See, I told you guys the PSP wasn’t dead. This week, Lumines, the damn-near-perfect musical puzzler for the PSP, saw a 5900% rise in sales on Amazon. And all because of a bug. Yes, Lumines is probably the first game in history to become more sought-after because of a minor bug that not even QA’ers can find. Yes, you’ve entered Bizarro World. Welcome.
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Over the weekend, PSP homebrew programmers/hackers found an exploit in Q! Entertainment’s puzzler in the form of a buffer overflow. Basically, this allows anyone to run unsigned code on the PSP, which Sony’s been desperately trying to stop. Ya know, so they can actually make money on the thing.
And of course, the underground homebrew scene has already released a downgrader app to bring the PSP’s firmware version back to the coveted 1.50 release. Sucks for Sony, I guess. Ubisoft, on the other hand, is laughing all the way to the bank.
I have two things to say on this issue. First, it makes me mad, but I know that 99% of these douche-bags are never going to actually play Lumines, one of my all-time favorite games. That infuriates the living balls out of me. Everyone complains that there are no good games on the PSP, but the moment they actually find one, they don’t even care about it. It’s a good game people, just play the damn thing.
And secondly, it’s amazing that this is what gets people to play their PSP. If Sony really wants the PSP to become as big as the DS Lite, then they may have to start incorporating this whole homebrew scene into their portfolios for the system pronto. If they can finagle money out of this whole movement, Sony may still have a chance.
Hopefully that new PSP Store that they’ve announced will allow indie developers a chance to spread their homebrew skillz out into the wild. The legal wild, that is.
But I’m sure someone at Sony is going, “Damn, I guess we need more bugs in our games…”
So THAT’S why puzzle quest is so glitchy. D3 wouldn’t do a recall because they care about the fans! More seriously though, I think it’s good for more people to be buying Lumines regardless of the reasons behind the purchase. Crackdown might have been a success because of the Halo 3, but I’m convinced that more than a few people are fans of the game (and Realtime Worlds) because they figured they might as well give it a shot while they were waiting for the beta to get underway. Hopefully the same thing will happen here.
While Ubisoft may be enjoying the sales, it seems like Sony may be slightly annoyed with them. We saw what happened when Sony got annoyed at Lik-Sang.
Sony better be pissed off at themselves as well, as they’re the ones that approved the game for manufacturing. It went through their approval process, which looks at bugs like this, and it got the go-ahead. And how would Ubisoft know the system itself would be a target for hackers from day one? Lumines was a launch title, and they knew nothing of the homebrew scene that would later explode on the system. Sony just released a patch for the PSP (3.51), so hopefully that stops them from doing anything stupid, like taking the game off shelves.