Nightmare at Christmas

Hello all, and welcome back to Playstation Base!  I hope you are all feeling fine and enjoyed your Christmas break!

Christmas is that time of year where millions of men, women and children wait with anticipation to open all of those great games, consoles and accessories that they asked for over the preceding months.  Millions of pounds were spent on gaming across the globe and with the end of year 1 for Next Gen consoles looming, it would be the best Christmas yet right?  Wrong!

On December 24th, the notorious and infamous hacking group, Lizard Squad, shocked and appalled the entire globe when they brought down PSN and XBL among a few other services.  This rendered every single gamer unable to play online and in many cases, their digital downloads too.  This was a disaster for the Christmas period, for both the consumer and the service providers, where not only were the services affected, but the likely lack of staff for the Christmas period wouldn’t have helped the situation at all.

PSN was eventually starting to come back online part way through yesterday (28.12.14), and after nearly 3 pain filled days of Monopoly and Kerplunk, adults and children alike were able to rush onto their respective consoles and join in on the belated Christmas fun.

Lizard Squad have caused a lot of outrage with many parents claiming that their children’s Christmas’ have been ruined, yet Lizard Squad claim that they are activists fighting against the lack of online security that multi-billion dollar corporations have, despite the fact that this service is still chargeable to the consumer.  They also stated that children should be spending their Christmas with family instead of in front of a brightly lit screen insulting people’s Mums in France, which I agree, but not for the entire Christmas period; although the length of downtime was essentially due to Sony’s incompetence.

I’m sure you are all aware of the story anyway, but how was I affected?  Well, actually in quite a strange way.  I myself was able to get online for the majority of the Christmas period and even got a couple of games of Advanced Warfare in.  I was also able to play all of my digitally downloaded titles (which is the vast majority of them) with absolutely no issues whatsoever.  My big mistake however was to purchase Dragon Age: Inquisition on the Playstation Store.  I got on there fine, I purchased it fine, Playstation took my money probably quicker than usual.  I downloaded it, admittedly a little slow, but after an hour or so, Dragon Age was finally a proud member of my XMB.  I booted it up, created a character, watched the opening cut-scene and that was it! 

‘The licence for this game cannot be confirmed right now…‘ 

Yep!  PSN allowed me to visit its store, purchase a game, take my money and download nearly 50GB of data, but it wasn’t able to confirm the licence for nearly 3 days after, despite the licences being valid for all of my other digital purchases!  I have no idea about the reasoning behind any of this and I would invite anyone out there to offer an answer.  There have also been reports over the 29th that Sony’s network issues are continuing, although I myself, haven’t had any issues.

In other news, I am extremely excited to sit down and play Dragon Age, at a first glance, it reminds me of Kingdom of Amalur, but more intelligent and with more depth.  Rest assured, I will be reviewing it once I have had a decent amount of game time.

So check back soon and don’t forget to Like and Share!

 Twitter: @PSbaseUK

Facebook: Playstation Base