Although the first continent to see Lutheranism, the printing press, the Spanish Inquisition, the spaghetti zombie movies of Lucio Fulci, and — of course — Adolf Hitler, Europe tends to get boned on console releases. We always get consoles last. Not only that, but companies insist on translating the dollar price at a 1:1 rate directly into Euros — this means we tend to pay 25% more than anyone else in the world. To be fair, that extra money is going towards the 21% VAT Europeans pay on all purchases to fund our socialist welfare state shangri-la. But synaesthetically, as an American gamer abroad, it tastes like bitter chalk.

But we Euros have been getting a lot of good news lately. First of all, suck it, you cowboys: we get the Black DS Lite first. And now Sony is saying that Europe will get the first production PS3s.

All may not be as it seems, though: who knows how many of the scanty 1 million available consoles will be coming to the EU? Furthermore, Japan still gets the PS3 a week earlier, which makes me personally wonder if Europe is getting the earliest produced PS3s because it is the least valuable territory to Sony. "The first PS3s have production issues? Give 'em to those Euro weenies!"FLORIAN ECKHARDT

First PS3s Headed to Europe [1UP]

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