Wii’s Balance Board has almost as many sales as PS3. Ouch.

Seems like Obamafever is subsiding and news is starting to… You know, flow again. That said:

• Love it or hate it, Ctrl-Alt-Delete has been around for a while and… Well, like a bad soap opera, you get sucked into these things. “Congrats” to Ethan and Lilah…? I guess?
• Red Alert 3 producer David Silverman has a crazy idea on how to reduce game piracy: MAKE GOOD GAMES THAT PEOPLE WANT TO BUY. What a maniac!
• Bahahahahahhaa
• Xbox Live Arcade games portfolio manager David Edery thinks that games are an untapped source of free labor. GET BACK TO WORK.
• PSP multiplayer via the webternets by piping through the PS3 is now live in Japan. No word on North American release.
• Gamasutra crunched some numbers and came up with first- versus third-party attach rates for PS3, 360, and Wii.
• China has decided to tax income derived from sale of virtual items or characters. Gold farming just got 20% more expensive.
• Our casual game of the day is 99 Bricks. It’s like tetris but totally not. Thank me later.

Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who has today off for voting day. In that case, get on your consoles or PC and fire up a game.

• Today, Valve’s Steam service has been updated. The biggest news with this update is back-end support for Steam Cloud. The new service will allow access to your Steam profile and settings from any computer used to access your Steam account. Steam Cloud support has been built into the upcoming Left 4 Dead, but will be back-ported to Valve’s entire catalog.
• One of the greatest Legend of Zelda games ever, The Ocarina of Time, is 10 years old. Celebrate by buying a… You know, real ocarina.
• Wired looks at the eagerly-anticipated Gears of War 2, and finds it lacking in “wow” factor.
• Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles ships today for PS3. I played the demo last night. If you liked Tactics, you’ll probably like this. The art style is somewhat like Braid mixed with standard manga.

I also gave Mirror’s Edge demo a shot last night. It’s pretty darned spiffy; I like it.

Hard to do gaming roundups when you have a houseful of people for five days. Sorry about that.

• Music seems to be a popular topic lately. In honor of election day, there will be several songs from the Presidents of the United States of America available for Rock Band tomorrow. I see what they did there…
• I forgot how much I loved the old Star Ocean on Playstation 1 until I read Silconera’s review of Star Ocean: First Departure for the PSP. Happy sigh!
• More developments in the Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero battle: was Activision’s CEO’s arrogance partly to blame for losing the Beatles to MTV/Harmonix?
• Mirror’s Edge demo is out for PS3 and Xbox 360. Sorry PC players, no demo for you.
• Guess we can look forward to a new Elder Scrolls in 2010. I know my kids were flipping out at this announcement.
• This is not gaming news unless you consider snowball fights (the real kind) to be gaming. I do, for the purposes of sharing this incredible link with you.

As usual, I’ll provide more when I get it. Game on!

There are lots of little bits of gaming news out there today, so I’ll try to sum them up succinctly:

• Valve announced that people who pre-order Left 4 Dead will have early access to the demo. The game will be released on Nov. 18th but pre-orders will be able to play the 4-player demo on the 6th. This is similar to what they did last year for people who pre-ordered Orange Box – we were playing TF2 for a few weeks before release (and, we got hooked…) Valve REALLY thinks you’ll like this game: Gabe Newell says “Every time someone plays Left 4 Dead, we witness the most overwhelmingly positive reaction that we’ve seen from any of our games.“
• Oh you may have heard. Fallout 3 is out today. You can buy it everywhere, and also get it on Steam.
• PSP owners may be interested in the new version of PSP Media Manager out today.
• LittleBigPlanet servers are now up so user-generated content can be shared. As a bonus, all user content from the Beta will be made available in the production game.
• Siouxsie and the Banshees Track Pack available for Rock Band on the 360.
• ArsTechnica reviews Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and likes the “going back to Castlevania II” style.
• I can’t stop playing NinjaKiwi’s Bloons Tower Defense 3. FML.

ExtremeTech replaces the PS3’s hard drive with a SSD to see how much it improves load times.

Just in case you were having any doubts that Valve is a PC-gaming studio, it looks like there will be zero ongoing support for the Orange Box on the PS3. The port to PS3 was done by EA, who is no longer committing developers to the project, according to Valve’s Doug Lombardi (reported by 1UP). There will, however, eventually be updates for the XBox, including the Pyro, Medic, and Heavy upgrades.

Short version: TF2 is a PC game. Don’t buy it for a console. And come play with us. Cheers, mate.

Yesterday evening I got word that Raptr launched a public beta.

Raptr aims to be the final social gaming application on your desktop. It connects you with like-minded gamers, friends, and competitors which allows you to share information about your gaming habits, achievements, scores, and more.

The Raptr games list window

This is similar to Steam, but Steam can’t, for example, allow you to see when your Steam friends start playing Call of Duty 4 on the PS3 and then later switch to Castle Crashers on the Xbox 360.

Raptr ties in as many gaming services that they can get their grubby little hands on. Amidst yesterday’s launch, I was able to punch in my Wii, Steam, Xbox Live, and PS3 network information. It also has fields for World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero, and Xfire.

I’ve added a few friends, such as Icrontic’s Bryan Miller (Cyclonite); as soon as he fires up any game on any of those networks, I can see that. I can also send him a public “shout” since the Raptr client ties in with the Raptr website, or private message him.

The first thing I liked about Raptr was the fact that it scanned my system for, and found, every game I own. It even let me know that Age of Empires III was outdated, and started downloading the patch for it. This could prove to be huge. Trust me, keeping up with patches for my kids’ systems with all their games means I can spend hours on gamershell.com and other patch sites.

This is definitely a beta. I had some weird Adobe Air XML error when I tried to manage the patches that were downloaded for Age of Empires. Also, I didn’t realize that the download speed defaulted to 30K for patches – they took forever (you can change it in the options panel). It downloaded 11 patches to bring my game up to the latest version 1.12, even though I had 1.11 installed already and only needed the tiny 1.11 to 1.12 patch. Updates seem really slow, and I had trouble finding a few of my friends and ended up browsing through every single user to find them.

All in all, I see a lot of potential with a service like Raptr. I can usually tell right away whether or not a new app/service is going to click with me, and my initial reaction is “yes, this will click.” It clearly needs some polish, but since this is a beta, there remains a lot of potential for fixes.

Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Michael Shorrock today announced that SCEA is working with Neversoft, Konami, Activision, and Harmonix to ensure that their music peripherals will work with all instrument-based games.

Let’s put that into plain English: They want you to be able to buy one set of instruments instead of having three drumsets in your living room.

This is a very real problem. For the current generation of rhythm/karaoke games you basically have to commit to buying multiple guitars – since the Rock Band guitar won’t work with Guitar Hero. If you want to play co-op in Guitar Hero, you’re buying another guitar.

With the next generation of games coming out – Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2, the drum kits are almost full-size professional electronic drum kits. There’s no way anyone is going to want (or can afford) two of those drum kits in their game room.

This seems like a situation where SCEA had to step in, grab each kid by the scruff of his neck and say “STOP FIGHTING AND SHAKE HANDS RIGHT NOW”. Good for us, either way. Unfortunately, no word on similar concessions for Xbox users.

There have been many operating systems running on the PS3, but all are Linux-derived and compiled specifically for the unique Cell CPU. One daring user has gone ahead and successfully run Vista on the machine.

By success, we mean something nearer to that of Enron or MCI Worldcom’s definition, but success all the same. The feat employed the processor emulator QEMU and managed to launch notepad in a spry twelve minutes.

It appears Microsoft has been hard at work enhancing the responsiveness of the Vista platform.

(Ed note: Zing.)

Sony announced a revamped 80GB PS3 model at its annual E3 press conference. The new model will cost $399, down from the current $500 package price.

The price drop doesn’t come without its caveats. The new model loses the following features: 2 USB 2.0 ports, flash card readers, SACD support, and all PS2 backwards compatibility support. The new 80-giger hits shelves in September.

Oh but fear not PS2 loyalists, you shall not be forsaken. They’ve announced that 130 new titles will be released for the system this year. SCEA is aiming to have 10,000 PS2 titles out by the end of the year. To celebrate, they’re releasing a new family-friendly PS2 bundle with the system, controllers, and a kiddie game for $149.99.

I received an email a few minutes ago from Sony’s Playstation.com since I have a Playstation.com account and I’ve used their site before. It was one of those generic, boilerplate “We have updated our Terms of Service and need to inform you blah blah blah blah” things.

I don’t know what compelled me, but for some odd reason I clicked on it. I never do this, so who knows what happened. Maybe the coffee is making me edgy.

At any rate, I was greeted with this… Wait.. WHAT?

The first line I read was:

We try to avoid putting those annoying ®, ©, and ™ marks and loads of itty bitty type on every page, but we’re telling you now that everything on this site is copyrighted and trademarked by us or one of our partners, unless we say otherwise. This means you can’t just use the stuff (no matter how amazing it looks) without our written permission. And we’ve got to be honest up front: even if you came up with a totally cool idea that we were really excited about, it’s not very likely our lawyers would let you use our stuff, even if you asked nicely. So you may want to just enjoy it while you’re here.

That is AWESOME. This is the most well written, easy to grasp Terms of Service I’ve EVER seen. If more companies caught on and started writing their ToS in this style, I’d start reading ‘em.

As it stands, I don’t know anybody that doesn’t just click “yes” “next” “yes” “ok” when presented with pages upon pages of legalese. Perhaps this is the cure.