"I'd love to live in a world with fewer leaks and more meat," said SCEA's head of hardware marketing, John Koller, to Ars Technica on the circulating murmurs of a PS3 slim model. Koller admits Sony has had "a certain amount of frustration" with rumors that a slim-lined PS3 will hit retailers in the fall and he thinks it's more important to focus on the certainty of the present than the possibilities of the future.

Koller calls it a matter of what "may or may not happen," which is interesting, since he's not flat out denying it nor is he outright laying down the "does not comment on rumor/speculations" angle. Could it be that the slim model is real, though now with the beans spilled, Sony will postpone its release plans? Surmountable evidence suggests that it is, and even Koller's wording in the interview (read: use of "leak," not "rumor") fuels this thought.

Compared to last Spring's outlandish software sales figures (fueled by the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and GTA IV), this year's stats aren't inspiring much confidence in gaming industry investors. In fact, many are anxiously awaiting the launch of new hardware to provide a quick sales boost -- but according to industry analyst Michael Pachter, they shouldn't hold their breath: By his estimation, new hardware won't be hitting store shelves until at least 2013.

Pachter said that publishers would be hesitant to adopt new hardware considering their investments in the current console cycle have yet to adequately pay off. There's one exception -- Pachter expects the oft-rumored high-definition Wii may appear some time in 2010.

Microsoft Canada has told Joystiq that a new console bundle is headed exclusively to the Great White North. The Grand Theft Auto IV: Limited Anniversary Edition bundle packs the best-selling "American Dream" simulator, GTA IV, with an Xbox 360 Elite console. As for other extras, the bundle comes up short.

Included in bundle are the standard Elite offerings (black console, controller and wired headset) along with 400, one month of Xbox Live and two promotional stickers: One for Grand Theft Auto IV itself and one for the Liberty City Swingers baseball team. That's it. The downloadable, Xbox 360 exclusive GTA IV: The Lost and Damned is not included.

The bundle is set to hit stores on May 4 and is priced at $399 -- the standard price for Canadian Xbox 360 Elite bundles. So, yay: a new bundle celebrating the one-year anniversary of GTAIV. Sorry if we don't bust out the confetti but this isn't even half as exciting as the Game of the Year edition bundle revealed earlier this month.

Update: FutureShop is now taking pre-orders on the GTAIV Elite bundle.

Today, Microsoft revealed a new Xbox 360 Elite bundle headed to store shelves this May. The Xbox 360 Game of the Year bundle includes the little-known online shooter called Halo 3 and Joystiq's 2008 game of the year pick, Fable II. The M-rated bundle is priced at $399, making the two million-plus unit selling pack-in titles free of charge.

Those of you keeping score at home will remember rumors of an elite bundle, which was set to include the two Microsoft Game Studios powerhouse titles, had been floating around the web earlier this month. Microsoft, continuing a long history of totally being able to keep a secret, confirmed the bundle today via Major Nelson's blog.

Update: Major Nelson has clarified this bundle will be available in all regions where Xbox 360 is sold, except those in Europe.

Lately, Sony has taken a Skittles-esque liking for more PSP colors. Japan just got the new Carnival set and a lilac system is heading to North America soon. And, as it would appear, a lime green PSP is also in the works. According to Chinese website VGSky.com, the lime green PSP-3000 model pictured above was produced in a Sony factory in China. It's currently unknown whether this specific color is being mass-produced or just a prototype.

Japan already has 12 different PSP color variants released on the market, and North America will soon have six. Where will this new color go, if it is indeed legit?

Rumors pertaining to the PSP2 (sometimes called PSP-4000) seem to be getting wilder and more exciting as the days go by. First, we heard about the UMD drive's removal and the addition of sliding screens, but now it's all touch screens (that slide) and dual analog nubs. According to PocketGamer, who apparently spoke with a developer working on the new hardware (and not Dave Perry), all of these new features will be available later this year when the PSP2 ships sometime before Christmas.

If we're following Sony's usual timeline of events, we'll see the new hardware unveiled at E3 -- just like the PSP-2000 and PSP-3000 in the previous years.

According to Enterbrain figures, the Xbox 360 and PS3 have both achieved milestones in Japan. As headlines would have you believe, the Xbox 360 has surpassed the one million mark for consoles sold, whereas the PS3 has done much more admirably, pushing over three million systems on the populace. The Xbox 360 achieved this after almost four years on the market (it released in Japan in December, 2005), wheras the PS3 claimed its figure nearly three years after launching in November, 2006.

Clearly, both consoles are big in Japan. Mostly because they're huge consoles.

[Via Kotaku]

Satoru Iwata's GDC keynote has revealed a somewhat unsurprising fact about the Wii. Iwata explained that global shipments for the Wii have reached "more than 50 million," propelling it to be "the fastest selling video game hardware in history." Let's look at some recent numbers, shall we?

As many of you NPD followers know, the Wii sold a whopping 753,000 units in February, and 679,000 in January, making for a total of 1,432,000 consoles sold in North America so far this year. In Japan, the console has sold 354,367 units so far in 2009 (counting the last few days of December), and Nintendo revealed 45 million Wiis had been shipped worldwide back in January. Add AMD's 50 millionth GPU, and you can see where this is going. We fully expect Nintendo's next move will be to purchase Japan and rename it Kirbyland.

Despite the rallying of software publishers, EEDAR Analyst Jesse Divnich thinks a PS3 price cut won't be that beneficial to Sony in the short term. In his retail sales preview for February 2009, Divnich calls the hypothetical, analyst-expected June price drop "unlikely to propel sales ahead of last [fiscal] year for the first half of 2009."

Even though he says the PS3 has "an impressive holiday 09 line-up," he claims Microsoft's successful campaign to position itself as the "core console of choice" won't give Sony much wiggle room. Currently, the PS3 is in last place for this gen, but Divnich has high hopes for PS3 in the long term. He expects Sony's system to pick up steam by "2011 through 2017," when Blu-ray becomes dirt cheap. It's not a very optimistic outlook.

The industry analysts at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research recently cast their assortment of oracle bones over some spreadsheets in an attempt to foretell NPD sales figures for the month of February. The firm's prediction is a tad on the grim side -- according to EEDAR, February software sales reached $659 million, a 2 percent decrease from last year's sales. They foresee a year-on-year decline for Spring 2009 sales as a whole, largely due to last year's glut of blockbuster Q1 releases, such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl and GTA IV.

EEDAR's hardware sales estimates are similarly un-rosy -- they predict year-on-year February sales for the PSP, DS and PS3 to fall over 10 percent. However, the firm does predict an 18 percent increase for the 360, and a whopping 68 percent jump for the Wii. With Wii Fit standing atop EEDAR's software sales chart, and with Wii Play presumably surpassing 10 million LTD sales as of last month, it seems Nintendo's license to print money is far from expiring.

Price is another major factor Brown discussed, having said that the relatively high price for consoles is still keeping a large chunk of consumers away. Price cuts would drive more sales, as in Brown's example of PSOne and PS2 success at reduced $99 and $149 price points -- both systems sold nearly 50% of their lifetime sales at these prices.

"... We've seen one major price drop thus far in this console cycle; we feel that we have a long ways to go," said Brown making reference to the 360 cuts which brought the Arcade down to $199. And by "long ways to go," he really means 'expect many more price drops to come.' Hopefully, we'll see some of those real soon.

It's difficult to rationalize microwaving a functioning device like a PlayStation 3, but we suppose most ideas from the "art" realm don't ever make much sense in the first place. From d0vetastic, comes this masterpiece abomination of a nuked PS3, which was left inside a microwave for two and a half minutes before it started to melt and catch fire. The controller wasn't spared from the nuking either; it burst into flames within seconds. Afterwards, once everything cooled down, d0vetastic painted in some details to complete his work.

Whether you want to call it art or not, it's still an interesting sight to see. You can watch how it all went down via the video clip we've posted after the break. Now that we know what happens to a PS3 when it gets microwaved, there's only one adage left unanswered: Will it blend? Perhaps someone else will get down to the mystery of that one.

[Via What They Play; Image: Kenny Irwin]

A recent AMD press release brought word of yet another hardware milestone for Nintendo -- earlier today, AMD shipped its 50 millionth "Hollywood" chip, the graphics processor for the Wii. With such a large number of units sold, the "Hollywood" has become AMD's most successful (and likely most profitable) gaming console chip in the company's history.

It's safe to assume by AMD's missive that Nintendo has manufactured around 50 million Wiis -- though their most recent LTD numbers place the console's sales around 45 million. Since Wiis stay on store shelves an average of fourteen seconds, this can mean only one thing: Someone, or something, has stolen five million Wiis. As usual, we blame the Nazis.

Judging by last week's torrent of PSP headlines, clearly Sony has big plans in store for its handheld in the coming year. One popular rumor making the rounds of late centers on a possible redesign in the works for the portable, one which purports to drop the UMD format altogether. It's an idea that Ready at Dawn boss Didier Malenfant seems wholly in favor of seeing, if only because it looks to point towards a platform dedicated to digital distribution.

The exec admits that he doesn't have the inside track on what Sony is up to with the PSP, though he told Edge in a recent interview that he'd "love to see anything that can help distribution move quicker toward a 100 percent online model." Like Bungie's Marty O'Donnell before him, Malenfant has been feeling the financial crunch put on the industry by the used game market, and confessed that "it's not piracy but used games that are killing us."

Ready at Dawn may have a more personal stake in a possible PSP redesign as well, with rumors of a PSP sequel to God of War: Chains of Olympus in the pipeline at the Irvine, CA studio. Unfortunately, Edge wasn't ably to pry any details out of the company co-founder, with Malenfant saying only that "the PSP was a great platform to work on and it's certainly been really good to us, so we have no complaint there." However, if Ready at Dawn is back to working with the PSP, we suggest maybe holding onto a few of those dev kits after the project is out the door instead of spending all of the company profits on stamps.