We first met Andre Vrignaud, a.k.a. Ozymandias, in San Francisco during the fall of 2001. At the time, he was Intel's evangelist to PC game developers, where he impressed us as both whip-smart and highly opinionated. These days, he works for Microsoft. Officially, he's the director of technical strategy for Xbox Live. But it's his unofficial role that we find far more amusing: as the Sean Hannity of the Xbox division's blog army, which includes Major Nelson, Gamerscore and Game Tycoon. Part Karl Rove, part Alex Forrest (the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction"), Vrignaud is plainly obsessed with compiling oppo research on the Playstation 3, and he won't be ignored.

Some of his post titles are sufficiently innocuous to temporarily disguise their true intent, like "Playstation 3 User Interface Thoughts" or "Thoughts on PS3 Launch Quantities Being Cut." Others, like "PS3 Online Being Supported By Xfire...Not as Cool as It Seems" and "Playstation 3 - She Just Ain't Done," have a very clear objective, and its initials are F, U and D. And no matter how much he tries to resist, Vrignaud simply can't help himself. On December 5th, he ended his "She Just Ain't Done" post by saying, "I'm probably done posting on the PS3 for now--at least until something changes for the better, or there's something positive to say." We took Vrignaud at his word, but his willpower crumbled after a mere eight days; yesterday, he composed the the decidedly un-positive post "PS3 Backward Compatibility Jaggies," complete with video. At this point, the only thing missing is a bunny rabbit boiling in a pot of water on Playstation chairman Ken Kutaragi's stove.

Still, as hilariously transparent as Vrignaud's motives may be, it doesn't excuse the fact that when it comes to the Battle of the Blogs, Sony Computer Entertainment has simply chosen not to fight. The only Playstation blog to speak of is the Europe-based Three Speech, which describes itself as follows: "'Three Speech isn't part of Playstation, but it does get to speak to Playstation. You could say we're 'semi official'." That's, um, different, we suppose. But having journalists write about Playstation in a "semi-official" capacity compromises the "journalists" involved--think Pravda or Armstrong Williams--without giving consumers the information they really need from the company whose products they've purchased.

Take a single example: the PS3 firmware updates that SCE requires gamers to download. Nothing in the download process explains what changes these updates actually make to the PS3's functionality. So gamers are left trying to figure it out for themselves until SCE deigns to release an explanation, if at all. Now compare that to Microsoft. When its movie/TV downloading service turned out to be effectively unusable upon its November launch, Microsoft used Major Nelson's blog as one of the main ways to reassure Xbox 360 users that the problems were known, were being addressed, and keeping its fans in the loop until the flaws were resolved. So while SCEA execs have told us that they plan to address the Blog Gap between themselves and Microsoft, the Vrignaud's Atwater-esque tactics and SCE's own puzzling silence on key aspects of its flagship product suggest that Sony should address this problem sooner rather than later.