Sony says the XBox 360 simply 'doesn't work'.

You can hear the knives sharpening across the Atlantic. Sony's Marketing Vice President, Peter Dillie hit out at the 360 at this years E3 saying the XBox 360 "doesn't even work."

This was not the only thing he said however:

"I don't want to be argumentative," said Dillie. "But I take issue with Microsoft either having a long tail, or being profitable, because they've never done either. They've never made a dime in this business.

"With the Xbox 360 you've got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don't, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a ten year product?" he said.

I'm sure Microsoft will reply in kind, and when they do, you'll be first (well, you know, as quick as I can!) to know.

Maddened mother blames games

The mother of the man man who stabbed nurse Cheryl Moss to death, Lorraine Harling, has blamed violent video games for her son, Stuart's actions. Speaking to the English Sunday newspaper The News Of The World she bemoaned gaming as the fundamental influence for her son's actions:

"I knew he was playing the video games but we didn't really know what went on in them, how brutal and graphic they were.

"Stuart was 11 or 12 when I bought him the PlayStation. For a long time I didn't even realise games had age limits on them. We'd just buy him the game that all the other kids had. I didn't really know what they were about. I think most parents are the same."

The judges recently gave Stuart Harling a life sentence after reportedly stabbing his victim 72 times and according to his mother, this was "exactly as he'd practised on the Playstation in his bedroom."

"Every night he would retreat into his darkened bedroom at home in Rainham, Essex, and enter a grisly virtual world that revelled in sadism, ritual blood-letting and death. Just like millions of other youngsters," she is quoted as saying. The News Of The World however, added it's own douse of petrol to the already out of control blaze:

"One of baby-faced Harling's favourite games was the notorious Manhunt, where players SLASH and SLICE their victims with meat CLEAVERS, cheese WIRE and CHAINSAWS, or suffocate them with plastic bags."

Harling's mother is quoted as saying, "I know these games are played by kids across the world, but some are truly horrific. And if they can cause a trigger to be pulled in someone's head they should be banned."

Just what this will mean for the future of video games remains to be seen. It will surely add to Jack Thompson's unrelenting campaign against the industry, that's for sure.

UT3 Mods may well be 360 bound after all

After Epic announced at last week's E3 that their up and coming title, Unreal Tournament 3 would be not only be release on Sony's Playstation 3 ahead of rival console, the Xbox 360, they also intimated that community mods for the title would only be released for Playstation3 also.

The very fact that they left out the 360 meant the gaming world at large automatically assumed that these mods would be Playstation 3 exclusive. However, Epic's Vice President Mark Rein explain why they were hesitant in including the 360.

"One of our big concerns was the ability to bring mods to the platform, and it's still a bit of an open issue, but we've had some pretty clear indications that we'll be able to do it, and we're pretty excited about that," he says. "That was kind of the one thing, we wanted to make sure we'd be able to bring user-created content to the platform before we made a firm commitment to it."

The reason for the initial doubts about the ability to mod the 360 version of the game were cast by Epic themselves. They gave an interview at last year's Tokyo Game Show where they remarked rather candidly:

"Unfortunately it's [Xbox Live] more of a closed platform," and says they've even been "quite negative toward user-created content."

So either MS have either loosened up or the very thought of the PS3 getting one up was too much to bare.

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