This is my second attempt at writing a newspaper column. The only reason I attempted at all was for the glory and prestige of seeing my name in the local newspaper, the Doings. The Doings which is a fine community paper might I add, holds competitions for young journalists so they can get a taste of what its like to spend 2 hours writing a 450 word column that will only take the average adult reader 2 seconds to recognize as not interesting and turn the page to the classifieds.

On July 9th Sony Computer Entertainment America made a big announcement, it was serious about selling more PS3's than Microsoft can sell Xbox 360's. Well, that's not exactly how they worded it, but by slashing $100 off the price of the base model of the Playstation 3 they are sending a statement to the competition, that they are not ready to settle for third place in the next generation wars (which are like the cola wars, but less people die on the front lines). As it stands now it is a toss up between Microsoft and Nintendo for first place, because while technically the Xbox 360 has more units sold (11,372,316 versus the wii's 8,582,243) the wii is at a 302 day disadvantage debuting almost a full year after Microsoft's home console.

Even though this is the biggest news piece in the 'PS3 comeback' category of games industry news, it is not the first. The effort to save the PS3 started as far back as March 7th when Sony announced an exciting new feature, Playstation Home. PS Home is Sony's answer to Xbox Live a very popular online service that allows paying Xbox 360 users to play multiplayer games with users all around the world. With PS home the user gets not only most of the features of Live (online multiplayer, easy to use download store) they get to create their own avatar to traverse the online world. While watching your online self sit on a luxurious leather couch and wait for a game to load while you yourself sigh at the irony from the relative comfort of your own worn-out couch the real world may not excite the average person into jumping on the Sony bandwagon, it is enough to create a positive buzz in the tight-nit games community

All of this pro-Sony press comes on the eve of the games industries biggest event, E3, a trade show that lets the entire industry band together and get national media attention. E3 is usually a time for big announcements to be made by very rich men in front of pasty faced games journalists, but if Sony is announcing such a huge price cut now, when they could have waited for the keynote address it is exciting to think what they have in store.

While addressing both the problem of cost and the problem of negativity felt towards the Playstation brand in one fell swoop is impressive, it will take much more from Sony to make some great games, get good media attention, get a good drink of water, retie their lucky headband and get back in the console race.