Console roundup

Sales fall in Japan, more updates, and more hacks.

The Japanese market has seen a slump in sales in the last week of trading. For the week ending October 12th, all six major consoles saw a decline in sales. The PS3 saw the largest percentage drop, with a fall of nearly 21 per cent.

We think Japan would see stronger console sales of the handheld Dreamcast saw the light of day.

Xbox 360
Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg believes the Xbox 360 will win the console war this Christmas.

Greenberg was citing September sales results as his support for the win - which show the affect of the slashing the console's price, and are possibly not the best example of future hardware sales. "We feel confident that we'll outsell the PS3 this holiday season in North America and in Europe. We'll do it on a global scale."

Speaking to Xbox360Fanboy, Microsoft's Major Nelson has revealed that the full download size of the new Xbox Experience expected in November will be 128MB - which will make it too large for a small percentage of 360 owners who don't have a hard drive.

A minimum memory unit of 256MB will be needed.

It's rumoured that the next Xbox will further upgrade current Xbox 360 games to utilise its new graphics and controller abilities.

In one of the stranger mods, a user at Macmod.com has built a G4 around his Xbox 360 Elite case.

PS3/PSP
This week saw the release of version 2.5 of the PS3 firmware, and version 5.00 for the PSP. Details are here,
with Eurogamer spotting Flash 9 support for the PS3.

As usual, the PSP firmware was cracked within 2 days.

The PSP-3000 was also hacked - to pieces. While Japan saw declining console sales, PS3 sales have almost doubled in the US.

Sony reported that sales of the console are now up by 94 per cent year-on-year, and up by 25 per cent over August.

We can only hope Sony takes notice of this fanboy's efforts to design the PSP2.