Last week, we had a little fun talking about the premature departure of Sony’s favorite made up vice president Kevin Butler. Butler announced on Twitter he was becoming president of a flooring company and that there may be a commercial to support that. Sony also told us to stay tuned for more information. Today, Sony revealed a new marketing campaign called “Long Live Play” that hoists Kevin Butler back into the limelight.

Sony is not going to be happy today. See, somebody’s just figured out a way to crack open its latest baby, the Xperia Play. The Xperia Play is a smartphone with the ability to play original PlayStation games on it, and until now people had to make do with the PSOne games Sony was releasing via the PlayStation Suite. I say until now, because an Android developer named Yifan Lu found a way to get the phone’s included emulator to recognize game files not acquired through Sony.

What makes Yifan Lu’s work special is that it’s actually based entirely on the PlayStation emulator Sony has built into the Xperia Play…

NEO-GEO was a force to be reckoned with when it came out back in the ’80s. OK, so maybe that’s not entirely true but it still had some awesome games that are making a comeback to your PSP and PS3 starting.

Starting July 19, 2011, SNK Playmore USA has re-released eight NEO-GEO titles to the Playstation store in North America for your downloading pleasure. The titles will be released as Playstation Minis and will be featured in both the “New Releases” category and the “SNK NEOGEO” Featured Publishers page.

At this time, no one but executives and certain at Sony and Microsoft have any idea when new consoles are expected to arrive. The only thing we realistically assume is that Microsoft and Sony are currently researching and possibly putting together hardware features for their new consoles. However, we’re all allowed to place our bets on when those consoles will be released. GameStop’s estimates the successors for the PS3 and Xbox 360 will be here in 2014.

We’re now in the generation of hard drives, SD cards and even the occasional memory stick when it comes to backing up game saves. It almost makes it hard to believe that a few years ago the standard method was memory cards, plastic blocks gamers would shove into consoles or controllers so they could save their game progress. At the time, memory cards were the thing. They offered a sense of freedom gamers hadn’t had before, allowing them to take their game progress on the go with them, not bound by on-cartridge memory or those loathed passwords.

Some companies decided that maybe they should take memory cards a step further. Not only have these devices hold onto our valuable game data, but allow them to be game playing devices as well. The results were Sony’s PocketStation for the PlayStation and Sega’s Visual Memory Unit for the Dreamcast. Sony’s PocketStation crashed and burned, while the VMU could be helpful, but never really reached the iconic status Sega hoped for. This week, let’s learn a little more about both of them…

Developers were recently notified that a new revision of the PlayStation 3 is in the testing process that will feature a new copy protection system not on the motherboard but inside the BD-ROM drive itself, similar to the Xbox 360.

In Japan, “X” – pronounced “cross” – is sometimes used when two titans of entertainment work together on a song, an album or a movie. When Capcom and Namco announced that the two biggest franchises in fighting were finally coming together to do battle and put another “who would win” debate to bed. Capcom won the coin toss and will be releasing their game firs and they had it out for play at E3 2011

You’ve seen the PlayStation Vita, you’ve read about the PlayStation Vita and now you want a PlayStation Vita. You probably have a few questions about the device that have gone unanswered. Don’t worry, Sony hears you and it has put together a handy FAQ with answers to some of the most common questions. We’re going to go over some of the more interesting answers right here.

Gamertell got some one-on-one time with Sony’s new Sharpshooter peripheral and Resistance 3 . Here’s our initial reactions…

Anonymous: an online community of hackers notorious for hacking into government sites and sticking it to ‘the man’. Their activities include releasing government information about war crimes, striking back at anti-piracy enforcers, and generally sticking up for the little guy, whoever they think he is. Note the motto on the flier. It almost sounds like something out of a movie, but this real (if loose) group of people actually exists, and up until recently, was viewed with some admiration by gamers, who can only imagine that hackers are gamer geeks as well (after all, gamers use computers just like Anonymous, right?).