Last week, on October 6th, PlayStation 3 owners may have been too busy playing the newly-released game Dark Souls to remember that the day marked the second anniversary of the release of (quite possibly) the best PlayStation 3 game to have been released so far: Demon's Souls. In fact, I almost forgot about too, until I logged in today to see this message on the game's boot-up screen:

In celebration of the event, Atlus and FROM Software have set all players' world tendencies to pure white from October 6th up through October 17th. Pure White world tendency (if you don't know already) gives the player slightly more hit points, decreases the difficulty of some enemies, and opens up new paths containing valuable loot and access to NPCs and side-quests.

But this reward doesn't come without a price,...

A few weeks ago, I started reading about some new ad campaign that Sony was planning called "Long Live Play". I was kind of disappointed to hear that Sony would be taking a new approach to its advertising, as I actually really enjoyed some of the early Kevin Butler ads. Today, I saw the first advertisement in this new campaign, and it blew me away in terms of creativity and execution!

The full ad is shown below:

While a "love letter" to the gamer in the form of a TV commercial doesn't make up for losing tens of millions of people's Credit Card information, reminding people of why they love to game is a great first step towards bringing back our business. The advertisement above features many of the most beloved characters in the PlayStation 3 library giving heartfelt thanks to the efforts of one valiant gamer for bringing their stories to life and helping them through their greatest perils.

So after they get their PlayStation Network servers hacked by vengeful hackers and expose 100 million user accounts, passwords, and credit card numbers to those hackers, they offered a "Welcome Back" package with a free 30-day subscription to PlayStation Plus, some free downloadable games, and a few other stuff. But that was the least they could do after making all their customers vulnerable to identity theft. They don't deserve credit or praise for that.

I activated my free subscription to PlayStation Plus last week because I knew the offer was expiring soon. I waited to the last minute because there's really nothing on PlayStation Plus that I'm remotely interested in. My plan was to wait till the last minute to activate it so that I could still at least back up all my save files to the Cloud in case my newly refurbished PS3 decided to croak on me again.

I'm glad I did it when I did, because I noticed that the "Welcome Back" stuff was gone from the PSN when I logged in yesterday. So I guess that means the offer has ended.

But Sony didn't bother to give users any notification or warning that the program was going to expire that I was aware of. No email notification. No messages when logging into the Playstation Store. I don't even think the "Welcome Back" pages showed the expiration date (did they?). Maybe there was a notification in the little news ticker on the top right, but that thing is so small, I never notice it.

Way to go Sony.

Konami let slip last week (and confirmed this week at E3) that it will be porting HD remixes of the PS2 editions of some of it's most popular franchises, including Metal Gear Solid, Zone of the Enders, and Silent Hill for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

UPDATE June 8, 2011 (3:46 PM PDT):

Just read the following article from PlayStation Universe:

"For starters, the publisher confirmed that its HD revamps of Silent Hill 2 and 3 will feature fresh voiceover work. No date for the Silent Hill Collection has been announced yet, though the set will be released for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360." -http://www.psu.com/E3-2011--Silent-Hill-Vita-to-include-multiplayer--a011942-p0.php

UPDATE to the update November 14, 2011 (4:28 PM PDT):

Apparently, the dispute between Silent Hill 2 voice actors and Konami has been (at least partially) settled, and it appears likely that the Silent Hill HD Collection will include the original vocal cast.

Update to the update to the update November 22, 2011 (3:18 PM PDT):

OK, so once again, the info provided for the HD Collection was not entirely complete. Apparently, there are also issues with the Silent Hill 3 cast. Namely, lead actress Heather Morris.

Sigh...

I recently had my full review of Portal 2 posted on Game Observer (now defunct as of 05/13/2014).

If you are interested, you can also prepare for my review by reading my pre-release blog for the game, in which I express concerns that Portal may go the way of Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and other games that oversaturate themselves with annual or bi-annual releases until the public gets sick of them. Hopefully that doesn't happen.

In the meantime...

Yes GlaDOS, we brought you back because we really do love to test!

Apparently, a very long time has passed since the first game. The Enrichment Center is very different. Under the care of the watchful AI, Wheatley, the entire facility has been slowly falling apart. The degrading, decrepit test chambers make for much more interesting visuals than the sterile, white and gray chambers of the first game. They are now overgrown with weeds and vines, panels are falling off the walls, broken glass litters the floors, and fallen and bent metal beams and girders obstruct some of your paths. It’s just too bad that with all the debris and vegetation littering the environment, that none of it is interactive. It slightly breaks the immersion when you walk through dangling leaves and they don’t react to your passing at all...