This may be the first holiday season in a long time that Sony is looking forward to. Some 440,000 PS3s were sold last week (compared to 550,000 Nintendo Wiis), and Sony says demand for the system was at “an all-time high.” Good thing for that price cut and re-design, right?

So this is reasonably exciting. Some super secret source told PlayStation Insider that Sony has talked to Mozilla about porting Firefox to the PS3. Note the wording of that sentence: talks about porting Firefox. Needless to say, if this is even true, then we’re at a very early stage of development.

Look at CNET, breaking news left and right. The site ran a little survey asking its UK readers how many times their video game consoles crashed. No surprise: the Xbox 360 leads the pack with a full 60 percent of heaving died (due to the red ring of death). The PS3 comes in at 16 percent (yellow light of death?), and the Wii is only 6 percent.

Final Fantasy XIII will come out in North America on March 9, 2010 for both the PS3 and Xbox 360. So says the official e-mail we just received. You can’t see it, but there’s a smile on my face right now.

It seems the Internet doesn’t like GameStop too much, so I’m not sure how this story will be received. The retailer announced at a conference in New York yesterday that it will launch some sort of in-store DLC service next year. That is, let’s say you buy Game, then immediately buy related DLC from inside the store via a special interface. (GameStop worked with both Sony and Microsoft to figure all this out.) Then, when you get home, the DLC is ready to be added to your game.

Some leaked screenshots from Sony show a PS3 interface with what looks like a native Facebook client configurable. There’s also a new photo browser and the ability to change the color of your gamercard, but at those features I make a dismissive gesture. A Facebook app would be handy, though a constant stream of status updates from heavy players might be lead to mutings by less gaming-orientated friends. “Devin found a new item!”

PS3 owners no longer have to be jealous of Xbox 360 owners. Now, they too can stream Netflix goodness through their gaming console of choice. That is, with a little help from a free Netflix disc they can.

Well, Netflix streaming on the PS3 works. Of course, you need to use the special disk (can’t just download the software eh? how quaint). But it appears to be working correctly. Check out the video inside, which demonstrates that it’s working, and working smoothly.

While the Nintendo Wii continues to have a stranglehold on console sales, both worldwide and in the United States, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are battling it out for the the second place position for year-to-date sales. Just a little over two months ago, Sony announced that they would be slashing the price of their game console, the PS3, to $299. Microsoft quickly followed suit, and in just ten days dropped the price of their most expensive console, the Xbox 360 Elite, to $299. Nintendo, who has sold nearly double the number of consoles worldwide as these two, decided to lower the price of the Wii on September 27th to $199: this was the first time since its inception that the Wii has had a price cut. All three console manufacturers hoped that the decrease in price would help them to increase sales and finish the year on a strong note. The results have been mixed: while all three consoles have seen an increase in sales, the PS3 has seen astonishing growth in the US and abroad, and has wrestled the second-place position in worldwide YTD sales from the 360. As for the Xbox, even in its upgraded Elite form it has seen only minimal gains since the price drop.

It appears that reports of 360 exclusivity for Netflix have been greatly exaggerated. You could always hack it onto your console, but this is a little more official. The streaming-video service will arrive on PS3s next month, and current Netflix subscribers will be able to watch to their heart’s content at no extra charge. However, in a rather absurd turn, streaming will only be enabled when you have a special Netflix disc in your PS3. What the hell is that about?

Sony may be coming out with a motion controller of its own, but that’s apparently not soon enough for accessory maker Blaze, which will be putting one out before that. And this one is so familiar to the Wiimote that I’m wondering how long the knockoff is going to stay on the market.

This probably won’t come as a surprise to any of you, but September was a Very Big month in the life of the PS3. For the first time ever, since its launch in fall, 2006, the PS3 was the best-selling video game system. See what amazing things happen when you price a product at an affordable level?

It only took Sony three years for it to get its act together! The recent introduction of the PS3 Slim was, as you know, a pretty big success, and today we have another metric: for the first time ever, the PS3 outsold the Wii in Japan last month. Everyone party!

I’d hate to be Ben Heck. You wake up in the morning and suddenly there’s a modded Nintendo DS in your stool. You got eat breakfast and find a modded Commodore 64 inside a cereal box. Then you go to work and suddenly instead of beers coming down the conveyer belt at the bottling plant you start finding modded PS3s inside laptop cases.

He used a 1280×720 17-inch laptop screen and has a front-loading Blu-Ray drive and a two-tone grey color scheme. You just press the button and “sexy time” happens.

Questing in Kalimdor, I received word that, yes, the Wii has dropped in price to $199. After I logged out, I got to thinking: how long can this last? Like, the Wii (and the PS3) came out three years ago, and the Xbox 360 came out four years ago. Given how quickly consumer electronics evolve, how long we can expect to play these systems?

Koei Tecmo has a giant at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, and their flagship title surely is Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 for PS3. It was playable and looked pretty cool. The same is true for Quantum Theory by the way (another Koei Tecmo action game) whose early version was impressive graphics-wise (but pretty buggy unfortunately).

Sony’s God of War III for PS3 is playable at the Tokyo Game Show 2009, looks great and will go on sale in Japan in March 2010. The upcoming God of War Collection for the PS 3 (American version) will include a playable God of War III demo by the way (but the one seen at E3 2009).

Sony laid out its motion controller plans the other day at the Tokyo Game Show and mentioned that Resident Evil 5 and LittleBigPlanet would be the first games to take advantage of the system. Well, freaks and geeks, wanna see some actually gameplay? ‘Course you do.