Just hours after the hacker collective Anonymous threatened to take down the PlayStation Network and major Sony websites, the PSN — the service that allows PS3 gamers to compete online and download games — has been going on and offline. The official PlayStation blog and Sony's U.S. PlayStation site are also loading slowly, if at all.

An official PlayStation Twitter account noted just before 1pm ET today that: "PSN currently undergoing sporadic maintenance. Access to the PSN may be interrupted throughout the day. We apologize for any inconvenience." The service was down after that though appeared to be functioning again by 3:30 ET.

We've contacted Sony to find out if they believe these outages are due to Anonymous' attacks and, if not, what they're doing to prepare for them.

Anonymous says they plan to attack Sony to punish the company for suing hacker George Hotz who cracked the PS3's firmware. Hotz, also known as Geohot, is now embroiled in a legal and ethical conflict about whether he had a right to mess with Sony's tech or if they are protected by U.S. law to keep him out and can both shut him down and look through his Paypal records to see who may have been giving him financial support.

The dynamic duo of Sveinn Jóhannesson Kjarval and Hinrik Haraldsson return with "Keep Clickin", the follow-up to CCP Games in-house band's 2009 hit "Harden the Fuck Up." If only EVE Online were this exciting!

This is one of those moments when I'm extremely glad I get to type and don't have to actually pronounce any of these names. CCP brought this noise to its 2011 EVE Fanfest in Reykjavík, Iceland, giving fans in the land of the ice and snow a glimpse of why people from Iceland shouldn't wear swimsuits and rap.

Their bodies and the music pale in comparison to the greatness of "Harden the Fuck UP", but then so does just about everything ever created.

Anyway, this is how CCP spent its summer vacation, and all of that phat internet money. In case you're curious, this is how they made it.

Examining MRIs and PET scans of Madden football veterans, scientists discovered severely damaged neural pathways in parts of the brain associated with motivation and attention, malformations that might explain the common inability among players to perform such basic tasks as maintaining hygiene and preparing meals for themselves.

— so reports joke news outlet The Onion, as inspired by real Madden safety news.

The future of airborne gaming may include a full-sized monitor, surround sound and plenty of legroom, if you've got the cash to drop on a plush, "Not For Wimps" airline seat.

The seat, designed by Contour Aerospace and Factorydesign, is among the future design concepts being shown off at the Aircraft Interiors Expo at the Hamburg Messe in Germany this week.

The Not For Wimps prototype, designed specifically for in-flight gaming, includes speakers integrated into the top edges of the seat, the ability to create a bubble of active noise cancellation around the gamer and a large monitor suspended in front of each seat by a Kevlar-coated carbon fiber arm.

The seat is currently only at the concept stage, which means that if gamers make enough noise maybe they could add or tweak a few of the design choices. What would you want added, removed or changed to a seat designed for gaming? Me? I'd want an over-sized table to hold a sturdy laptop, a dedicated power point, LAN access and a separate side table for food and drinks. It would also be great if the seats sported multiple consoles, or the ability to rent a PS3 or 360 mid-flight, for the duration of the trip.

Other concepts being shown off at the week's show include a seat with a built in iPad, another with a built-in Playstation Portable and a beverage trolley designed to dispense a multitude of drinks with the push of a single button.

Oy! I want one of those drinkie things too for my seat.

Aircraft Interiors Expo: a Preview of Tomorrow's Passenger Experience [PRNewsWire]

Square Enix announced today that Final Fantasy V, the Super Famicom game that didn't make it to the states until 1999's Final Fantasy Anthology for the PlayStation, is in development for the PlayStation Network, enhanced by exclusive CGI cut scenes.

It all started with a song, an instrumental created with a Playstation by Canadian musician Jim Guthrie, it seems.

Speaking to NOW Magazine, Guthrie explains how he went from days creating music for Three Gut Records to working with a team of five on what would become iPad gaming darling Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery – EP. Guthrie said the Superbrothers sent him a pixel art postcard in 2003 or so and he responded with a bunch of instrumental Playstation music. Fast forward two years and the team came back to him to work on the music for what would become Sword & Sworcery. And that Playstation music, it remained important.

"The Playstation music I sent Craig years ago hugely informed the game's early stages of development and we actually used a few of those compositions," Guthrie told the mag. "As Craig and Kris added more ideas to the pot I made more music inspired by those ideas and Jon and Frankie stitched it all together with 1s and 0s. Toward the end Capy's own Sean Lorhrisch swooped in to smooth out all the audio levels and add extra SFX."

The end result was a game meant to be a role-playing walk through of an album.

"The name of the app is Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery – EP because we always intended for the music to be a core element of the game experience," he said. "It's an album you can "walk through." Because of that I wrote the music with an album in mind. "

And now the music for the game that is album is getting it's own album release, set to hit iTunes later this week.

Check out the full interview over at Now.

Jim Guthrie embraces his gaming-geek side

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a simple shooter that raises one of life's great questions: Which is worse, giant-sized bugs or normal-sized bugs?

Spiders terrify me. When I think of evil, they're the first thing that comes to mind. I've been told all my life how they help regulate the insect population and are beneficial to crops and such, but no matter how much people try to sugar coat them, I just can't swallow spiders. Not anymore than I already do while I am asleep.

Ticks, also arachnids, don't look quite as evil, but they want to burrow into my skin and lay eggs, an action I do not approve of.

Bees don't bother me quite as much. Ants, on the other hand...let me explain. When I was five or six I was playing hide and seek with some friends and accidentally hid in a bush the base of which was an anthill. I was covered head to toe in the little bastards, too terrified to even breathe. My mother ran a bath and I dived in, submerged for minutes in fear of breaking the surface of the water and being covered again.

So yeah, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon? I'll be right there on the front lines. As far as I am concerned, being tiny is these creatures' one advantage. If they're big enough to see, they're big enough to shoot.

Check out the PlayStation Blog for more on the insect and arachnid enemies of Vicious Cycle's upcoming video game catharsis for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon is a simple shooter that raises one of life's great questions: Which is worse, giant-sized bugs or normal-sized bugs?

Spiders terrify me. When I think of evil, they're the first thing that comes to mind. I've been told all my life how they help regulate the insect population and are beneficial to crops and such, but no matter how much people try to sugar coat them, I just can't swallow spiders. Not anymore than I already do while I am asleep.

Ticks, also arachnids, don't look quite as evil, but they want to burrow into my skin and lay eggs, an action I do not approve of.

Bees don't bother me quite as much. Ants, on the other hand...let me explain. When I was five or six I was playing hide and seek with some friends and accidentally hid in a bush the base of which was an anthill. I was covered head to toe in the little bastards, too terrified to even breathe. My mother ran a bath and I dived in, submerged for minutes in fear of breaking the surface of the water and being covered again.

So yeah, Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon? I'll be right there on the front lines. As far as I am concerned, being tiny is these creatures' one advantage. If they're big enough to see, they're big enough to shoot.

Check out the PlayStation Blog for more on the insect and arachnid enemies of Vicious Cycle's upcoming video game catharsis for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Watch the Fighter class hack and slash his way through the forces of evil in the latest trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, bringing the pen-and-paper role-playing module model to Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network, and PC later this year.

When a great-looking video game imitates a real life place, how close do the two get?

Compare the downtown Manhattan of Crysis 2 to the real thing and you'll see what happens when just one real intersection, where State St. meets Bridge St. down in the financial district, becomes a video game battlefield.

The real intersection needs to accommodate foot and car traffic and allow the businesses of business and tourism to get done. The video game version needs to allow room for the player's super-soldier to plunge into a shoot-out. But the video game version is walled off to prevent wandering and filled with more trees, trucks and even a statue-turned-memorial, all serving both as barriers behind which to hide in a gunfight as well as visual indicators that we are in a damaged place that we hopefully will care about.

(For one more comparison between reaity and the NYC of Crysis 2, check out the video game's addition of a certain skyscraper to New York's skyline.)