For those of you who are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Konami's latest installment in the Metal Gear Solid series, here's a quick fix for gamers looking for some excellent storytelling from Hideo Kojima. Sony's PlayStation Store Japan has recently delivered the Kojima classic interactive adventure, Policenauts, to help tide people over before the arrival of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. More details in our full article.

Despite reports that the three prime consumer electronics giants will be working on next-generation, cutting-edge chips by 2010, Sony, Toshiba and NEC Electronics have all denied such claims. In fact, only Toshiba and NEC Electronics are attempting to renew the chip development alliance, and have left Sony out of the talks.

For the next line of 45nm chips for consumer electronics, Sony will be going their own separate way. "We have no intention of joint production. We make products ourselves, and if our capacity is not sufficient, we can turn to outside suppliers," a Sony representative said.

Next-generation development of smaller and more intricate chips require deeper pockets as development costs and upgraded facilities require more financial resources than usual.

Only experienced and money-burning giants, such as Intel and IBM, have every ability to develop next-generation chips without outside help. Whether or not this has any effect on the STI alliance (Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM) for the Cell BE, Sony consumers will just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, Intel has already been successful with a next-gen, 45nm-prototype of the Core 2 Duo processor ("Penryn"), and plans to mass produce a 32nm, 80-core processor ("Westmere") by around 2009.

Talk about a comeback - LG Electronics is apparently giving their dual-format concept another shot. They've just announced that they'll be releasing details on the player at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

For the guys who can recall, LG had made a much earlier announcement for this dual-format player, which ended up getting scrapped.

Consider this a confirmation of at least one facet to the recent video format  talks that have been closely tailing the next-gen consoles. With that said, we'll wait for word on the other dual-format entries, such as Samsung/Toshiba's player, or NEC's dual-format chip. For now, we'll just have to wait out the next four days before CES begins from January 8 to 11 in Las Vegas. Remember to check out the other console-related treats to be featured while you're there.

We always love new technology, but with things like storage media, we always have to hope that our choice is correct with regards to buying the more common platform. Being on the losing side would mean that your hard-earned money would go totally down the drain. I mean, even though it might be fun to show off those Sony's videocassette recording format, introduced in 1975">betamax players once in a while, but all of us knows that it's still money spent on the wrong thing.

And for some reason, companies never seem to understand that showing off their power by introducing proprietary/new media formats is an immature thing, which only leaves a lot of consumers angry, and pretty much confused. One of the culprits here is Sony. I could name formats, but it would be pointless since it would include just about every format Sony has sided with in the past, so what is a poor consumer supposed to do? One way is simply putting off the decision until there's one clear winner.

But for some people who live and breathe gadgets, this might not be a viable option. However, you can count on some mature companies to bring an amount of sense into this whole mess and for today, we have NEC taking that role. What they've done is gone ahead and created a "hybrid" chip which will be able to handle both HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats and although they're still just chips and not the final product, we can now expect drives with this chip in the coming year. The other nice thing about them is that the price of this chip is on par with those other chips which are exclusive to HD-DVD or Blu-ray drives. What this means is that you probably won't have to shell out a huge amount of money to enjoy both formats at the same time.

And going by their estimates, it seems that they are pretty sure of its success as they're planning on shipping around 3,00,000 chips every month starting from April 2007. Well, once these drives are out, I don't see why people would buy stand-alone drives anymore as the advantages of this chip makes it a sure success even before it's out.