the privilege of playing a game that I wouldn't have otherwise played.
As many of you know, Sony was attacked by an "external intrusion" in mid April. There have been countless articles ranging from "Sony is the devil" to "Sony is the victim". There's little to nothing going on in the gaming world that compares to the media foodstuffs that any journalist could gain from this event, so it's no shock that every day there is something new and not fresh coming out of said journalists.
Shortly after Sony took PSN offline, speculation began. It was anyone's guess as to what happened, as members began only receiving an error message upon trying to sign into PSN. It took Sony a few days to change the message people were getting to "Playstation Network is currently undergoing maintenance." Which really only led to more speculation. If you've been following the PSN blog : http://blog.us.playstation.com/ you already know all of this information, and if you haven't then you can revisit it step by step for yourself as I don't see the point in repeating the same crap that's already been done.
Sony held a press conference today May 1 2011 and laid out some of their "make good" information for the network being down so long. Of course you'll never please everyone, but they had to start somewhere. What they are offering all PSN users to make up for the downtime, in my opinion, is overboard.
Enough of what everyone else has been doing during this downtime, I'm posting today to tell you what I did with my "break from online gaming".
Wednesday evening, I decide I'm going to log onto DCUO and run a few missions or possibly do some pvp, haven't decided yet. I boot up the ps3 and get an error. Hmm, wtf..... I try again, and again and again. By this time I'm wondering if it's my connection, so I fire up the other PS3 and get the same error. I check my internet connection, and it's fine, but errors out on the PSN. I check the official blog, no word here. Proceed to do a bit of head scratching, and then dig further into it. Seems everyone has this problem, yay it's not just me! I tell myself, F it, I didn't really want to play anyway, and boot up Netflix. Netflix wants to sign into PSN, which is down. Now I'm starting to get frustrated, since I can't play online, now I can't watch some instant media. I try to sign in, it errors out, I hit the cancel button, Netflix keeps trying, tries to sign in again, errors, I cancel again and BOOM, Netflix works fine. Yay!
Thursday, I boot up my system and receive the same error. Darn. I check the blog to see if something official has come out about it. Nothing. I head out onto the open ocean of journalistic freeform that is the internet, and find that there are about 10 million assumptions and speculations about what is going on. None of this crap is useful. I decide that I'll check back later. That evening I tried again and nothing, but the blog had a post that said they were aware and no other news. Great, this doesn't sound good at all.
Skip ahead to the April 22 post. External intrusion. That's not good. Like anyone else, that had a credit card linked to their system, I called my CC company immediately and cancelled the card, better safe than sorry.
So, now I know that it's down for the long haul and there's not a whole lot that anyone can do about it. I decide that this is a good time for me to pop in a game my brother let me borrow I don't even know how long ago. I never got around to playing this title as it's a single player game (I'm not overly fond of single player games anymore with online gaming taking the majority of my time up) he heavily recommended to me. My god am I glad PSN went down. I would have never gotten around to this game, and I know that now. It took the PSN being taken offline for me to enjoy this title, a sad fact I now know.
Friday. I pop Heavy Rain into my disc drive and I'm ready to play this game. I avoided everything I possibly could about this game because I knew in my mind that I wanted to play it, but I heard that any information about it could spoil the experience. So, I took extra steps to avoid any information. Man am I glad I did. If you haven't played it, you need to, even if you don't think you're a fan of "this type of game" you need to play it. I'm not going to review it, or even type anymore about it because this is a game that you need to play with a clean slate to give it justice.
Ultimately, I have to thank the hackers for the downtime, I would have never gotten to experience this game had they not forced Sony to take PSN down. So, thank you, I can say without a doubt I am in the minority of PSN members that would say thank you to them, but, afterall, they are the reason for this post and the satisfaction I got out of playing Heavy Rain.
99/100 because no game is perfect, but Heavy Rain camped out, shared a beer with Jesus Christ and got pointers on how to make a game.
What did you do with your PSN vacation?
