News for the week of March 16th, early editon.

Yeah, it's going up early today, I have a lot more stuff to do tomorrow than I planned... well, this morning. It was unsurprisingly slower this week, what with the GDC not on. No one flipping out over the Wii, and I still don't really care about Spore.

• I'm sure someone is tired of this by now, but I'm not. A German site, Cynamite, got a hold of a pre-production Pal PS3 and did a little backwards compatibility testing. Very astute of them, since it's been a big deal that Sony said Europe will be getting the software BC but has assured everyone it'll be just as good as the hardware BC. Maybe not so much according to Cynamite, who put a dozen recent popular games through their PS3, and only one – Eragon – worked. No God of War, no Guitar Hero 2. A caveat: it was the 1.6 revision of their firmware, it could easily be updated by the ship date.
• Good for them with the whole folding thing, though. It would be nice to see other console manufacturers doing that, with their multi-core chips and all... maybe some SETI action.

• Epic lawyers gone wild, some more! Do you recall that little throwdown Epic's lawyers had with this guy? Sure you do! Mark Rein even came out of the woodwork to apologize, which is pretty cool even if his company can't hire lawyers that can read a website fully, which is weird because they apparently passed the bar exam and I understand that takes some reading skills. Well, those lawyers and their text disabled browsers have done it again, giving this gent the option to destroy his one-off piece of fan art. Nice. It's acrylics on canvas, for chrissake.

• 300 and video games in the same post? Awesome. Or is it? Variety, of all places, has a nice piece on movie critics comparing (in this instance) 300 to 'video games' in general. This is basically used as a thinly veiled insult, that a movie heavy on the visuals and lighter on plot is tantamount to a video game. I'm guessing these people have never played a Zelda game or waded through FF7. I recall being mildly incensed by Joe Morgenstern's article about games in the WSJ, where he admitted his gaming experienced started and ended at Nanosaur 2. Yeah, maybe just drop the 99 bucks for a ps2 and fire up anything that's sold well in the past three years before you run your mouth.

• NPD numbers for February are out, and... You know, I kind of want to actually not feel like I have to rag on Sony for the PS3, but it sucked out loud last month. Coming out on top? The Wii. I wonder if Nintendo execs have Scrooge McDuck style money bins that they dive into when they feel the need for a refreshing swim?
  
• - 335,000 Nintendo Wii's
• - 295,000 Sony PS2's
• - 228,000 MS Xbox360's
• - 127,000 Sony PS3's
• I understand they were intent on moving 200,000 PS3's, but consumers apparently had other ideas.