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...

After decades of video gaming, the real good guys with the uniforms and badges finally get their moment to shine! But can they stand up to the vigilantes, anti-heroes, super heroes, undercover cops, crooked cops, and outright criminals that we are used to playing as?

Brain before brawn

Fighting crime isn’t all glamour and excitement. The job of a protector of the peace isn’t all shootouts, car chases, street brawls, damsels in distress, and throwing cars at super villains. There’s a lot of walking around crime scenes and looking at stuff. Figuring out what kind and size of shoe left the prints in the dirt. Reading the brand name of the lipstick of murdered women. Reading the addresses of bars off of matchbooks. Looking up the registered owner of a car with a license plate number provided by a witness. Reading through hotel registries. And accusing people of lying about stuff. It is this element of police work that L.A. Noire tries to capture. The focus of this game is taken away from gun fights, chases, and action scenes, and attempts to highlight the more cerebral elements of police work.

Although the exciting stuff does still happen, this game is a departure for Rockstar games. It puts the player in the role of a police investigator with a badge rather than the hardened criminals, vigilantes, bullies, and antiheroes that we’re used to. The exaggerated fictional cities and over-the-top dark humor have been replaced with a massive and highly detailed (although somewhat anachronistic) reproduction of 1940’s Los Angeles that takes itself much more seriously. The map is pretty large, accurate, and surprisingly densely packed with streets and alleyways. Average roads are multi-lane, sidewalks are decently-sized, and everything has a great sense of scale to it that most city-sandbox games lack. And the game only contains a fraction of the actual city!

Well, yesterday, Sony finally came out and admitted that the PlayStation Network (PSN) had been hacked. Apparently, it took them one or two whole days to find out themselves, and then another whole week before they told their customers. Well, I guess I can understand that they wouldn't want to tell anybody that the names, birth dates, email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, passwords, and possibly also credit card info, billing address, and the answers to security questions to all of their 77 million accounts were hacked.

I wouldn't want to admit to that either.

But as a customer, it sure would have been nice to have been notified earlier that I needed to start changing my passwords and security question answers to any other online services that I am a subscriber to. Or that I should start double checking my bank accounts and credit reports for possible fraud.

But these sorts of things happen. A data theft this bad has never happened before, but anytime you put any personal information in an online service, you are taking a risk. So I can't really be too mad that this happened.

What I can be mad about, however, is that Sony pretty much begged for this to happen.

This April has been a busy week for video games, and a very weird one, too. And the news has varied from good, to bad, to ugly, and everything in between. Here's some of the stuff that caught my attention:

Table of Contents

• Nintendo to reveal Wii 2 at E3 this June?
• PlayStation Network down for days
• Portal 2 available
• First NCAA Football 12 gameplay video
• Civilization V patch due out

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."