Sony has just revealed that the PS3 will support 3D Blu-Ray Disc Playback. This news come from the Sony media briefing currently underway at the Tokyo Game Show.

The 3D support for Blu-ray Disc Playback will be added on the 21st of September (next week!) through system software update 3.50 and will allow you to watch movies in stereoscopic 3D.

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Sony has announced a special new Michael Jackson-themed PlayStation 3 bundle to celebrate the release of the ‘This is It’ documentary on Blu-Ray and DVD, featuring the late great pop star.

The bundle will include a 120 GB PS3, a DualShock 3 controller, necessary cables and a Blu-Ray of the documentary, and will release in Japan at a price of ¥33,500 (or $366) on January 27th - the same day as the release of the standalone documentary.

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Electronics masters Sony and Panasonic have teamed up to develop a new and improved Blu-Ray disc, increasing the capacity of future discs by 8.4 GB on a single layer.

Blu-Ray discs can currently hold a maximum of 25 GB of data on a single layer (and obviously more on a dual layer disc), but thanks to new technology that allows the evaluation of high quality media at higher capacities, this maximum capacity can be increased to 33.4 GB, and remains usable by current Blu-Ray players.

From Nikkei Electronics Asia’s report:

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Oh dear, here we go again…

Microsoft’s big Kahuna, Steve Ballmer, has once again made comments that have caused some confusion amongst the Xbox 360 fan constituency, this time regarding the availability of Blu-Ray accessories for the company’s line of products, which many console followers took to mean that Blu-Ray players would be made available for the Xbox 360.

If it were true, this would be a major turn of events for the future of the Xbox 360, after the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray format war resulted in Blu-Ray becoming the preferred disc format going forward, meaning Microsoft’s investment in HD-DVD was a case of betting the wrong horse, making the manufacture of the extra, external Xbox 360 HD-DVD drives a poor choice over the option of providing a Blu-Ray offering instead.

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Just about every generation of consoles sees vast amounts of rereleases of old games as the publishers seek to bolster their revenues with catalogue sales. In fact, I reckon that if Nintendo were to stop making new games today, they would still make profits till kingdom come. The reason for this is clear: people new to video games, those who missed out the first time round, and those who remember the games of their youth with fondness. Add to this the fact that platforms become obsolete and formats change, and what once was easily available becomes hard to find.

Space Ace, a game first released on Laserdisc format in video arcades, shortly after Dragon’s Lair, has seen its share of formats, but hasn’t been officially released on a mainstream console in the last two generations (although it was released on DVD). The advent of HD and Bluray has made this a sensible time to rerelease it since the animation was originally done in film quality and scales perfectly to HD resolutions. This means the Bluray release of Space Ace is the best version of the game there has been simply due to the restoration work done on the film originals and the 1080P transfer.

Continue reading El33tonline’s review of Space Ace.

Microsoft has confirmed that it is not in talks with Sony about bringing Blu-ray technology to the Xbox 360.

In a post on Gamerscoreblog post detailing Microsoft’s NPD performance during February, Microsoft commented “In case you were wondering, Microsoft is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Disc Association regarding integrating Blu-ray in to the Xbox 360 experience.”

Microsoft stands by its belief that “games are what are driving consumers to purchase game consoles and we remain focused on providing the largest and best library of blockbuster games available.”

This announcement comes in the wake of numerous reports that Microsoft was looking at adding a Blu-ray drive to the Xbox 360. Microsoft had to stop making their HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 after many key backers of HD-DVD, most recently and notably Toshiba, decided to back Blu-ray instead.