Although not widely publicised, Sony has quietly let slip that they have dropped hardware backwards-compatibility from the European PlayStation3 as a cost-reducing measure, even though the more affordable 20Gb variant will not be available and the 60Gb console is likely to cost more here than in either Japan or the Americas.
Amazon posted that Nintendo’s Wii console could be pre-ordered from today at 9am. The product wasn’t actually listed until about 9:40, at which point it sold out within, literally, seconds. In the time it took to mis-enter my email address once (d’oh!) and then re-enter it correctly, all units had been sold.
I wonder what the size of Amazon’s allocation was?
There’s a Japanese guy whose site has some of the coolest and strangest Flash games on the web – Grow RPG is genius.
Brand new is Chronon [eyezmaze.com] – there’s a little yellow guy trapped in a cage inside a large grey monster’s house. Your job is to help the little guy out by manipulating the objects in the room around him – but the crucial tool is that you can skip forwards and backwards in time at will to set things up for later.
It reminds me of a game called Time Machine [worldofspectrum.org] on the ZX Spectrum [wikipedia.org] which had a similar concept of earlier actions altering the later state of the world.
In the case of Chronon, though, it’s characteristicly totally nuts (in a very Japanese way… this is the country which came up with Katamari Damacy) – but worth persevering with, if only to see what crazy thing happens next 
Highly recommended!