I’m digging the heck out of the Xbox Live Arcade game Trials HD, but everything you’ve heard about how difficult this game gets is very true. Very, very true.

Consider this: After finally clawing my way to the point where I unlocked the “extreme” difficulty set of tracks, it took me 23 minutes and 336 faults (that is, crashes or checkpoint resets) to finish just the first one, dubbed Brown Boxes. The criteria for earning a silver medal on that course? Finish within six minutes with fewer than 40 faults. I have no idea what the criteria are for gold or platinum medals, but I assume one has to ride the bike like a friggin’ motorized unicycle through half the course, like this dude (who makes it look way, way easier than it is):



For me, Trials HD is a lot like the Guitar Hero games. I don’t have the skill to play Guitar Hero on expert – even most songs on hard are beyond me – so in essence, I’m buying a full game but only ever playing two-thirds of it. But with Trials HD I can’t really complain, because the two-thirds of the game that I can play is actually a lot of fun. Plus, I finally realized what the harder courses remind me of: It’s Unbeatable Banzuke with motorbikes. Good luck, rider-san.

Remember when the PlayStation 3 first went on sale in the fall of 2006, and how the upper-end model cost $659 in Canuckbucks? And remember when Sony Computer Entertainment’s then-CEO, the legendary Ken Kutaragi, said people would be happy to work more hours to buy one?

The PS3’s come a long way, baby.



As early as next week, a new, slimmed-down, $299 PS3 with a 120 GB hard drive will begin arriving in stores, ultimately replacing the no-longer-in-production 80 GB and 160 GB “fat” models currently on shelves. Here are some impressions of Sony’s skinnier, cheaper offspring, as well as a few candid snaps of the new PS3 and its chunkier predecessor.

It’s not as slim as you think
I admit I was a bit surprised at the size of the new PS3 (which we’ll call by its popular “PS3 Slim” moniker, even though Sony really doesn’t like that name), thinking maybe it would be something more akin to the super-small second iteration of the PS2. Silly, I know, given the bulk of the original PS3, but still. The new model is definitely thinner and lighter, but its footprint is only slightly less that than the original. It’s smaller, sure, but not what you’d call petite.



It’s also not as pretty
While the original PS3 is a bit of a bulbous monstrosity, I like its glossy black hide more than the PS3 Slim’s matte charcoal finish. And the old PS3’s cool touch-sensing buttons, while a bit unintuitive, are more elegant than the PS3 Slim’s generic clicky buttons. On the other hand, it’s nice to see the giant “PLAYSTATION 3” logo in that dumb Spider-Man movie font gone from the console; the PS3 Slim has a simple, subtle “PS3” in the same style as the PSP and PS2.



And it’s not as quiet, sort of
Bear in mind that the PS3 in general runs very quietly, especially compared to the Harrier jet cacophony of the Xbox 360. But while the PS3 Slim is supposedly even quieter than its predecessor, I found the fan noise that it does make to be bit higher-pitched and actually more noticeable in a quiet room. You won’t hear it at all while playing a game or watching a movie, though, which is more than I can say for my 360.

Stand it up at your own risk
The original PS3 is so thick and beefy, it can stand on end vertically with no problem. Being skinnier and lighter, the new PS3 requires a separately sold stand in order to be placed upright. Or does it? The Slim can indeed stand on end, but you wouldn’t want to use it this way anyplace where it (or the surface it’s sitting on) could be jostled or bumped, lest it tip and tumble. Sony, would it have killed you to include a cheap stand in the box instead of charging people $24 to buy one separately?



No bells or whistles
My own PS3 is the original first-generation 60 GB model, with full PS2 backwards compatibility, four USB ports and slots for CompactFlash and SD memory cards. These features have been whittled away in successive revisions of the PS3 hardware, and the Slim doesn’t bring any of them back – there’s no PS2 backwards compatibility, no memory card slots (other than the Sony Memory Stick slot) and just two USB ports. Also, you can no longer install another operating system to a drive partition – sorry, Penguinheads. Are any of these deal-breakers? Not really, but there they are.

But you know what? It’s a PS3, and it costs $299
This is what it all boils down to: the new PS3 can be had for three bills. Getting the price at that magical $299 mark will open all kinds of doors (and wallets) in Sony’s quest for broader acceptance and perkier sales, and it makes the console once again competitive with standalone Blu-ray players, which are still hovering around the $250 mark. I’ve talked to half a dozen fence-sitting friends and co-workers who are now ready to hop off and take the PS3 plunge, thanks to the lower price. Hey, it only took three years.

And what of the competition? Well, Nintendo and the Wii are off in their own little universe – if you go into a store to buy a game console, chances are you either want a Wii or a 360/PS3, but not both. Although with sales of the Wii finally beginning to plateau, news of the PS3’s new price – along with a rather slick motion controller peripheral debuting in 2010 – certainly won’t help Nintendo’s cause any.



As for Microsoft and the Xbox 360… rumour has it a price drop is coming in short order, though I would call this less shrewd marketing than a case of simply remaining competitive. Because when you now look at the two consoles side-by-side, it’s awfully hard to recommend an Xbox 360 based solely on features. The $299 PS3 plays Blu-ray movies and Blu-ray based game discs, has a 120 GB hard drive and built-in Wi-fi. The $299 Xbox 360 can’t play high-def movies from a disc (and the price and selection of downloadable HD titles in the Xbox Live Video Marketplace leaves much to be desired), it has a 60 GB hard drive and the separately sold Wi-fi networking adapter is still priced at a ludicrous $100.

The games are the thing, of course – you’ll never play Halo or Gears of War on a PS3, just as you’ll never play Uncharted or Ratchet & Clank on a 360 – and for my money, the 360 still has by far the best online experience, as well as the best controller of any game console. But dollar for dollar, the PS3 has become a whole lot more attractive. And not just because it lost some weight.

As you've probably heard by now, today's press conference with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat was to announce the formation of Ubisoft Toronto, a new game development studio that will open here in T.O. by year's end and ultimately employ 800 people.

It's a win-win-win for the city, the province and the Canadian games biz, that's for sure. What will be interesting is seeing what sort of drain (if any) this has on other Canuck studios, specifically those in Ontario and even Ubisoft Montreal itself. Will folks at St. Catharine's-based Silicon Knights or London, Ont.-based Digital Extremes jump ship to work at Ubisoft Toronto? Will guys and gals who left Ontario to go work at EA Canada in Vancouver or Ubisoft Montreal ditch their jobs there to come back home? (Mallat told me he does expect to seed Ubisoft Toronto with some key talent from the Montreal studio, so that's probably a given and a necessity.) And is there enough talent to fill those 800 positions and still grow Ubisoft's Montreal operation to the 3,000 employee mark the company is shooting for? Everyone seems to think so. And it will be nice to finally have a major and sizeable studio here in the T-dot-Oh-dot, with no offense intended to the likes of Rockstar Toronto or KOEI Canada.

Mallat plays things pretty close to the vest, so I couldn't get him to fess up on where the Ubisoft Toronto offices might be located (he said several locations are being looked at), or which game properties the studio would be working on (more on that in the coming months, he promised.) Still, the excitement among people like the triOS College game design students at the press conference was infectious -- these guys are learning how to make games, and when they graduate they'll suddenly have a major, prestigious employer right in their own backyard. And it's about time.

A curious and cryptic press release this morning: "Premier Dalton McGuinty, the Honourable Sandra Pupatello, Minister of Economic Development and Trade, and Yannis Mallat, CEO Ubisoft Montreal, will participate in a strategic announcement today at 1:30 p.m. EST. Photo opportunities with Premier McGuinty and Mr. Mallat will be available following the announcement."

Must be big, whatever it is. Is Ontario going to begin offering game development tax incentives in line with Quebec's attractive tax credits? Is Ubisoft going to invest in Ontario in the form of a new development studio? Is Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty stepping down and naming Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat as his replacement? OK, it's not that. But still, very curious.

Today's announcement is taking place at a theatre near Yonge and Bloor in Toronto, and we'll be on hand then to find out what's up.

It's fashionable these days to poke at newspapers with sharp sticks, decrying the print medium as a dinosaur lumbering blindly towards the tar pits. But for every website or blog that provides balanced, accurate coverage of its chosen field, there's another one (or two, or 10) that's just after a hits-grabbing headlines, facts be damned.

So it is with these bogus "new Xbox 360 coming in 2010!" rumours that have been gushing through the Intertubes, all of which can be traced back to a single misunderstood quote by Microsoft's smooth-pated CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer reportedly told an Executives Club meeting in Chicago that... well, no one is really sure, because even the sites that began spinning this rumour can't seem to offer a quote that supports it. But the suggestions range from a brand new generation of Xbox (oh come on, get real) to a refresh of the hardware that incorporates the Project Natal technology.

Although Microsoft's usual stance on rumours is not to comment, they've weighed in on this one with a definitive "no." That said, I expect once the Project Natal gizmo becomes reality, we'll see an Xbox 360 bundle that combines the console, the Natal device and some Natal-enabled games.

And it's not unrealistic to think there may eventually be a slight revamp of the Xbox that integrates the Natal device's processors and such into the console's body, though the camera and microphone array will obviously always remain a separate unit to allow gamers to position it most effectively. Lots of us don't have our Xbox 360s sitting directly next to our TVs, so building the Natal camera into the console itself would be dumber than dumb, and will never happen.

Oh yeah, and it's been ages since I posted to this blog. I say time and time again that I'll post more often, but this time I mean it. For reals! Maybe. Probably. Meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter (stevetilley), since that tends to be where I go with real-time musings, even if a lot of them are kind of asinine. Not unlike those new Xbox rumours...