I say officially because the first actual sighting of the price came in a Meijer catalog. Now we have a second in a Wal-Mart ad that sports the new Elite console box and doesn’t show the once-included HDMI cable (nor component cables you may notice). The new SKU is actually kind of a crap deal. You get no HD support. Instead, they give you a hard drive boost that, frankly, isn’t big enough if Microsoft wants to get serious about downloadable content.

I’ve always preferred the Xbox to a Playstation, but this really makes the PS3 a whole lot more appealing. Granted, I don’t know their game lineups nearly as well, I’m not as familiar with the controller, but they’re supposedly adding a 250GB hard drive and you get Blu-Ray support.