In an attempt to make put an emphasis on their newest console rather than continuing the popularity of their previous ones Sony has announced that the newest PS3′s rolling off production lines will not have hardware capability like those of previous North American console releases. Instead they will use a software solution like the one in European console. This means that instead of using hardware for backwards compatibility the new PS3s will use an emulation software for backwards compatibility, similar to that of the 360.

(Thanks to Crash for the clarification.)

EA is making intelligent moves left and right these days. Everything from their acquisition of Peter Moore, increased voting stake in Ubisoft or their new casual studio seems to be marking a string of big business moves. You can now add another one to the list as Hasbro and EA have drawn up an agreement for both to have access to their range of licenses until 2013. Meaning Hasbro will very well be making Will Wright branded toys in the near future.

But what are the advantage to EA? Hasbro owns a wealth of board game rights, everything you can possibly think of as classics are now exclusively available to EA. Titles like Monopoly, Sorry and more fill out the list. It seems that EA was quite serious with their casual studio, now having an amazing backlog of board games to work with. With everything looking positive, it’s only a test of time to see if their new studios can properly adapt these board games to the home screen.

Nintendo has yet to make any announcements, but you can bet they will come the official NPD numbers next week. According to VG Chartz, which is an amateur, although fairly accurate measurement on system sales worldwide, the Wii total sales are now sitting at 10.1 million. Decent buffer room ensuring either the Wii’s milestone, or it occurring officially very shortly.

What does this mean for the Wii? It was able to do what 360 did with nearly a year longer. As the 360 sits in the 10.3 million range, expect total Wii sales to surpass the 360 within the next 2-3 weeks at the current pace. One thing is for sure, no one can officially deny the success of the Wii as it’s about to take possession of first place. Apparently scaled back, but cheaper hardware seems to be the way to go these days, we’ll have to wait and see how this changes the next generation of consoles.

Today Bungie revealed a new weapon and the final grenade type: the infamous flamethrower and the incendiary grenade. The flamethrower will be significantly more balanced than in Halo:CE, and far more realistic. The flamethrower wont merely spout flame, but actually release flaming fluid that will act and react like real fluid would. Frank O’Connor explained the principal of the flamethrower to IGN.

“If you shoot a pillar, the liquid in the flamethrower will adhere to it and burn there. Likewise with the floor and with bad guys. It will cause continual damage to a vehicle. When the flames start to cool down and evaporate, it stops causing damage. If you’re lucky enough to keep it on a Warthog, then you will in fact take it down with a flamethrower.”

The flamethrower also came with a new QuickTime VR that the Bungie team seems so fond of, and I have to say that the game is looking really, really, good graphically. If your connection can’t handle the VR, we’ll have multi-angle images of the flamethrower, and one of the incendiary grenade after the jump. The incendiary grenade operates like the flamethrower, but players throw it. It is designed to act as more of a defensive “tool” then as a weapon.

“You can block an exit by throwing down a couple of fire bombs. It will create a small wall of flames that it’s not smart for someone to walk through.”

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A while ago we reported that a firmware update for the PSP allowed the system to be unlcocked so that it could use it’s CPU’s full 333Mhz. For all those who thought that there had to be a bigger catch than just battery life, it turns out you were right. According to a report, the PSP can only use up to 222 of it’s CPU’s megahertz while the system is using Wi-Fi. Apparently the PSP is either clocked or unclocked for a game. This means if developers want to add multiplayer in their game, the system limits the clock speed for the entire game, not just during the multiplayer. The reason for this limitation is unknown, but when GameDaily asked why this was, Sony Computer Entertainment America said they would find out from Sony Computer Entertainment Japan.

Loads of new info about Halo 3 were released to the public today during a user Q&A on Bungie.net. That’s not all, there’s also a sneak peek of the new Halo: Uprising comic, the first page of which can be viewed after the jump. The questions brought up a great deal of interesting details about Halo 3, starting with the multiplayer.

The Wii isn’t the only system that appeals to the female demographic anymore because Halo 3 multiplayer will include the player the option of switching Master Chief’s voice to that of a female (Kelly?). At launch Halo 3 will have approximately the same number of maps as Halo 2 did. When players use Forge, which is the level editor, the amount and type of vehicles will be somewhat limited, for example the “Elephant”vehicle will only work on the Sandtrap map. There will be numerous more armor variations, and we might see the return of the MJOLNIR Mark V armor.

For campaign the water physics will be greatly improved from what we saw in the beta, especially it’s reaction with grenades. The Arbiter will be killable. Not only that, but apparently no NPCs are invulnerable, which is odd. I recall that Johnson seemed to always die when he was around me in Halo 1, and he’d always come back the next level.

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If you’re not already at it, you better start your arms race very soon, because World In Conflict is dropping on September 19 in the U.S, and a few days later in the rest of the world, as usual. The long awaited RTS game will retail for $49.99 for the usual edition and $10 more for the Collector’s Edition, which will include an actual price of the Berlin Wall. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, for $60 you can not only have a game, but a piece of history as well.

A few months ago the remaining players of Battlefield 2 were a bit upset, to say the least, as the stats tracking system was no longer updating. The outage lasted a few weeks, affecting some 150,000 players during the period, according to EA. They have now been compensated these players with 2000 free points from EA. The average player gets some 20-30 points per round, depending on map/size etc., so it’s a decent trade off, albeit some players have lost a lot more during the outage.

You may remember a while ago that Silicon Knights sued Epic for providing Silicon Knights, and other developers, a model of the Unreal Engine 3 that was essentially broken. A few days ago, Epic made a counterclaim to Silicon Knights stating that they didn’t have merit for their claims, and that it is merely a way to siphon money for Too Human.

“SK’s lawsuit is a pretense. SK does not have any valid claims against Epic. SK filed suit in a bid to renegotiate the License Agreement, in the hope that Epic will prefer that to the burden of responding to discovery and associated adverse publicity.”

Now Silicon Knights is responding to that counter with a counter of their own. Silicon Knights’ Lawyer Cris Holland claims that, bear with me, Epics counterclaim that Silicon Knights’ claims have no merit, isn’t valid and has no merit itself, and that Silicon Knights wont make a profit from Epic, it will simply cover it’s losses.

“We don’t think Epic’s counterclaim has any merit. We believe strongly that our claims in our complaint will prevail and the damages Silicon Knights has suffered in connection with its original complaint are vastly more, millions of dollars more than what Epic claims its damages are in its counterclaim. They’ve set forth $650,000 and our claims will dwarf that substantially.”

Holland also said that Too Human wasn’t at E3 because Silicon Knights will hold their own event(SilCon?) to show the game to the public.

Nvidia, the leading graphics card maker in the world, has reported profits of $172 million in Q2, double that of 2006, with revenues reaching $935 million. Most of the profits are due to great sales of their GeForce branded graphics cards, plus the millions of RSX chips Nvidia provides for Sony’s PlayStation 3. The Taiwanese company has also announced plans of a “three-for-two” stock split, where owners of two Nvidia stocks get a third one for free.