More to Life than Online

12.05.2011
A few weeks ago, I that one unintentionally pleasant side-effect of being forced offline was the fact that you weren't constantly bothered by notifications, friends who wanted to play a multiplayer game while you were happily immersed in a single player adventure and, of course, system updates.

Now it's coming up on a month of downtime for PSN, some people are getting impatient and taking drastic measures, if . To me, the idea of selling my PS3 just because I can't use its online facilities seems somewhat excessive -- granted, I don't play a huge number of online games and prefer single player story-heavy experiences by far, but I'm not even missing things like the PlayStation Store. In fact, if anything, my wallet is quietly thanking Sony for not being able to tempt me with goodies at impulse-purchase prices, and my bank's fraud department is happy about the fact that my card on file expired just as all this nonsense kicked off.

But not everyone's like me. Some people enjoy playing online -- and more to the point, some games are specifically designed with the online component as their main selling point. Titles like Brink, for example, not to mention the Call of Duty series. And I can see how those players might be tempted to jump ship to Xbox as time goes on with no end in sight.

There's also the important matter of Online Pass and its equivalents to consider -- and not just in multiplayer titles. Customers purchasing new titles will effectively have parts of their game rendered impossible to access. Given the recent news that addon, this could be a problem -- especially as Rockstar hasn't yet announced exactly what this grants (or denies) access to as yet. Who would knowingly buy a game, aware that there will be part of it that they can't use?

I like to think positive, however. This PSN outage isn't going to last forever -- hopefully -- and all will be back as it should be soon. It's just a matter of waiting... some more. But what do you think? Is it too late for Sony to recover from this? How many of you are considering jumping ship to Xbox? How many of you have done it already?

And on the flip side, those of you who bothered by this whole experience, what are some of your favorite PS3 titles that don't rely on PSN? Personally, I'm a fan of Disgaea 3 and the Sly Cooper Collection -- and what better time than this to replay the Uncharted series?