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Singularity

I connect the PSN failure, the release of Portal 2 and how it all ties into our (in)ability to continue saves made in PC games and continue them in future PS3 sequels.

Geraldo Nascimento, Blogger

May 4, 2011

2 Min Read

A lot has happened this Easter holiday. Portal 2 was released last week, after a fanciful cooperation between Valve and the indie community. The first game whose PS3 edition offered digital downloads of the counterpart PC and Mac versions. Unfortunately, PSN went down shortly after. If we remember history correctly, Half-Life 2 was delayed a year or more because  the source code was stolen. The source code of an engine called Source (I love self-referential loops).
I wonder if the breach was somewhere buried beneath Portal 2?

Another thing worth noting, the founder of Sony died at the age of 81, roughly during the PSN hack storm. Both news were always reported unrelated, and they probably are, I just thought it would be important to note these circumstances.

Portal 2 uses Steam Cloud to store saves and settings. One of the good things about PSN is that the saves are stored locally, what if they were in the cloud like Steam? What are the chances that Steam might also be down, and prevent tons of people of continuing their saves? There's certainly a reasonable technical document and / or engineer that will calm the masses and assure us Steam would never go down, but we don't really know.

All of this to reach my point: I received the PC version of Mass Effect 2 for free due to purchasing Dragon Age 2 and I am loving it. I want to store the save when I finish it and import it into my future PS3 copy of Mass Effect 3. Do not bother with the "why" I am getting it for the PS3, all I want is to know if this will be possible.

Amidst this storm of app stores, clouds and social networks, will there ever be Singularity?

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