It's been learned there was a slight change made to the insides of the Ps3 that will be coming to Europe and the UK on March 23- this change is making some doubt just how well the backward compatibility with PS2 games will be.

"Rather than concentrate on PS2 backwards compatibility, in the future, company resources will be increasingly focused on developing new games and entertainment features exclusively for PS3," said David Reeves, president of SCEE.

Sony had said before that 'a new combination of hardware and software emulation will enable the PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation titles, and a limited range of PS2 titles'. It was known that the emulation was eventually going to be in software, similar to what Microsoft does with the XBox 360. Early units of the PS3 in Japan and North America, however, have the PS2's Emotion Engine chipset inside for compatibility.

"The backwards compatibility is not going to be as good as in the US and Japanese models," a Sony spokesperson told Reuters. They plan to release a list of currently compatible games when the system launches and this will be updated as they get more PS2 games to work properly under this method.

Well add that to the fact that Europeans are being asked to pay over $800 USD for the Playstation3 and we had to wait an extra 4 months for the console and they want us to pay $96 USD for the games (rrp)... I wonder what will happen next ?

any suggestions ?

I live in the U.S., but that doesn't mean I don't feel you guys' pain. I had no idea games were going to run for that much in Euro.

I have tried to come up with reasons for why Sony is doing all of these ridiculous things... Honestly, I am running out of reasons. I guess they just are in it for the money right now, and they will worry about the consumer later.

Rory K, I hope you still decide to buy the system. Despite how much they don't want you to want one, I have found a lot of enjoyment out of the system so far. I can only hope they turn it around after these silly launches are over with. They desperately need to turn things around...

About the countdown clock, if Jim needs one, I know of a good free Flash animated/HTML clock you can get.

Go right here: BlingyBlob.com - Custom countdowns and countdown timers for your MySpace, Xanga, Hi5, etc.

The clock is fully customizable, down to the second! I used one on my website, didn't have a problem out of it.

Hopefully you don't have to censor that link... it's just myspace codes, so it should be alright to post here.

Right. Oh well, I just went looking for countdown clocks on the internet once, and blingyblob was the only one that even worked for me. I am not experienced enough with coding to figure out how to make a neato clock like that, so hopefully someone on Absolute Playstation is.