Recently, the much-hyped PlayStation 3 firmware 2.40 update — with in-game XMB and Trophies - was made available online. But this came with a bag of surprises. Owners of every model of PS3 are reporting problems ranging from the minor microphone problems, to the gigantic ones, like consoles not booting at the initial wave screen. In response to this, Sony has taken down the update for the time being and updated their knowledge-center post for the 2.40 boss with the following text:

“UPDATE: 7/2/2008, the PlayStation 3 system software version 2.40 has been temporarily taken offline and will not be available for download as our engineers examine any possible issues with this update. The Knowledge Center will be updated with information as it becomes available; please check back here for further details.”

Sony PR director Patrick Seybold believes this problem might be an individual one, will are “looking into it right now and will work with those customers [to] directly address any issues they may be experiencing.” Unfortunately, the only currently known fix for those with a non-operational system is to reformat the hard-drive, erasing all the savegame files. The repair cost are estimated to be 150$. Given Seybold’s comments, presumably Sony will be working out other fixes for systems that were broken with the update soon.

The massive update includes an in-game Cross-Media Bar, the much talked about Trophy system, and many more features

A petition has gone up, with over 2,000 fans signing on to complain about Diablo 3’s art direction.The petitioners feel that the graphics are too bright making them cartoonish .They feel that WoW might have strong influence ruining the dark series of Diablo.

This is what Keith Lee, The Diablo III lead producer had to say for a brighter, more colorful Diablo. “One of the things that we considered when we were working on the visuals for ‘Diablo III’ is the fact that color is your friend. We feel that color actually helps to create a lot of highlights in the game so that there is contrast. A great analogy is like in ‘Lord of the Rings’ — not everything is dark. It allows you to see what a creepy dungeon can be like but if everything is dark it doesn’t allow you to have a lot of contrast.”

Diablo is meant to be a fairly dark, brutal game.That said we can have more brutal looking  dark things like the dungeon. The current ’style’ in games is to have this drab palette of brown, which apparently means ‘realistic’, if you’re a partially colour blind mole who’s never left a tunnel. Not everything has to consist of black, brown, and gray. The game takes place in the human world for the most part it seems which has a little something we call color.

So what do you think?