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Sony has been weathering calls to lower the PlayStation 3’s price for quite some time now, and you can imagine that constant queries about something Sony won’t change must take a toll on one’s patience. Senior vice president of marketing, Peter Dille, for example, sounds like he’s going to scream if somebody asks him just one more time. “Everybody in the development community would love for the PS3 to be free,” he sighs, “so they could just sell razor blades....

In the wake of theEuropean PlayStation Forums’ announcementthat they’ll be offline next week for a PSN authentication update, we also have a related story that will surely be very exciting for many PS3 owners. According to athread on the official PlayStation.com Forums, there’s finally a light at the end of the long, dark tunnel of waiting for PlayStation Home. Forum member ‘patches 4 socom 3’ received the May 08 issue ofPlayStation: The Official Magazine, and found a neat surprise within its glossy pages....

Blizzard has already boasted thatStarCraft IIwas thefastest selling strategy game of forever. So it’s not surprising to see find that it continues to sell at an alarming pace, having broken the 3 million mark in one-month. “We appreciate all the enthusiasm that players around the world have shown forStarCraft II,” said Blizzard CEO and cofounder Mike Morhaime. “It was important to us to deliver an overall gameplay experience that was accessible, balanced, and fun, and it’s been gratifying to see how strongly the global community has already embraced the game....

Street Fighter IVUS National Championship Finals are coming up, set to kick off on April 18th, 2009. Taking place at Fort Mason in San Francisco, 16 national finalists will take each other on to see who emerges as our national Grand Prize winner. This winner will go onto the International Exhibition, where our champ will fight others from Japan and Korea. At the event, Capcom and GameStop will host their “Street Fighter Fights Hunger” charity drive....

The latest trailer forStreet Fighter X Tekkenis bound to please some fans and scare others. The reveal thatFinal Fight/Alpha 2veteran Rolento,Street Fightermainstay Zangief,Tekken‘s big daddy Heihachi, and relative series newcomer Lili are bound to be welcomed by most. I mean, who doesn’t love Rolento and Heihachi? Old men that kick ass are never a bad thing. The grenades and bozo hair are just the icing on the cake. The game’s new modes, including four player true tag team combat, are also looking good....

Episodic gaming has become a very popular way of digital games to extend their lifespans and rake in more cash over time. At least one developer, however, is against such a practice, with Team Meat saying they’d rather kill themselves than do that withSuper Meat Boy. “Dear Internets:Super Meat Boyon Wii will NOT be Episodic,” says the dev via itsTwitter. “That’s retarded and we won’t do it. I’d rather kill myself …  It’s a way for companies to trick you into paying more for a game....

: Reminds me of that sweet Half Life level I used to play all night at CS LAN parties. Killbox? Nothing like messing with gravity settings while your friends are flying through the air hundreds of feet above their enemies. These guys are good.

Taiko no Tatsujin, orTaiko: Drum Master here in the west, is coming to the iPad. It’s upscaled, sure, but now you’ll have more screen real estate to get tapping on. It’s calledTaiko no Tatsujin Plus, and it comes with “Carmen” when you download it from the App Store (Japan). It’s free because you’ll have to pay for song packs.Siliconeraasays that three song packs are available: Popular Song Packs 1 and 2, and J-pop Pack 1....

Unlike my first playthrough ofBioShock, Take-Two is not going to harvest everything it can get its grubby little hands on,according to chairman Strauss Zelnick. Outside of sports titles, Take-Two promises not to milk its franchises on a yearly basis and wants to promote quality over quantity. “First of all, we’re driven first and foremost by making the best games in the business,” Zelnick boasts. “you may’t do that on a clockwork type schedule … even if we had the ability to do a triple-A title annually, the question is how do you optimize the consumer’s desire for a franchise title, the needed development time and the concern that if you come out [with a game] too frequently, you run the risk of burning the franchise out....

EA Sports announced tonight that Tampa Bay Lightning center Steven Stamkos will grace the cover ofNHL 12, ending the Chicago Blackhawks’ two-year reign on the hockey game’s box (Patrick Kanewas on theNHL 10box, andJonathan Toewswas on theNHL 11cover). The Lightning selected Stamkos with the first pick in the 2008 NHL Entry Draft, and he has become renowned for his goal-scoring talent (with 51 goals, he shared the 2010 Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy for most goals in a season with the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Sidney Crosby) and his toughness (the man took a slapshot to the face in Game 7 of the 2011 Eastern Conference Finals, suffering a broken nose, but he quickly returned to the ice)....

From Software’sNinja Bladereally came out of nowhere. One day we just woke up and there it was — a new ninja game for the Xbox 360. It may have just suddenly appeared one day, butNinja Bladewas playable at TGS and as soon as I saw it and remembered it existed, I headed right on over. A small section of the game was playable, incorporating a number of different gameplay elements, and I tried as much as I could to shed a little light on the latest ninja-flavored action game, and the huge number os Quick-Time-Events it contains....

If given the option of only being able to charge my iPhone from the computer or the wall, I would always choose the wall. But the great thing about the iPhone is that both options are on the table. The same can’t be said for Sony’s wireless controllers, which require some sort of USB contact with a machine turned on. Thankfully, the problem of having to leave your PS3 on for the sake of charging is about to end … in Japan....

Unique controllers for videogames are all the rage these days now thatGuitar HeroandRock Bandhave shown that a game can sell profitably despite requiring them. Why stop with music games though? If a game needs a special controller for it then it should have one. Conforming to a platform’s given controller is sooo last year. To hear Kenichiro Imaizmu, one of theMetal Gear Solidproducers, such was the thinking of Hideo Kojima when he was first developingMGS4....