Alex is about as funny as rug burn.

I know you say "as of today", and that may be true of Hot Shots Tennis, but Motorstorm: Arctic Edge was pulled a while ago. I learned of it when Motorstorm RC came out and I got an itch to play Arctic Edge again. It's gone from the store, from my Download History, from any place I could possibly download it. Very pissed.

Arctic Edge is actually pretty good. But yeah, despite the PSP being the Iphone of hacks, it really lost Sony a lot of money. Hopefully it won't happen again.

@MmaFanQc: heh. You misunderstand. We're in agreement. My comment was a joke. "Oh no, the Vita is going to be just like the PSP, extremely successful". The point is mocking the idea of declaring doom and gloom for it by comparing it to the PSP, as the PSP actually did amazingly well.

I bought a racing game once. I say bought. It came with my Xbox. I even tried it. Don't get the allure of driving round and round. It's only slightly more entertaining than watching someone else racing. Strap some guns on though....man Rollcage is great.

If only you could turn snark into a consumable object and sell it, Alex Navarro.
 
Because I would buy it. I would buy it so hard. You see this medal!? I did this for you.

It's only Half-Byte Loader. Sony is overreacting a bit. It's understandable, but HBL is harmless and probably won't open the Vita up that much.

Dammit... Sony's quite reasonable to do this - you have to be fast and absolute in snuffing out exploits or your system may be cracked wide open. The hackers are reasonable to look for exploits - the system's capable of a lot, and it's awesome to unlock that. But consumers get caught in the middle and it often leads to everyone putting up with fewer features...

@MmaFanQc said:

@TruthTellah:

BTW, nothing bad has happened yet. Preventative measures = good thing.

Pretty much. As Ben Franklin said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Considering there wasn't enough cure for the PSP, they're going to be heaping prevention on the Vita.

@Scrumdidlyumptious said:

It's only Half-Byte Loader. Sony is overreacting a bit. It's understandable, but HBL is harmless and probably won't open the Vita up that much.

Yeah, maybe an overreaction, but let's face it, the kid who got bullied in school is probably going to be a bit cautious when out in the world. Sony got FUCKED by piracy on the PSP, and the PSN outage last year probably didn't do anything to help their paranoia levels.

I love that the mere fact that I was amused thinking of the possibility of some Hot Shots Golf fan being totally destroyed by it not being on the PSN store and making a hyberbolic crack about it has somehow been twisted into me defending Sony for fucking the consumer and devolved into people mocking the shape of my head.

Never change, Giant Bomb community. Never, ever change.

I'll post a bit more information here what actually happened so people are a bit better informed. Specifically, a blog issued a series of instructions on how to release half byte loader on the the Playstation Vita, so if you were following the blog and acted quickly, you could download the game (in my case, Motorstorm Arctic Edge) which would run a save game exploit that let you boot into the Half byte OS, the same that works on a PSP Go. This does not allow for loading of Iso's, but it does allow you to run a gameboy emulator, for instance, which is a great retro experience on that OLED screen. The exploit can no longer be used obviously (unless you already have the appropriate digital versions on your machine already), and people are furious because they bought the game, only to have it pulled out of their downloads list before they got a chance to get it, I believe that is a first, but could be wrong

"It was as if, like, maybe a hundred or so Hot Shots Tennis fans cried out and were suddenly silenced."

simply wonderful.