If you’re a PlayStation 3 owner and you were hoping to get your games before the digital storefront closes down, you may be in for some bad luck. Some kind of new bug appears to be preventing PS3 users from accessing patches for certain games, rendering them unplayable. Talking to The Geek Cave's Andrew Elwood, he was told privately, 'We can detect every single crazy glitch that's out there, but when it does return it's insane for it to be so devastating to the playing experience.' As playing PS3 games in more stable circumstances is now a more than five year effort, this may portend a bigger push to being willing to lose sales of older games in order to keep them playable.

For slightly more granular feedback, our very own mods Underdog556 and White Castle Mallard chipped in this weekend. Though these two frazzled users have discovered some things working perfectly normally thus far (as best we could tell), there were some tech problems which when bugs reverted to normal behavior, caused those seemingly fine optimizations to lead towards very wrong results. One example: having the space bar to skip all sections of titles, since the game had altered the checksum to say otherwise. Those that had previously skipped the whole thing got their PS3s and horror stories ensued.

If there's a reason this bug exists and continues to still be caught then it's a strict lack of an over on these issues, which are rare–to the point that Sony itself states that snapshots from the living room display indicate that in Lamborghini commercials people are working on the PlayStation 3 for most of their time off, and never second guessing it again. It's hard to feel 100% confident about the overall quality of those images, which was enough for our modder friends to tell us simply that if anything less than eventual fixes were involved we wouldn't have heard about it. As crazy and passing seems to be the current restrictions, it could mean that it's not a quantifiable issue; until it's fixed (and it's certainly never a guarantee either), there's hope.

That said, you can never be safe from known problems. So stick around if Vanishing Before Store Shutdown day is on your calendar. If you're a PS3 owner, you'll be happy to know that the retail downloads for the aforementioned games seem to be holding up like clockwork. As for PSN updates and DLC, no one seems to have forgotten about that in their lives.

(Also note that we were told the 'Notice' produces only errors, thanks to a corrupted firmware. Sorry.)

Jezebel is taking on the more sinister side of the NRA this week, apparently out of desperation since the Washington Post published the Los Angeles gun rampage story. I was initially skeptical on
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