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Sony approaches E3 bruised and bloodied by its very fresh 24-day PSN outage and still-ongoing PlayStation Store downtime. Right off the bat Sony will apologize for the PSN data breach and will, of course, do some whining and blaming of evil hackers and complain that no system is completely secure. If Sony has learned anything about PR, however, they will spend a tiny bit of time on that, and move on to showing product.

The good news is that they'll be spending a good portion of the show talking about and giving the press hands-on with new hardware, which has long been Sony's strong suit. The NGP will be the star of this year's show, but expect more detail on the just-announced PSP Remasters, PlayStation Move, the Xperia Play, and maybe just maybe they'll grant my two long shot guesses below.

The potential for the PSP Remasters on PS3 is pretty big. Today, playing your PSP online using Adhoc Party on the PS3 means you're tying up the console already but you're sitting in front of it with the PSP and your headset on, leaving the graphical horsepower of the system idle. Those little room-and-waving-man graphics don't take much to render, you know. This new category of game ties it all together and will end up needing an update to Adhoc Party. This update, however, could pay off in bigger ways if it becomes a part of the standard SDK.

Downloadable games are getting cheaper (and smaller) on all sorts of platforms, and adding online support is expensive. To stay competitive, Microsoft has opened the floodgates with their indie developer section on Xbox Live Marketplace, and Sony needs to make developing for the PSN even more enticing. Sony needs to leverage Adhoc Party by putting a software library on top of it to let the PSP Remasters and PSN developers easily -- but please, much more intuitively for the end-user -- do everything Adhoc Party can do. This way developers get all the benefits of peer-to-peer online play without having to run the servers themselves. Beef up Adhoc Party with online leaderboard support and now we're talking.

What do you think?

What is it?

Gods Eater Burst is a third-person action game where the player joins from 1-3 AI or human (via local Ad-hoc WiFi play only) squad mates on a series of missions to take down one or more enemy creatures that come in three sizes: bigger than you, way bigger than you, and how-are-we-supposed-to-take-something-that-big-down?! The game is a revised and expanded version of a formerly Japan-only release, and while developed by Namco Bandai Games it's published in the US by D3Publisher.

This is one book you can judge by its cover, at least initially – the box art is a clear clone of Monster Hunter box art, but it also shows one of the more interesting twists on Capcom's well-worn and wildly popular formula. The monsters and the world have a strong sci-fi and anime flavor to it and – brace yourself – there's actually a story behind all of this monster hunting.

There are a number of PSP games that are so good that they've elicited the comment "if only this was on the PS3 and used the PSN for online play", and it seems like Sony and top PSP game publishers have heard our plea. A new category of games is coming to the PS3 on Blu-ray called PSP Remasters, and Monster Hunter Portable 3rd is going to be the first, naturally. Selling over 4.5 million units in Japan alone over 6 months can give you the cash to do a port or two.

These will be Blu-ray releases that are an up-rezzed remake of the PSP version but will continue to use Adhoc Party on the PS3 for online play, the Dual Shock 3 controller, and will feature save game portability between the PS3 and PSP so you can play on your PS3 at home, then put the saved game on your PSP to continue playing away from home.

No other games have been announced, and it's listed as "starting in Japan" so it's likely to come to other regions, but if they can ensure the PS3 and PSP versions play together online -- which is what Adhoc party and the ability to play on either the PS3 or PSP very strongly implies, perhaps this shows a bright future for bundled re-releases of a Blu-ray version for the PS3 along with a PSP download voucher for the handheld. NGP title support, anyone?

And Sony, if you could please make Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker your next PSP Remaster we'd really appreciate it.

The short press release is right after the jump.

Yesterday saw the launch of Incursion 1.5 and the continuation of several small refinements of EVE Online along with a few significant ones. To celebrate, Impulse is offering the EVE Online client and first month of service for $9.99. What's there to celebrate in this release? The one that will most directly affect new players and all players in high security space is a revamp of the Agents system.

Agents dispense missions (a.k.a. quests to you fantasy MMO players) that upon completion reward the character with currency and/or items along with standing points with the Agent's NPC corporation. Fail a mission, or decline more than one every four real-time hours and you lose standings. So what's wrong with this system? On its face, nothing, but like many parts of EVE, the devil is in the details.