Earlier this month, comScore found that the Nintendo Wii was the most popular item in UK search engines, which is why it doesn't really come as all that surprising that the console has turned out to be the most popular item on UK's eBay. Read how the handhelds and other consoles fared in the full article.

Fans of the PlayStation Portable game Daxter who want to help change children's lives may want to look at the auction started by Ready At Dawn over at eBay.

The item up for grabs is a Daxter PSP Entertainment Pack. The product itself was signed by members of Ready At Dawn and 100% of the final sale will be given to the Child's Play charity organization. Check out the full article for more details!

QJ.NET reader TOY pointed to us an interesting and helpful link over at online auction site eBay started by no other than Fanjita himself. Ever since the Pandora's Battery exploit has been perfected, a lot of people have been trying to rip off innocent PSP owners by selling instructions, free software, and copyrighted software.

As you all know, these things can be obtained for free in several sites like here at QJ.NET, and you can perform the unbricking and downgrading part on your own without the help of others. So what did Fanjita do to combat these up-to-no-good people? Well, according to him, you have three options:

• Give a large sum of money to the scammers, in return for illegal materials or just freely-available information
• Donate a small sum of money to the original developers of this release, by purchasing from this buy-it-now auction.
• Read all the information for free.

Of course, we will understand if you prefer the last option but choosing the second one is more like showing your appreciation for the developers. After all, the above mentioned buy-it-now option is only listed for 0.99 GBP or roughly around US$ 2.00. Like Fanjita said himself, the choice is yours.

The Read link below should take you to Fanjita's eBay auction link.

Attention, smart shoppers! The Noobz Team is stopping at nothing to keep you guys informed. And there's no excuse now that you shouldn't be. As the homebrew team has predicted, some "enterprising" individuals would take the advantage of their Pandora's Battery ultimate unbricker and offer it for sale online.

Noobz has updated their site in the hopes of disseminating information to eBay shoppers. The one thing they want to promulgate to the world (although in the PSP community, we pretty much know it for truth already) is that what these "PSP Unbricking Battery" sellers online don't want you to know that it's actually available for free. We've known about it since day one. But this serves as yet another stern reminder to the uninformed.

In their blog update, Noobz has released some basic facts for all eBay shoppers who might be tempted to purchase the Unbricking Batteries. Here's the 411 on Pandora's Battery:

1. The Pandora Battery is actually a combination of specially-modified PSP battery, and specially-modified PSP pro duo memory stick.
2. It allows you to unbrick, or downgrade, ANY PSP, regardless of current firmware, as many times as you like.
3. Although you can convert the Pandora Battery back to an ordinary battery, you're recommended to use a spare battery, as it is more convenient and flexible.
4. To make a Pandora Battery, you need a homebrew-capable PSP.  If you don't have a homebrew-capable PSP, you should find a friend who does, or use the information below to find someone who can make a battery for you, for free.

Yes. We can't stress enough that the Pandora Battery is free. Now if you want to convert your battery into an unbricker, you can do so yourself easily. We've posted a comprehensive tutorial the other day. If you're not fond of reading text, there are also a lot of tutorial videos online as well. If that still doesn't work for you, we've provided forum links where you can ask help. And finally, if all else fails, you can go directly to the source of it all - the masters themselves at Noobz, via the Read link below.

Download: Pandora's Battery
Donate: N00bz!
Visit: [Guide] Unbrick or Downgrade any PSP using the Pandora Battery

This article was originally posted on August 24, 2007 at 8:53 a.m.

When Noobz and C+D released their Pandora Battery unbricker for the PSP earlier, the teams warned everybody that information on their project was leaked.

This amounted to the unbricker being released earlier than expected (it was originally meant for the PSP Slim), and more importantly, to several unauthorized copies of the unbricker being sold on the market for cutthroat prices.

We're letting you guys know about an ongoing auction over at eBay that appears to be for one of these "unofficial" releases. The auction starter (aka mediaseller1977) is selling an "Unbricking Battery" for £ 40.00 (US$ 80).

We're assuming that the dealer means a PSP battery that's already been prepped with the Pandora Battery. Also being vended is a copy of what appears to be the installation software for the unbricker, for £ 2.50 (US$ 5). Both sales are expected to end this August 26.

As an important reminder, Noobz and C+D released their Pandora Battery unbricker as a free downloadable (follow our previous report for the download link). Just make sure that you've got the technical skills to install its components.

We're letting you guys in on this information as a form of warning - the dev teams did say that certain "enterprising" individuals would be popping up to take advantage of their success. Spread the word.

---

Update: When the Noobz said that "some enterprising individuals" may take advantage of their success, they were really on to something. We reported earlier that a Pandora Battery used to unbrick PSPs has gone on sale at eBay, but now a separate instruction file is being offered for US$ 5.99.

Again, we post this as a warning to those of you who are not fully aware that both of the information and the unbricking software are hosted free of charge by the developers' sites and QJ.NET.

All you really need to spend on if you want to unbrick a PSP is a spare battery which will be used to jigkick the bricked handheld. Instructions are available in our comprehensive tutorial. We're hoping nobody gets suckered into this gimmick.

Thanks to Haikaido for the tip!

Remember the God of War-style PSP kit Ramon Stokes was auctioning several weeks ago? We're happy to report that the said handheld has been bought, bagged, and hand-delivered by Mr. Stokes himself to its new owner(s) - Ready at Dawn Studios.

Yes, you read that right - the very same devs behind the GoW series of games decided to step into eBay to make their offering bid of US$ 1,725.00. And as previously announced, 15% of the proceeds are going to the Child's Play foundation; That's US$ 262.3 going to charity.

And the good news didn't end for Mr. Stokes with the eBay transaction. Upon arriving at RaD's Southern California office, he got to meet the dev team, and even managed to play the Chain of Olympus demo during his visit. The GoW-PSP is expected to be put on display in the company's new offices for 2008, alongside other "trophies" they've picked up in the past. Wait, they're just going to display the PSP and not gonna use it? Awww, man...

If in case you folks are wondering what a PSP DEV Kit controller - similar to the ones that mysteriously showed up on eBay last December - looks like, the "Mobile Married Life" blog has a disassembled PSP dev kit featured over at their site. Images of the carnage and Sony PlayStation Portable butchery follows.

   
   

If you want the captions and the descriptions for the images, feel free to head to the actual entry through our Via link below. Word of warning though, it's in Japanese, so better use one of those online translation engines that spout this weird Engrish. Yeah, go get lost in translation.

More images behind the "Full Article" link, too!

 

We've posted about that rare Chrono Trigger Rom listing on eBay earlier this month, and it seems that some of you folks appreciated it, so here are more tales of gaming awesome on eBay.

Here's the the story: 30 year old gamer Kris Kling, is selling his huge 24-system console bundle on eBay. It has stuff from the ancient-yet-classic Atari 2600, all the way to the PSP. The bundle has systems from Sega, Sony, Microsoft, Atari, and Nintendo. It even has the rare Sega Nomad.

What's nice about this auction is that 10 percent of the proceeds are going to the Child's Play Charity that the Penny Arcade guys set up. So bidding just to up the price, as annoying as that is (sorry, bid-spammers are just irritating at times), is a good thing in this case. At the moment of this writing the highest bid is US$ 405.00. You can get to the eBay listing via our "read" link below.

The ultimate video game system collection? Well, we'll leave the "ultimate" part up to you guys, we'll go busy ourselves with bidding.

  

What with the recent homebrew milestone of the 3.03 downgrader, people have been talking about the hot topic (no, not the store, silly) left and right. Heck, even our very own Jake D. had a recent interview with the PSP Show about it. Every Tom, Dick, and badam must be itching their arses off trying to find a copy of the original GTA: LCS. It is, after all, the key factor in the exploit.

Well, if you don't have a copy for yourself, you might want to check around with your friends and ask them if you can borrow it for like three seconds or something. However, if "asking friends" aren't your thing, you might want to resort to some other... desperate measures. Like US$ 400 worth of desperation.

Oh yeah. Someone's trying to get some homebrew "incentive" by selling an un-patched GTA: LCS UMD in eBay with a starting bid of US$ 400. Just a bit more and you could use that money to buy a 20GB PS3. 400 is pretty steep, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The guy putting it up for auction claims it's in mint condition - no scratches and includes the manual and all.

So, deal or no deal?

Note: Naturally we suggest to our readers that are looking for a unpatched version of GTA LCS on ebay, look at all auctions by searching for "unpatched gta lcs" (via Read), instead of overpaying $300+. One commenter reported buying GTA LCS "for $17.99 used at Gamestop with the 2.00 upgrade", so you might want to start there first. You can also take a look at this thread in the forum to see which version of Grand Theft Auto your buying before you make the purchase.

Talk about an auction to go mad for. Someone's got a custom-made Pyramid Head figure up for grabs on eBay!

Aritario is selling his own rendition of the monster known as Pyramid Head, based on the figure from the Silent Hill movie, rather than the game series. As you can see from the picture, it really does look a lot like the movie version, complete with the movie version of his massive knife.

This version of Pyramid Head stands 7.5 inches and has three points of articulation, for those folks who want to take pictures of this massive monstrosity of the human psyche. Personally, Pyramid Head creeps us out, and we'd much rather prefer his cute friends in the bloody nurse outfits. The current bid for the figure is at US$ 75, so if you're interested in having a faithful companion by your bedside, you may want to check out Aritario's auctions.

At the very least, this figure is far better to have around than his dancing cousin.