I don’t really use my Playstation 3 the same way that I use my Xbox 360. My Xbox 360 is my console of choice; it has hardware upsampling, Microsoft absolutely nailed the community features, the online matchmaking and in-game friends list integration is consistent through almost every game, and the controller feels fantastic. It’s gotten to the point that I even get multiplatform games with PC releases on the 360 (unless we’re talking a Valve game or a real-time strategy game) simply because if a new game comes out I’d rather sit on my couch with a controller rather than end up sitting at a desk all night at home after sitting at a desk at work all day. Making the 360 into the “game machine” also helps me think of my home computer as more of a development/work machine as well which, when it comes to my hobby development, can be an important distinction.

The Playstation 3, though, exists as a console for Playstation 3 exclusives and, also, as a bluray and DVD player. And, up until this point, most of my Playstation 3 gaming has been entirely offline; Metal Gear Solid 4, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. I got in a couple public games of Warhawk with no attempt made at organizing a game with friends or some such (because I didn’t have any friends with the game). I was able to get in a few games of WipEout HD with some Shackers which, while fun, required communication on the Shacknews site since Sony deemed it wise to not ship its consoles with with a voice communication solution. Other than that minor fact, the games of WipEout went very well.

But it wasn’t until SOCOM that I really attempted to play a multiplayer-focused game on the system. As I’m sure I’ve made clear here and elsewhere (a good refresher is here): the SOCOM attempt failed. In the rare instance where I was able to get into a game I experienced hard system locks, simply being ejected from the game to the PS3 XMB/Dashboard, and so on. Supposedly this game has an update coming tomorrow which should fix a number of the showstopping bugs that it shipped with; however, the game will still be lacking features which are discussed at length even in the game’s own manual.

SOCOM is one thing; sure, it’s a multiplayer-focused game, but it’s the kind of game that could surprise a company with the launch day server load and completely bring things to a halt — this doesn’t excuse the rest of the laundry list of bugs, but it can account for some server-specific issue.

The thing I’m having trouble understanding is how LittleBigPlanet’s servers can fail on every count for its launch. On Monday night and Tuesday morning the servers were completely inaccessible. Tuesday night the servers appeared to be accessible but, instead of connecting to them, the connection process appeared to freeze the game’s startup process and then hang at the “pod” (main menu) preventing me from even getting into the single-player story mode. This game not having its servers available for launch is akin to Spore not having any of its own extensive community features ready when it came out; it’s not a game-breaking thing, but it’s such a major feature of the game that one would expect a major publisher to have predicted heavy loads and adjusted for them. In the case of LittleBigPlanet (and SOCOM for that matter), there were even public betas put out weeks in advance of the games’ release dates.

The complaints I’m listing are incredibly minor in the scheme of things, but they come off as being such amateur mistakes that I’d expect someone like Sony (publisher of SOCOM and LittleBigPlanet) to handle better. I have been operating under the belief that Sony dropped the online/multiplayer ball with the Playstation 3 — and that’s even when their free service is compared to the Xbox Live subscription service — and, from the looks of it, I will continue to do so for some time.