It’s been a long time coming, but the Playstation store is finally back. Awaiting you is a huge lineup of new downloadable games, demos, add-on content, themes, avatars and videos. Also, PlayStation Plus has been updated with new full game trials, free games and DLC, free avatars and more discounts.

I know. You want to know about your free games from the Welcome Back program. Well, they aren’t ready yet. But I, like you, am waiting. Can’t be long now.

Sony has announced that their PlayStation Network services will be fully restored worldwide before the week is over. Except for Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. That includes Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity.

Those in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea have a wait still as their are still problems that need to be sorted out. Hopefully the network can stay up and stay in good health so that we can all game happily ever after.

The latest rumor is that Sony will name their upcoming NGP handheld the “PlayStation Vita.” Yeah, we think it’s weird too. Vita is the Latin term for “Life,” so let’s hope the battery life ends up surprising us. Backing up this rumor, the psvita.com domain features the same technical contact as psp.com.

Well, we should know for sure about this rumor at Sony’s E3 keynote on June 6th. The NGP is expected to sell for $250-$300 for the cheapest model. What do you think of this name?

Rumor is that in order to cut costs and compete with the price of Nintendo’s $249 3DS, Sony’s NGP handheld might be gimped from the start. The NGP was originally intended to ship with 512MB RAM, but will now only ship with 256MB. It has also reportedly lost the 16GB of internal memory first planned, and this might be replaced by external storage cards.

If this is true, it means that the NGP will be a slightly less capable machine and that would be a real shame. But this would allow it to compete with the 3DS.

Good news for PS3 owners in Asia. The PlayStation Network is finally coming back online. Sony has announced that it will restore the gaming network across the continent, after over a month of downtime. The company’s PSN services are already up and running in other parts of the world and tomorrow it will be back in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan.

Those in South Korea and Hong Kong still have to wait. Hopefully they get everyone gaming online again soon.

Feeling a little blue because your info may have been hacked due to Playstations woes? Well this should make you feel better. A short form on the PlayStation website is now distributing activation codes for a free year of Debix AllClear ID Plus identity theft protection.

The offer is good for all US PSN and Qriocity account holders who activate before June 28th, and it will get you up to $1 million in identity theft insurance coverage. That’s got to make you feel better right? Sony hopes so.

Let’s face it, Sony needs all the help it can get right now, with all of the hacks it has been suffering. That’s probably why Sony is teasing this limited edition PS3 bundle that gets you Call of Duty: Black Ops with a 160GB console.

The price is $299 and Sony’s also throwing in the First Strike content pack. It will be available next week, starting on May 31. If you are just getting a PS3 this is the one to get. This game will have you playing for months.

Sony has updated its Vaio S Series notebooks with Intel’s latest Core i5 and Core i7 processors, for a performance boost. It now also comes with an optional battery which Sony says will give you up to 15 hours of battery life. If true, that is pretty sweet.

The Sony Vaio S Series features a 13.3 inch display, and your choice of two Intel Core i5 processor and one Intel Core i7 processor, plus 4GB of RAM standard with the option to upgrade to 8GB. There’s also your choice of hard drives from 320GB up to 750GB or Solid State Drives from 256GB up to 1TB (with 2 x 512GB).

As cool as the PSP is, it is starting to look a bit dated. So Sony is introducing the PSP Remaster series for PlayStation 3, where Sony will port select portable game titles to the PS3 in high-def Blu-ray. Some of those titles may even have new add-on content and stereoscopic 3D support.

Another new bonus is that gamers will be able to share game save data between the two platforms. The key to the success of this will be what price they charge for these games that you have already played. The first PSP Remaster title announced is Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, which is Japan only and arriving at an unknown date.

This is not a great time to be Sony. It was affected both by the massive earthquake in March and the PSN outage from April into May. Sony is set to announce its full financial report for the fiscal year this Thursday and it isn’t looking great.

Previously Sony predicted a ¥70 billion ($855 million) profit, but now thinks a ¥260 billion ($3.14 billion) loss is more likely. The earthquake was directly blamed for a loss of ¥22 billion, but that figure might even grow as this estimate is only through the end of March. Sony also has an early guess of a ¥14 billion (about $172 million) total cost for the PSN breach. But again that figure may increase.

This is getting ridiculous. A month ago you might have said that PSN stood for Pretty Safe Network, now it seems more like Pretty S**T Network. PSN had only just gotten back online when hackers breached it once more with a vulnerability having to do with the system’s password reset. This whole situation is crazy. They should have had some sort of plan in place for a total system meltdown in the first place.

I say we all get an extra 2 “Welcome back” games for this. If they ever get things straightened out, we may even get a full gaming session in which we can play them before it crashes again.

As Sony is busy getting PSN back in place in America, they still have all kinds of other problems thanks to the outage. Their latest problem comes from Japan. Apparently the Japanese government refuses to allow Sony to reactivate its network until they are satisfied it is safe.

Japan has two issues. The first is that the company’s promised counter-hacking measures, which were announced on May 1st, have not yet been fully enacted. The second is that Japan wants to see even more preventive measures taken to ensure that users’ credit card numbers and other private data will be safe.

Sony’s latest update on its PlayStation blog regarding the nearly three-week long PSN outage gives us some hope that we will be playing games very soon. Understandably, they can’t give an exact date for when access to the network will be returned, but Sony says that it will “likely be at least a few more days.”

You might remember that the security breach potentially exposed the private information on over 100 million user accounts. So when the network goes back online, Sony’s work will be far from over as they will have to deal with some consequences, including a class-action lawsuit. The company may even reward users by giving them a free month of access to the PlayStation Plus paid subscription service, free ID theft monitoring and free extra content.

PSN may be suffering an outage, but Sony still needs to keep the empire rolling along as best they can. So Sony has just introduced a new line of PlayStation Portable branded earphones. They come in six different colors (black, white, silver, red, blue and pink) and will deliver high resolution sound. They claim that it has powerful bass and clear treble output.

These are perfect for the PlayStation Portable and should work fine with your other devices that have a 3.5mm audio jack. These Sony PSP earphones arrive this summer in Japan for $27 (2,200 Yen). Hopefully we get them soon after. By then PSN should be back up. We hope.

For most of us the PSN outage has just cost us some time playing the games that we love, but for others it has cost much more. PSN is losing money for developers just by keeping people from buying games and content.

VP Christian Svensson, in a post on the Capcom Unity forums says, “As an executive responsible for running a business, the resulting outage [is] obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget. These are funds we rely on to bring new games to market for our fans.” Hopefully Sony sorts things out sooner rather than later, but I think we can all agree that Sony and any hurt developers may have gotten a bit complacent in thinking that such a thing could never happen and not being at least a bit prepared for a scenario like this. Never put all of your eggs in one basket people.