That would mean that PSN would have been down for six weeks by the time services are restored.

Every day this outtage continues I am more and more embarassed to have put my faith on Sony. A company that has proven over and over that they dont care about their customers. Promising game vouchers for PSPGo conversions and then backing out. Charging developers for bandwidth costs on PSN, which means smaller and shorter lived demos for customers.

Go to wikipedia and count how many firmware updates that fix or add nothing there are. Firmware updates that are just “security fixes.” Sony was completely on top of hacking when it came to their data and those patches came quickly.

I am not worried about my data, but at this point I’m beggining to worry about Playstation exclusive developers like Q-Games (of Pixel Junk fame.) All of their profits come from PSN sales. Sony said theyd be helping developers out, but with such an extended period of downtime I’m sure some studios will fall on hard times.

At the same time, I am worried about those who are not involved in games like I am. Those who get their news from the local NBC affiliate that dont know what is going on. Are they going to buy the NGP? What can Sony say? At this point just hold off the launch for an extra week and announce the re-launch during E3.

This outtage hurts gaming as a whole. If we are going to move to cloud gaming and cross-platform gaming, we need everything to be secure. Hackers were there before, they’ll be there after. You have to build everything with that threat in mind. I’m not excusing the hackers, but Sony was ridiculously unprepared.

Meanwhile, I’m going through my pile-of-shame, which is holding me over until L.A. Noire. I’m almost done with Arkaham Asylum and will probably go to Dead Space afterwards.

My heart goes out to those of you who bought a PSPGo.

(source: Joystiq)

Update : Sony has said that they have not released a timeline for PSN to come back online. So instead of May 31st it is indefinite. That’s better?

“I was highly anticipating the release of The Ballad Of Gay Tony, but just found out that it is only on the XBox360. I am certain that I am not the first person to ask this, but how come it wasn’t released on the PS3?” – received via Mouthoff

We know that it continues to be an often-asked question – and believe us, we understand the frustration of PS3 owners like yourself who haven’t been able to play any of our most recent releases. All we can say is that we at Rockstar promise to be very good to you with our releases in 2010. Please stay with us and stay tuned!

I find it so odd that they decided to pick this question amongst all the other ones. I’m going to go out in a limb and say they’re trying to string us along until they’re able to release the DLC on PS3. Lost and Damned was released 17 February 2009, and if we use the same logic as other ‘exclusive’ Xbox360 titles, exclusivity lasts for a year.

Then again, maybe they’re just referring to LA Noire and Agents.

Source: Rockstar Newswire

Well, this has sucked.

In Rock Band mode the guitars just keep pressing X (green) in turbo mode, making it impossible to control the game. After some searching around it seems like this is an issue with Rock Band 2 and the way to fix it is to set the controller to Guitar Hero mode.

Now for the fun part, apparently firmware 3.10 broke the controllers. Well it didnt break them, it just made them not get their connection straight.

To fix this I made sure I had one Dual Shock taking slot 1. Then I proceeded to plug in the ‘footpedal’ in Rock Band mode, this should make the controller turn Blue. Then you need to go into Guitar Hero mode and hopefully it keeps the Blue light when it auto-adjusts. If it doesn’t then you need to keep turning the knob back to Rock Band and re-syncing until you do get the Blue light and then go into Guitar Hero mode.

This might take a few tries. Have patience. It sucks, I know!

Some have suggested using two Dual-Shocks so that the guitar is actually controller 3. This worked for me as well but i didn’t have any better luck than with just the one controller.

What if I have 2 Nyko Frontman guitars?

Its the same process for both I did one guitar first, and then the other (Blue and then Orange). It has been taking me like 10 minutes to get them to sync correctly, but once i do, they just work.

This is not the nicest of solutions, and I am honestly quite annoyed by this situation but the guitars work and I got the game for cheap. I’ll search around tonight and update this post if I find any better solutions.

UPDATE (11/29/2009) :

If the controllers come up SOLID RED in Guitar Hero mode, turn the knob back and forth (to Rock Band and then back to Guitar Hero) this will toggle the controller and make it try and find a new open channel. Wait for it to go to a new solid color, if it goes red again just turn the knob once more, repeat this until you get a different color. Its really not a pretty solution. *sigh*

The PSP Go is a solid piece of hardware. It has a large screen, and a pretty decent design. It’s lacking a second thumbstick but they claim it’s because they wanted compatibility with older games and with the PSP-3000 which is still on sale. They finally killed UMD, which makes this device dependent on memory stick storage, which works fine for me since I didn’t want to be messing around with physical media on my portable device to begin with. Then there’s smaller bite size games for the platform called PSPminis that will provide instant entertainment in manageable portions for my daily commute.

It’s everything I wanted in a handheld… A year ago.

The thought of walking around with two devices seriously makes me ill. I was finally able to stop carrying my computer around when I bought my iPhone, and the amazing app community that has rallied around the device is seriously remarkable. I would love a device that does both. Plays serious video games and is also my personal communications hub. The N-Gage had it right, only that it did both things poorly. The iPhone on the other hand is slowly getting there. They perfected the personal communications and then allowed the developers to build games for it and extend it’s platform. Sony still has an opportunity to get into the market though since the iPhone’s biggest drawback for gaming is it’s lack of a physical control mechanism. And while I would love for it to have a phone built in, I’m sure the limitation is battery life, hell, I get terrible battery life from my iPhone when playing Peggle, I don’t even want to know what would happen with a 3D action/adventure platformer.

At the end of the day it’s all about the games though. And of the thousands of games that the iPhone has, most are worthless. If you want a really fleshed out game the iPhone has yet to crack that market. The PSP is getting Metal
Gear Solid Peacewalker and Parasite Eve 3, I need to play those games. It really sucks that they scrapped the UMD to download program, but there’s still talks of something being worked on and I’m confident they understand just how important it is for them to figure this out.

So in conclusion, I’m going to finally buy a PSP this year to keep at the office, the PSPGo might just be that PSP. Pricing was not aggressive at all so Im sure it’ll come down some soon or the retailers will start bundling games with it.

All in all, great job Sony! Other than the pricing, the PSPGo is in my opinion the best PSP they could have built while maintaining good battery life and backwards compatibility.

This last article is exactly what I’m talking about. Sony needs to stop pretending like they know whats best for everyone and start listening to what the people are saying. If we want Netflix streaming… give us Netflix streaming. It is of no cost to you, and I already have a Netflix account. How else do you think I would be watching the Blu-Ray movies you say I should be watching? Buying them at $35 bucks a pop?

RIIIIIIIIIGGGHHTTT….

Why is there no video podcast download function in the PS3? If I could get home and just sit on my couch and watch TekZilla it’d be awesome. This is something the PS3 -can do- right now, yet they are not letting it do it. They are concentrating on selling us movies through the PSN video store that are DRMed to hell and therefore useless unless you plan on only watching them on your PS3 or PSP. Yes, they wont play on your iPhone, so sorry.

If Sony figures out that the future is in open DRM standards and interoperability (or no DRM at all) and on accessibility to all the forms of entertainment that there are available and not just to your walled garden. IF they figure this out before Microsoft does, the PS3 has a fighting chance.

Sony needs to give us everything. Talk to the PlayOn guys and get half those streams on the PS3. Netflix, Blockbuster, Amazon Video On Demand. Give us choice by having too many choices, not by ‘selecting between the movies on the video store’. As long as they do not give us all the options that there are out there for video delivery, not because of software/hardware limitations but because it is a business desicion to try and force you to buy videos through their store, they need to The Fuck Shut Up.

They are defending themselves by claiming that the consumer (which already spent more than enough money in their over-priced box) would not want to use the subscriptions he/she has already and would prefer to spend more money in the solutions that Sony deems worthy. This is foolish and I’d rather if they just said nothing, and started talking about all the great exclusive games they are getting to the platform instead of these media choices.

Exclusive games like Tekken, Final Fantasy XIII, Killzone 2.