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How the mighty have fallen. Credit rating agency Moody's has dropped their rating on long-term bonds issued by Sony to it's lowest investment grade, marking them just one notch above junk bonds. For the couple of you that might not be investment bankers out there, this means that the agency believes there is a very, very good chance that the Japanese tech giant is in real trouble and may not be able to pay off its long-term debt.

Over a year ago, Sony's PlayStation Network was hacked. It was an enormous deal, and Sony had to bring down the PSN for weeks in order to maintain safety, preventing consumers from PlayStation 3 and PSP online gaming and digital purchases for the length of the outage. Now, this far into the PlayStation 3's life cycle -- most likely a year or two away from Sony's next console replacing this one -- a team of hackers has reportedly obtained and released the console's "master key" online. This means that, along with some custom firmware, people can run pirated software on the PlayStation 3.

The dawn of the next generation of video game consoles is nigh. Though they haven't exactly been forthcoming about their next-gen consoles, both Microsoft and Sony are obviously hard at work on them. Plus, the Wii U is definitely coming. With this is mind, it's obviously time that the PlayStation Store got a major redesign. Instead of actually making it useful during the actual life of the system, it should clearly be both useful and quickly obsolete.

"If Sony can't have Kevin Butler, no one can!" That was the sentiment (I assume) in a board room somewhere at Sony headquarters when company executives realized that ex-spokesman Jerry Lambert, the man you probably know as fake PlayStation executive Kevin Butler, was caught red-handed playing another console in a commercial on national TV. Hurt and mentally traumatized, Sony is suing Lambert and Bridgestone Tires over an ad where the man formerly known as Butler is shown playing the Nintendo Wii.

Digital comics seem to be the way of the future: Storing comics on a computer is great for world travellers living in small apartments, but bad news for collectors who like to show off their life experience with stacks of longboxes. The collectors have a point: Downloading comics instead of keeping physical copies definitely has its pitfalls. You never know when your comic-reading platform of choice may just decide to shut down forever. Case in point, Sony announced that they plan to shut down the PSP's comic book store at the end of October.

There's something almost reasonable about the idea that the large cable companies, like Verizon and Time Warner, are looking to get a slice of console gaming pie. After all, those rigs need a television, right? Seems only natural for cable to try to expand into the market. Unfortunately, the technology required to stream games to a television, bypassing a console, just isn't there to support them yet, especially with Gaikai and OnLive being either owned in whole by Sony or requiring a box of its own. In short, it's going to be a long time before this ever happens in any meaningful way.

Well, it's official: At the Tokyo Game Show, Sony has just confirmed the existence of a PlayStation 3 that's slimmer than the typical PlayStation 3 Slim. Now that there's a console even smaller than Slim, though, we'll have to coin a new term. PlayStation 3 Thin, perhaps. A new hardware iteration is all well and good, but it appears that the bundle is just 1/5th smaller and 1/4th lighter. Without much else to go on, the whole thing seems rather pointless.

Security was a major issue for Sony when they designed the PS Vita. Anyone who's familiar with the PSP likely knows that the console is one of the easiest consumer gadgets to crack out there: It was (and is) very easy to pirate PSP games, and that's something Sony does not intend to allow on the PS Vita. Despite Sony's best efforts, no device is "unhackable": Self-proclaimed reverse engineer Yifan Lu says he's found an exploit in the system that will eventually allow custom software to run on the device. While many gaming pirates are hopeful that the breakthrough will lead to hackers eventually jailbreaking the PS Vita, Lu says that his work doesn't allow people to pirate games, and he has no intention of helping them figure out how to do so.

When the tiny $25 hobbyist computer, the Raspberry Pi, first took hold, manufacturing was relegated to China even though the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a U.K. charity. That's not exactly a far cry from how a large amount of companies handle their production, but Raspberry Pi production was sent over to China not because the Foundation wanted to cut costs, but because they needed to cut costs until the unit proved popular enough to be produced back in the U.K. Well, the Raspberry Pi proved popular enough, and with the help of Sony Wales, the Raspberry Pi is now being produced in the U.K. where the Foundation originally intended it to be.

Apparently OnLive's loss is Microsoft's gain. The makers of the Xbox have been courting the employees laid-off by the cloud-based gaming service during their recent buyout fiasco, hosting at least one "OnLive Mixer" in Mountain View, California -- very close to OnLive's Palo Alto headquarters. Looks like someone might be staffing up for their own cloud-based gaming service.

The closure of video game development studios is something that seems to happen in regular cycles. As their larger parent companies tighten their belts, satellite studios get hit with layoffs, and sometimes entire studios go belly up. Sony has just announced that this is the fate of their Studio Liverpool development house. Once known as Psygnosis, Studio Liverpool had been in operation since 1984.

Sony, and by extension the PlayStation 3, has a history of supporting odds and ends via the PlayStation Network. After all, there aren't many games like Flower or Journey on other competing services. That isn't to say Sony is the only one taking chances, but when they do, they're interesting chances to say the least. The fostering of unique and special video games is likely one of the only reasons we're seeing Papo & Yo, a game about a child dealing which his alcoholic father, hit the digital shelves at all. Check out the launch trailer above to see just how different video games can truly be.

Sony had previously announced a Ratchet & Clank Collection -- a remastered version of the original three PlayStation 2 titles -- for the PlayStation 3 would be hitting store shelves on August 28th of this year. As it turns out, this wasn't the only card Sony had up their sleeve. The company has revealed in a post on their blog that August 28th will actually see the release of their Collections line as a whole. God of War Saga and inFAMOUS Collection will be making their debut on the same day.

Yes, they do, in fact, still make those. I was surprised too! Sony even released their newest entry into the Walkman line in Europe just yesterday. The Walkman F800 will be the slimmest ever and will come sporting the Android 4.0 operating system. But where did it all begin? We'll be taking a look at the storied past behind Sony's portable media player and sharing a few of the F800's details after the jump!

Recent filings with the Federal Communications Commission alerted hawk-eyed watchers to the existence of a new model of PlayStation 3: The "CECH-4001X." Up until now, however, it wasn't known exactly what kind of changes Sony would include in this new model. That's where Anatel, which is effectively the Brazilian version of the FCC, comes into play. Their own documents apparently included a series of images purported to be of this fantastical new design.