Is anyone else wondering what the heck is going on at Sony’s Entertainment Division? The past few weeks have seen one mistake after another:

• SOCOM: Confrontation (an online only game) launched with the servers not working at all well. This is secondhand info but I read enough reports about the problems that I’m confident that they were real and widespred. People spoke of spending more time staring at menus waiting than actually playing the game.
• LittleBigPlanet got delayed because of the Qur’an lyrics in one of the music selections for the game. How did this only become an issue in the eleventh hour? Wouldn’t you think you’d get a translation of any song lyrics that were going to be in your game, well before launch? The delay took a lot of the ‘bang’ out of the launch; instead of a single launch day when everyone was getting the game, we got a launch window of about 4 days. Which might have been a blessing in disguise because….
• LittleBigPlanet servers were also borked on launch. Not only did this mean you couldn’t play online, it also impacted the single player game (if you were logged into PSN, which must of us are if our PS3s are internet-connected). I talked about this here; the long and sluggish load times I experienced were indeed caused by the game trying to talk to the servers and not being able to. Not the way to make a good first impression.
• Last and admittedly least, the Mirror’s Edge demo is hitting PSN and XBox Live Arcade this week. There’s a lot of buzz and anticipation built up around this game, and for once, a demo was coming out first on PSN, and not on XBLA until the following day. Except the Playstation Store didn’t get updated until late evening ET. I’m thinking it was somewhere around 10 pm? I started to download the demo, but (Playstation Store servers being the slow beasts they are) had to go to bed before the download was complete. Advantage squandered.

I love my PS3 and during the prior console generation I appreciated the broader range of games offered on the Sony platform than you can generally find elsewhere. But now the JRPG’s are moving to the 360, and the ‘quirky’ games tend to show up as downloadable titles so you can get them anywhere. The only advantage Sony seems to still have is hardware reliability and even that may be fading as Microsoft finally starts getting the 360 hardware right.

Sony has been struggling and this holiday season is its change to turn that around some, and maybe it can. But it needs to stop making these highly visible blunders if its going to gain (and retain) the confidence of gamers. Fable 2 is only on XBox. Fallout 3 looks better on XBox. And Microsoft’s game servers tend to be pretty reliable. Let’s hope that the Resistance 2 servers are rock solid when that game launches.

Somewhere around July 23rd, our Wii Fit Balance Board started acting wonky, giving crazy readings and drawing straight diagonal ‘COB traces’. I futzed with it for a couple of days, but on Friday, July 25th we called Nintendo to request service.

Later that day we were emailed a pre-paid FedEx Ground shipping label. On Saturday we packed up the Balance Board and on Monday, July 28th I dropped it off at a Kinko’s FedEx Center. It arrived on July 29th (a bit of luck there, we’re in MA and the repair center is in NY so it didn’t have far to travel). By July 30th there was a notice in the Repair System that they would replace the board but it was currently back-ordered.

In spite of this, a new board was shipped via UPS Blue (2nd day air) on July 31st, a Thursday. Today, Monday, August 4th, the new board arrived. It works perfectly. And cost us nothing beyond some packing tape (we sent it back in the original WiiFit box, wrapping it in flattened out brown-paper shopping bags).

I’ve been “fortunate” enough to have to pay to have both an XBox 360 and a PS3 repaired. It took Microsoft almost 5 weeks to turn around the XBox ($100) repair, and it took Sony 3 weeks to turn around the ($150) PS3 repair. And in neither case was anything repaired…the old unit was just swapped out for a refurb.

So I have to rate Nintendo as easily the best of the ‘big three’ when it comes to Customer Service. The exchange was handled swiftly and with no hassles whatsoever.

And we’ve got our little friend back. Oh, how we’ve missed our Balance Board Buddy!

The New York Times has a piece on Amazon’s new TV & movie streaming service (to replace Amazon Unbox): Amazon Plans an Online Store for Movies and TV Shows.

Of note is this quote: It has struck a deal with Sony Electronics to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs..

So two days after Sony announces their TV & Movie download service for the Playstation 3, Amazon announces a partnership of sorts with Sony Consumer Electronics for a competing service.

Granted the audience for Bravia TVs is much broader than that of the PS3, but you can access the PSN store from a computer. Why not stream that content to a Bravia TV?

It just seems like Sony is working against itself yet again.

The last of the Big 3 Conferences was, in my opinion, the best of the 3 for hardcore gamers, though some of my friends disagree and feel like Microsoft’s was the best. Jack Tretton took the stage and did his usual self-deprecating opening, talking about how nervous he was and how doing the press conferences takes about 2 years off his life. I actually like Tretton more than MS’s Mattrick or Nintendo’s Dunaway or Fils-Amie. He stumbles once in a while but at least he sounds a bit more natural. Mattrick in particular was so wooden and monotone it was like he was channeling Ben Stein or something.

Sony pushed Resistance 2 pretty hard, but we already knew about that. They talked up the PS2 and PSP as well as the PS3, of course. When it came time to talk facts and figures, instead of using the same old power point slides, they used a LittleBigPlanet level with Sackboy running through it, triggering bar graphs to grow from the ground and labels to descend from the sky. It was very entertaining and made me even more anxious to get my hands on the game (coming October of this year).

They oddly didn’t spend a lot of time on Home, showing one brief video of it. Announced a new PS2 Bundle, of all things, coming out this fall. PS2 is apparently the gateway drug to PS3, though we all know every kid in the world wants a Wii and/or DS so they can play Pokemon games.

Their video download service was announced and in fact went live later on in the day. You can buy or rent standard def movies and tv shows, and you can rent HD movies. You can move content from the PS3 to your PSP to take with you. A nice showing but wow, are they ever way behind MS and Apple in this area.

On the hardware front, they announced that the basic PS3 was getting a hard drive upgrade, to 80 gigs. It is still not clear to me if they’re going to eliminate the current 80 gig model (with its additional USB ports, media slots, and most importantly, backwards compatibility) or not. No price change for the doubling of the hard drive size, and so the 80 gig PS3 costs the same as the new 60 gig XBox 360 + XBox Live Gold membership for a year. A nice marketing bullet point anyway..

Beyond that, it was all about the games. 130 games are coming out for the PS2 this year! I guess they must still be selling. Twenty-three exclusive PS3 titles, with 10 on blu-ray and 13 on PSN. Newly announced games for the PSP were Resistance Retribution (3rd person shooter) and Valkyrie Chronicles (rpg). It isn’t clear if the latter is a port of the PS3 or a side-story or what.

New games revealed on the PS3 were Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty, a PSN game that will go for $15 and be out this summer. It looked as good as the blu-ray Ratchet & Clank, it’s just a smaller, shorter game. The PC MMO DC Universe will be coming to the PS3. The MMO space is one niche that Sony has a chance of owning if they put some effort into it. So now we have 3 MMOs headed to the PS3: DC Universe, The Agency and FreeRealms.

God of War III for the PS3 was made official and technically was a ‘new reveal’ but even Tretton kind of downplayed it since it was so obvious it was coming. The ‘blockbuster’ reveal was, apparently, Zipper Interactive’s MAG (Massive Action Game). Let’s hope that’s a placeholder name! 256-players in a modern combat shooter. Unfortunately, my DVR cut out before I could see any footage! Ah, the foibles of being on the outside looking in.

To me, Sony had the best press conference in terms of delivering info about new games to hardcore gamers. I’ll admit that ‘best’ is pretty subjective. MS’s poaching of FF XIII was bigger news than anything Sony had to tell us, for sure. And their Netflix thing was a big non-gaming announcement. But they didn’t show any new games.

I’ll back up my statement with the pretty superfluous observation that there was more applauding and crowd enthusiasm shown at the Sony press conference than there was at Nintendo and Microsoft conferences combined.

All that said, Sony did nothing to offset MS’s lead. I don’t think they’re going to be able to catch up, and if they continue with their “We don’t buy exclusives” party line, Microsoft will keep cherry picking IPs away from Sony.