When People post on the" PS3 beating the Wii in Japan"...

[mike_intellivision]

Sony sales have improved because the machine is now at an acceptable price point and have a growing software library. Things will continue to get better as more software is released.

The only negative is that to get to that point, it had to give up backwards compatability in the 40G model -- but that really means is that people will have to keep their PS2s if they want to play their PS2 games. The 80G PS3 and the Xbox 360 both offer software compatabile backwards compatability and I beleive the PS3 has a higher percentage of odler games that will play on the new console.

The Wii has slowed because it could not keep selling at the insane, fade-like rates in Japan. And it really has not had much new to offer the Japanese market (which has been described accurately as unpredictable and fickle) in recent months. The chief beneficiary of the lower demand in Japan appears to have been North America which has seen an increase in console avaiable (and where the announcement of Wii for sale can cause massive lines/queues to for very quickly).

It should be interesting to see where this pattern (of near parity) stablizes and what software releases does to this pattern. Wii Fit will probably drive sales for that unit very widely for a few weeks. But the PS3 has games on the horizon that could do the same thing -- Little Big Planet seems perfect for the Japanese market.

Try to take this as objective analysis rather than boosterism. I have a Wii -- but am still stuck in the last generation for the other two systesm (PS2 and Xbox). Mostly becasue I value my marriage more than buying another new game system.

Mike from Morgantown