Death's Cold Embracer

If you were wondering why it suddenly just got harder to access your PSN account from a Vita or a Playstation 3, there's a reason for that. Take it away, Mr. Mario.

I'll give you the Cliff Notes for the sake of expediency. Thanks to a recent system update, your normal PSN password will no longer work on legacy consoles. Now you'll have to access your PSN account from a computer, click your avatar on the top right of the page, click Security from the options that appear, and get a special temporary password. You'll then need to turn on your PS3 or Vita, go to the PSN log-in screen, and enter your user name and the previously procured password to access your account from those systems. Got all that? I sure as hell didn't, which is why I'm grateful Endless Gaming Horizons offered an explanation of this overly complicated workaround on his YouTube page.

All kinds of funny business has happened to Sony's older consoles thanks to this vexing update. If you liked using your Playstation 3 as back up storage for all the games that wouldn't fit on a miniscule PS Vita memory card, you can forget about doing that now, because 4.89 chops through that functionality like Bruce Lee through a stack of cinder blocks, or Bruce Lee's estate through a suspiciously similar fighting game character. (I was going to report on this earlier, but the report from Nintendo Life seemed to be the end result of fruitless speculation, if this more recent report from ShackNews is any indication.)

If you haven't already done so, now's the time to jailbreak your PS3 and Vita and explore gray market sources for your games. It's not going to get any easier to use these systems legally, so hike up those pantaloons, fold down that eyepatch, and sail the pira-seas with either PKGj or CDRomance. Sony doesn't seem to give a damn anymore... why should you?

BREAKING NEWS! You may be able to access the games you've purchased! A recent post on the Playstation Blog suggests that you'll be able to play some of the legacy games you've previously bought on the Playstation 4 and 5. It's not an ideal solution, but it's better than cutting players off from their games entirely. Thanks to Reddit for this surprising revelation.

P.S. Oh yes, there's one other thing worth mentioning. In a puzzling move, Square-Enix recently pitched the rights to most of its Western intellectual properties overboard, with the mysterious "Embracer Group" scooping them up in a fisherman's net. (Why the sudden swerve toward nautical nonsense in this post? I dunno, I mentioned piracy and decided to run with it.) 

Embracer devours ALL!
(image from Reddit)

What you should probably know is that Embracer is the entity that owns T*HQ-Nordic, among dozens of other mid-sized developers. In fact, they're so big that they eclipse all other major game publishers in acquisitions, including Microsoft, which is currently wrapping its jaws around the frighteningly massive Activision. The fact that a company so shrouded in secrecy owns so much of the video game industry... concerns me a little.