Filed under: Gaming

Sony‘s PR department has got to be one of the oddest places in the world to work: what other job requires doing damage control over accusations of running a racist marketing campaign and apologizing to the Church of England about violent video games in the same breath? Well, the latter is the current situation report from the whole “Resistance: Fall of Man level being set in Manchester Cathedral” brouhaha. Apparently, the company and the Church are going to sit down and discuss the Church’s demands — how much the company will be donating, and whether there will be a recall of the game — with the background of Sony sincerely apologizing to anyone that was offended by the depiction. In light of this controversy, the embarrassment from asking a Church “can we make a video game where we shoot aliens inside this Cathedral?” would have been far less damaging than all this negative publicity: next time Sony, just ask permission!

[Via Joystiq]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Home Entertainment

A thread over at the AVS Forums has highlighted a potential problem with the coating of Blu-ray discs, described by many as “disc rot” due to the mould-like spots that have made several owner’s Blu-ray discs unplayable. The five page thread has reports from dozens of forum members, many of them discovering spots which can’t be rubbed off on Blu-ray versions of “The Prestige.” It’s impossible to judge how widespread the problem is from a single forum thread, although it’s not unheard of to see a product recall after a problem is discovered by users on a forum. It’s also worth noting that for every user that has reported the spots, there’s one or more people with discs that have no problem. If you’ve encountered the same issue, your best policy is to try and get a refund / replacement disc from the place where you originally bought it from. If enough people are reporting a problem, then retailers will be a much stronger voice than a bunch of consumers sounding off in the echo chamber that is “the internet.”

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Sirius‘s Echo Home Repeater System, which boosts the quality of Sirius satellite radios by redirecting a signal from an external antenna to units based inside the house, has gone on sale. For $100, you get the transmitter and one receiver module, with extra receiver modules (for extra cash) also available. At the very least, this kit means you don’t have to have a bunch of antenna extension cables running all over your house, and at its best it will probably increase the quality of the signal. If you’ve got multiple radios in your house, then we’re sure you’ll agree that this is pretty much a must buy: for single Sirius radio owners, notsomuch.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Laptops, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Texyt got their hands on two of the Ricavision-designed prototype Sideshow PDAs that we first heard about a few weeks ago: specifically, the MK140 eChatter (pictured) and Fridge Magnet models. Winbond representatives said that the Sideshow devices could cost as little as “about $80” for the smaller Fridge Magnet device, and “about $150” for the larger eChatter with a QWERTY keyboard, but as Winbond’s background is chip manufacturing, they could have meant that this is how much the devices will cost to manufacture and not how much they’ll go on sale for (so don’t get your hopes up just yet). We’d love a Bluetooth enabled, 5-inch touchscreen PDA for 150 bucks as much as the next gadget maniac, but we’ll try and keep it down until we see it confirmed.

[Thanks, ZSX]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming

The translation from Korean to English is a little icky, but it looks like the PlayStation 3 launch in Korea which took place earlier today went ahead with an 80GB hard drive, in line with previous reports from Sony. It still confuses us as to why Sony is so adamant that the rest of the world won’t be enjoying this same capacity anytime soon: it’s not a justification to say that Korea has better broadband and therefore more capacity is required (Europeans and North Americans will just have to wait longer to fill the drive!) But hey, we’re not ones to get all huffed and puffed about a measly extra 20GB of space; you’ve already “freed your hard disk” by now, right?

[Thanks, Jayoung]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!