Paramount saw this as there way out.

But let’s be serious here, who really wins? HD-DVD was at least a policed format with high standards for the players they endorsed. The bonus features on each disc outweighed their competition on their Blu-ray equivalent too. Blu-ray players aren’t even all up to spec, meaning that early Blu-ray adopters won’t be able to enjoy all the new features of future movies, or, and this seems much more likely until HD-DVD is buried, none of that extra content will be implement as to not oust their supporters in an iPhone-like fashion. While HD-DVD offers the better content at a more reasonable price, perhaps it’s the fact that the Playstation 3 has it built in that makes Blu-ray the victor. As a word of caution however, HD-DVD is not dead yet, so although I won’t be purchasing anymore HD-DVD’s, I will accept any and all that you would like to send me.

I’d hate to say it, owning a Xbox 360 HD-DVD player and all, but the signs where on the wall when I couldn’t even rent a HD-DVD movie. What made it worse was that unless I was in Best Buy, all the other stores would spread several copies of the same Blu-ray movie over 6 rows while HD-DVD sat on 4 at tops. It will be great to pull the ‘ole HD-DVD player out when my grandchildren come over, and I can tell them all about DVD, Laser disc, and Betamax.

Now excuse me, I’m going to go watch Heroes Season 1 on HD-DVD.

Nintendo Wii:

• Endless Ocean
• No More Heroes

Playstation 3:

• Burnout Paradise

Xbox 360:

• Burnout Paradise

  Endless Ocean is hardly a video game, it’s simply a scuba diving simulator. There is no real goal in the game besides simply exploring all of the ocean and the ocassional tasks your boss will ask you to do. What’s interesting is that this game has by far the largest selection of features in any Wii game out there. Not only do you utilize all aspects of the Wii-mote and Nintendo Wi-Fi, now you can upload music through your SD card slot, giving you the ability to listen to music while you scuba to your hearts content. Honestly, the game seems like something that would sell me on the system if I had no idea what a Wii was and the hot girl at the Wii-osk at my mall showed me the game. Just imagine swimming with a giant virtual shark while listening to Jamiroquai – Deeper Underground. And judging by your reaction, I’ll assume I’m the only one who bought the Godzilla 2000 Soundtrack.

No More Heroes will be the only game on this entire list that I play from start to finish. This game is a hilarious interpretation of American idiocy displayed in beautiful cell-shading, reminiscent of the developing teams work on Killer 7 for the Gamecube. The main character Travis Takedown (AKA Johnny Knoxville) decides to purchase an energy katana (AKA Lightsaber) and simply beat people up with it. Someway or another he finds himself involved  with an assassin organization and is charged with fighting his way to the top. His reward? He’d like to tag the girl giving out the missions. This seems like such a stray away from the normal Wii games that I can’t wait to see if it stands up to the hype. The controls are apparently spot on for the combat aspect, even to the point where the higher you hold the Wii-mote and nunchuck, the higher you attack, and vice versa. If you decide to buy a game this week, this should be your pick. I’ll review it as soon as I get a chance to play it.

Burnout Paradise continues the burnout line in the right step. As always, the game play revolves mostly around objectives and crashing your car into tiny pieces, but now you can do that online with your friends! All of the fun of car races and demolition are now combined into one really good looking car game. They even have this feature called “Show-time Mode” that allows you to see even further into what actually happens when you crash your car. Unlike other racing games that show you simulated crashes in specific areas only, you can enter “Show-time Mode” anytime you like, even if your objective is to beat a race and not crash your car. But seriously, who completes objectives?

If you haven’t spent all of your holiday money, consider putting most of it away, except for buying No More Heroes of course. If you don’t have a Wii, go buy that first then buy No More Heroes. There is honestly no reason not to have a Wii unless you just can’t find one. The other games are very interesting, but is your money worth “interesting” or is your money worth playing Jackass/Starwars/Kill Bill in beautiful cell-shaded glory?

Each week I’ll start off by showing you what’s coming out this week and during that week I’ll review all of those games that I can afford to buy or get my hands on. If you have a game I missed or a suggestion on what to review first, speak up! It may be my money buying the games (unless you convince the rest of the staff to buy me them!) but your the ones reading this.