Hasta La Gadget!

Ahhhh! E3’s next week, which means, of course, that I need to start packing soon for my trip to LA. It also means that we’re knee-deep in video game rumors. We waded through all of the information swirling around next week’s show (well, Natalie the intern did, actually) and picked out a few of the our hopes for next week’s show.

Sony: New PSP. This may well be the big news of the show. Speculation is bubbling up that Sony will release the PSP Go!, the successor to its perennial favorite portable gaming console will drop the UMD in favor of downloadable media and 16GB of built-in memory.Oh, and will God of War 3 get a release date?

More after the jump.

The Jon Peddie Research Institute announced Tuesday that PC gaming is holding strong during these troubling economic times. JPR, a multimedia consulting firm, found that although spending has slowed on PC gaming hardware, as in other areas of gaming, it has slowed less. Data charting spending the PC-game hardware market in 2008 and 2009 shows a downward trend, from $20.07 billion to $18.65 billion.

So why is JPR forecasting a near $5 billion increase in spending by 2010? The firm foresees a trend of people staying home more, going out less to movies, putting a hold on vacation plans, and turning toward more economical forms of entertainment. You can buy a game for $50, for example, and get hundreds of hours of amusement–and a computer doubles as a way not only to play games but also to watch TV and create video.

The NPD Group, a leader in marketing research for the entertainment industry, agrees. When it asked Americans if they had gone to the movies or played video games in the past six months: 63% answered they had played a video game and only 53% claimed to have seen a movie.

Rock Band Track Pack: Classic Rock software is out now in stores for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, and Wii system. This game of classic rock hits will feature 20 songs from artists such as The Who, Rush, Boston, Police Steve Miller Band, and George Thorogood.

Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners will have the option of playing the game off the disc or downloading it onto their consoles’ hard drives for free. After the songs are downloaded they will appear automatically in player’s Rock Band library.

Rock Band Track Pack: Classic Rock’s suggested retail price is $29.99 and will be rated “T” for Teen.

Back in November of 2007, Microsoft filed for a patent on a device known as the “Magic Wand.” The patent, which was filed roughly a year after the release of Nintendo’s gesture-based Wii console, was just recently made public.

The abstract description of Microsoft’s device is as follows,

The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can facilitate rich interaction with and/or management of environmental components included in an environment. The architecture can exist in whole or in part in a housing that can resemble a wand or similar object. The architecture can utilize one or more sensor from a collection of sensors to determine an orientation or gesture in connection with the wand, and can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component based upon the orientation. In addition, the architecture can include an advisor component to provide contextual and/or comprehensive guidance in an intuitive manner.

There are plenty of theories surrounding the proposed application for such a device, including a Wiimote-like controller previous referred to as Newton. The patent includes the names of a number of Microsoft bigwigs, including Zune/Xbox-daddy J Ballard and Andy Wilson, one of the heads of Microsoft’s Surface project.