No Japanese PSN?

I have a couple friends that I regularly play games on my Playstation 3 with, so the recent outage of PSN due to lame hackers has been particularly annoying. However, since PSN came back up this past week I was all set up and excited to play this weekend. Only one problem: one of my friends lives in Japan, and Japan hasn’t approved their PSN to come back up.

That doesn’t mean that we didn’t do anything together. Since PSN went down we have been experimenting with various multiplayer online games. We tried a whole range of games, from the serious MMO (Lord of the Rings Online) to the casual why-would-you-play-this MMO (AdventureQuest Worlds), and various simple shooters, a Tron game, and even online games of hearts. Since we couldn’t play Borderlands like we were playing, today we tried Armada Online.

I remember playing Armada on my cousin’s Dreamcast over a decade ago, and I remember that the whole game was pretty dang cool. Rose colored glasses, I’m sure, but I believe it did have some merit. I was surprised to find that this was a properly MMO’d version of the Dreamcast game, ported to PC.

Sure, it shows its age. Hard. But overall it’s still a pretty fun game, and I feel like it actually provided a good amount more enjoyment than I got from playing some more serious or more polished games the previous few weeks. Although it’s a lot of fun, I can’t wait for PSN to come back up worldwide, because I’ve got some Cat-G Akrid to kill.