You may have seen our story recently on the recent firmware 2.40 update and all the (potential) deliciousness it brings. We actually shied away from going all-out on pimping it because we were told from multiple dev sources that it was very much a foundation for stuff going forward. I even personally tried to tell forumgoers elsewhere that it was something that was going to take time to really gain traction.

The reality of what 2.40 adds to the PlayStation 3 experience is something that isn’t exactly tangible from the get-go. Yes, you have custom soundracks. Yes, you have Trophies, which to me is huge because rather than an arbitrary number, you now have that and an RPG-style level. Why the hell this is more engrossing to me than GamerPoints has actually caused me a bit of concern. There is quite literally zero difference between the two in the grand scheme of things; it’s still just a number, but something about the idea of “leveling up” based on grabbing Bronze, Silver and Gold trophies is, admittedly, intoxicating.

We don’t even have a full-fledged game yet patched (at least at the time of this blog) that supports the idea of the “Platinum Trophy” (you get it for earning all the Bronze/Silver/Gold Trophies, and it gives you, in effect, an “experience boost” for nailing ‘em all). But I want it. I don’t even know why I want it, but I do. It’s the RPG nut in me, and duplicative though it may be toward Microsoft’s Achievements, something about it being not another number yet, yes, still another number amazes me.

But 2.40 isn’t perfect. It went well for most of our systems, but Warren’s machine has bucked and decided to restart at random times. Still other tales persist on forums across these here tubes that tell a far more frightening tale: PS3s are getting bricked. We’ve contacted Sony, but not after all this rabble has eased a little, to hopefully get an official comment on things (we’ll let you know when we know).

It does seem that this is an issue commonly tied to people that opted to go the very route that Sony had allowed and upgraded their hard drives. In many cases, this includes the 40GB folks, which, aside from the Metal Gear Solid bundle, have already had to suffer no PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility if they wanted to play someting other then PS3 and PS one games. The (relatively) meager storage space was also a reason to throw another hard drive in there.

It does seem the solution so far is to just insert the normal system-ready hard drive back into the PS3. Things update (begrudgingly, if my 30 minutes of literally constant rebooting and searching for an update to Super Stardust HD are any indictation), but we’ll get an official word from Sony here soon… I hope.

Tags: 2.40, firmware, PlayStation 3, PS3, super stardust hd

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Console Gaming, Downloadable Content, PlayStation, Site updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.