Sony's extending its PS3 birthday celebrations today with a hefty price cut on its PlayStation 3 "Reference Tool" (developer kit) to ease the barrier of entry for fledgling developers and the cheapskate majors. The kit now goes for the rock bottom price of $10,250, and Sony's promising more price cuts as more developers sign on board. In comparison, a Wii dev kit is somewhere in the ballpark of $2k, and while we're unclear what the actual 360 dev hardware runs for, the XNA "YouTube for games" Game Studio Express license is a mere $99. That said, we're liking this price cutting trend out of Sony, and can only hope it continues.

[Via Joystiq]

While it's bad news that the Wii won't be region-free, we hope that these new snaps will lift your spirits. An anonymous tipster just sent us five photographs of the Wii developer kit, and we only have one thing to ask our friends at Nintendo: did ours fall off the back of a FedEx truck? Seriously though, we know that developer kits come in colors that the public never gets, but perhaps Nintendo could one day take a page out of Apple's playbook and charge a premium for this snazzy green -- it is, after all, the color of money. Make sure to check out the quartet of photos on the next page.

Although the first PlayStation3 dev kits were nothing short of gigantic (similar to those PSP dev kits), it looks like Sony has released a "final" version -- one which doesn't exhale winds kin to a tropical storm and whine like a jet engine -- that's been tracked down and posterized. As expected, the juicy details here are few and far between, but at first glance it does seem to sport the obligatory optical Blu-ray drive, and on-hand reports stated that an alpha build of Full Auto 2 was among the data housed on the 80GB hard drive. Initial reactions were relatively positive, garnering praise for its sleek menus and "lag-free" play while connected to the PlayStation Network. The lucky few who wound up handling the not-yet-finalized controller dug the lightweight feel (thanks to the omission of a rumble feature), and noted that switching from wired to wireless modes was much snappier than the versions at (the final) E3. Unfortunately, no new information was leaked about titles in development, and no substantial secrets were unearthed, but hopefully that'll change pretty soon once these start making the rounds.

[Via Game Informer]