The Playstation Network

Looks like Blogger is back up and running. I was considering making a proper post on the PSN outage a long time ago, but then this place was under maintenance, and then everyone else said everything that could ever deserve to be said about this issue. Not that I have any authority to speak on the matter, since I don't own a Playstation 3. I haven't seen Kaz Hirai's video apology or anything, but from what I hear it looks like this company might have finally gotten its act together. I'll believe it when I see it.

In any case, to those of you with PS3's, here's hoping the worst is over, and you can finally start playing Portal 2 online.

Speaking of, here's something related I wrote on another blog a while back:

For some reason, I feel bad for Valve right now. Even though it’s the fans who put up with so much of Sony’s nonsense who suffer the most, for some reason it’s that one developer who I think is getting especially screwed here.

They made a huge deal about how Portal 2 and future games were going to be the -complete- experience on the Playstation 3. Steam on a console system. Cloud states and all that mumbo-jumbo. Even I was finally starting to consider that maybe purchasing a PS3 in this day and age wasn’t a completely ridiculous idea. They were going to do everything they would have done with the Xbox 360, if it weren’t for the draconian guidelines Microsoft placed on developers in regards to free updates and such. The reasons why Team Fortress 2 on the Xbox was received so horribly? That would supposedly never happen here. It sounded like they wanted to bring something closer to the perks their PC audience has over to the console crowd.

And a couple of days after the launch of a game meant to be played with a friend or online, the testing ground that had the biggest chance to maybe convince the big M to rethink things, what happens? Only the biggest catastrophe imaginable for an online service like PSN.

I can’t remember a disaster in video games like this since the 80′s crash. And there’s still barely an indication of why it happened, and how it’s going to get better. People are going to be talking about this one for ages.

...Yeah, I know. I cringed a little re-reading that. Hopefully that will look like alarmist over-reacting as time goes by. <_<

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~A.H.