DETROIT, MICHIGAN (ICG)—Today in the streets of Detroit and surrounding suburbs, mass riots took place as Xbox 360 fanboys left their homes, their jobs, and their vehicles to wildly celebrate the “crash-heard-round-the-wibbles,” as Playstation 3 owners silently brooded and plotted their revenge. The reason for celebration? Modern Warfare 2 dedicated servers for the Playstation 3 are currently down, with no solid ETA for recovery.

Joystiq confirmed the outage on their own internal PS3, and found a Tweet from Activision support that claims, “We don’t have a hard ETA on the servers coming back up, but the outage is totally unrelated to the patch.”

Xbox 360 fanboys were seen to descend in hordes upon Playstation forums, gaming news sites, social sites, and even town squares, cheering wildly, chanting things like “PWNED!” and “LOL PS3 SUXX”. No violence has been reported yet, but we’ll keep an eye on this developing story.

Recently developer Infinity Ward announced that the PC version of the newest Call of Duty installment would not support traditional dedicated servers–instead favoring its own custom backbone for internet matchmaking. In no time flat, nerd rage ensued in the form of an internet petition demanding that dedicated server support be added to the game. As of this writing nearly 178,000 have typed in their digital John Hancock in the hopes that Infinity Ward might abandon their custom solution in favor of the archaic dedicated servers we have come to know and love. It’s much harder to abuse a system when not in control, and it seems many server admins are lamenting this revelation.

Infinity Ward held the announcement until gold masters were being shipped to manufacturing, knowing that the PC audience would be resistant to change and that the only way to get this over with would be a good old fashioned force feeding. Matchmaking over an Infinity Ward-supplied backbone is coming, whether you like it or not.

With all due respect, may we suggest that perhaps all 178,000 of our nerd friends are raging about the wrong thing, though? (more…)

During the Sunday Night Football contest between the Steelers and the Chargers, developer Infinity Ward sprang for some prime time advertising space to show us their latest and greatest, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Previews billed the new footage as “shocking”. It was, at the very least, surprising–games based around modern warfare are a sensitive subject. While it appears that the game doesn’t link to any actual current events, it does hint at an exploration of one of America’s greatest fears. Pick up a gun, soldier. Your country needs you.