To quote a certain Whiskey colleague of mine, it's been a looooong roooooad for Sony lo these last several weeks. We, the collective gaming audience, have given the company a perhaps rightful amount of crap for how it handled communication with its customers during the fallout of the hack that sent the PlayStation Network into offline limbo for longer than anyone could have possibly expected. While the Welcome Back program and assurances of identity theft insurance did a little to help quell the masses, deep down, I think all any of us really wanted was just to get back onto PSN and start playing some damn games.

Welcome back, old friend.

Today marks one of the final steps in that "get back to playing some damn games" initiative, as Sony announced via the PlayStation blog that the PlayStation Store has emerged from the ashen cloud of offline purgatory and returned to the online realm in both North America and Europe. Though you may run into a few errors throughout the day trying to access certain content, these are likely just creaks from the house settling itself, and soon enough, everything should be back in proper working order.

The blog entry lists an almost absurd amount of new content for players to sort through--seven weeks is a long time, yo--which I will skip out on re-posting here. Suffice it to say, there is a veritable smorgasbord of new games, demos, DLC, avatar crap, and the like available for your perusal. There's even a new episode of Qore, if you're into that kind of thing.

It's worth noting that none of the Welcome Back program downloads are available just yet. Sony's post explains that the apology downloads are currently going through the final phase of testing, and should be available "soon."

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some L.A. Noire PS3-exclusive content to finally download and dig into!