I recently had the misfortune of needing to send my PS3 into Sony for servicing. Something was wrong with the graphics card and was creating very unpleasant graphical artifacts and texture issues on most of my games. EA Sports games such as Madden and NCAA were very badly affected. Fallout New Vegas would sometimes go completely black on me. Metal Gear Solid 4 saw some very irritating texture pop-ins and coloration issues. Even the Back to the Future downloadable game from the PSN was suffering from similar problems...

Sony's customer service is horrible. Not the service. Just the policies, the way that the hardware is configured, and the lack of respect that the whole process has for the consumer. I don't understand how they are still in business when repairing a $600 piece of hardware goes something like this:

"Thank you for calling Sony Customer Support. Oh, you're PS3 broke. Well that's too bad. Go ahead and back up your hard drive even though none of it can be restored onto a replacement system anyway. Pay us $130. And then send the system in. If we feel like fixing it, we will. But we probably won't, cuz that would require, like, you know, work. So we'll send you a replacement and inconvenience you even more by making it impossible for you to restore your save files and downloadable content. Thank you and have a nice day. Or a shitty day. Whatever."

Portal 2 is due out in stores in about 2 weeks. I'm looking forward to it. I loved the first game. I bought the Orange Box for it, and didn't even bother finishing Half-Life 2 or even touched Team Fortress.

GladOS's voice captivated me. The puzzles twisted my mind. The clever story that tells itself entirely through background details in the gameplay and environment rather than expository cutscenes or dialogue immersed me in the world. Johnathan Coulton's end credit song, Still Alive, is still one of the most requested song whenever I get together with friends to play Rock Band.

It was a triumph. I'm being so sincere right now.

But I can't help but wondering: Do I really want a sequel to Portal?

Do you?

Quite a bit of interesting news in the gaming world this weekend (well, interesting for me anyway).

One little tidbit of bittersweet news came in the form of the release of a new Trine 2 trailer and the accompanying announcement that the game has been pushed back a few months to late summer.

The new trailer can be seen below:

Earlier this week, I had another game review posted on Game Observer (now defunct). This time, it was a review for the PS3 game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions:

Beenox combines several different styles of gameplay and visuals into a fairly enjoyable but very short, disjointed, and sometimes unstable Spider-Man adventure.

I’m so glad that the last few Spider-Man games have not been constrained to follow a movie’s plot. Even though the Spider-Man 2 movie game was arguably the best Spider-Man game since the first one on the PS1, I really want to see developers try something a little more creative with the Spidey character. I’m one of the people who thoroughly enjoyed Web of Shadows and was really hoping to see further development with that game’s fantastically tight controls and combat mechanics. But Beenox had different ideas for a Spidey game – much more ambitious and creative ideas. They scrapped the free-roaming open New York and web-swinging mechanics that have become a staple of Spider-Man games since the second movie game in favor of a dimension-hopping beat-em-up. It’s actually a nice change of pace....

UPDATE: The Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions review is also now available on this blog. Click here to check it out.

Earlier this week, I had another game review posted on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014). This time, it was a review for the PSN downloadable game Back to the Future: The Game - Episode I:

TellTale games has crafted themselves a wonderful little piece of fan service in Back to the Future: The Game. The game really does feel like a labor of love, as the developers clearly put a lot of time and effort into getting the details right and being as respectful to the source material as they could. Characters, environments, and props all look exactly as you’d expect them to (within the style of animation used), and the voices are mostly spot-on. The voice of Marty is replicated by the fantastic Marty McFly impressionist AJ LoCascio, Christopher Lloyd himself was tapped to return as Doc Emmett Brown, and the supporting cast all do an excellent job. Except for Biff. Biff didn’t sound quite right. At least not to me. This game will no doubt draw in any Back to the Future fan right from its opening moments, in which it replicates Doc Brown’s unveiling of the time machine and the first time travel experiment...