I turned on the PlayStation 3 Wednesday night, and after logging in, I got a system update message. On one hand, I think it's great that Sony is getting these firmware updates out quickly and responding to early issues. On the other hand, there have been quite a few firmware updates already and they can take quite a while. And you can't jump out and play a game while the system update is loading, so you're basically stuck.

Well, I'm an impatient man, and when the latest update was only 5% completed after about 10 minutes, I decided to cancel it. But before I could lay a finger on the wireless controller to click the magic "X" button, Fredi, Aaron and Shelton screamed "No!" - you know, like a long, drawn-out, slow motion "No!" - and quickly reminded me what happened to some folks who cancelled or turned off their PSPs during firmware updates. Since the PlayStation 3 uses the same XMB interface as the PSP, it's entirely possible that I could have bricked the system. And quite frankly, we're too afraid to find out what will happen (though we've read some forum posts about people turning their consoles off during the updates and bricking their systems).

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What we do know now is that Sony's online network is slow, at least for updates and downloads. You can't fire up a Blu-ray movie or even watch a game trailer during the firmware updates; you just have to sit there and watch the water boil. Between the first few updates and downloading the demo for the new Gran Turismo, not to mention all the end user license agreements (EULAs), we've lost hours of valuable game time for the console (not that there are all that many worthy PS3 games yet, but still). And most of it is because Sony apparently rushed the already-delayed console out before the quality assurance people could ensure that PlayStation 2 games actually worked on the darn thing, which makes early adopters feel more like beta testers.

But here's the curveball: all the waiting and cumbersome updates became a distant afterthought once I got into the multiplayer online mode for Resistance: Fall of Man. In last week's column, I criticized Resistance for having good but not great visuals and too many uninspired first-person shooter clichés. And while the co-op mode and offline multiplayer death matches were enjoyable, I was still disappointed by Resistance, which had been hyped as a "Halo killer."

I also noted in last week's column that I didn't get around to trying the game's online multiplayer mode, for which some readers took me to task. Well, I spent several hours over the last week playing Resistance via Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN), and I was incredibly impressed. This wasn't another one of Sony's broken promises or next-generation hype that fell flat on its bloated face like Elvis falling off the toilet at his moment of death. No, this was the real deal.

First, getting into online multiplayer mode is easy on Resistance. Press a few buttons and you're there. Players can choose two between ranked team-based competitions or solo free-for-all melees with up to 40 players. There are only a few screens to negotiate before you join a game, such as a silly "online user agreement" and a screen for Insomniac Games announcements [click on the slide show to see the corresponding screenshots]. One you've selected the type of game you want to play, a match-making screen comes up while the system takes a few seconds to uplink. Then a staging screen comes up with all the vital info, such as name ("Free-For-All Game"), map, type ("Deathmatch"), number of players and, of course, a roster of each player's gamer handles ("twitchguru" is ours) and rank (there are 60 different ranks with various badges and icons that I haven't figured out quite yet). After a couple of more loading screens that last about 10 seconds each, the action starts.

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