Speaking from experience - if you're about to walk away - back up your game save data - (to a memory stick, USB or what not) and delete ALL save data (yeah, every ghost, one by one painful as it may be) - then download the game again from the PSN store - you're allowed to do this free of charge 4 or 5 times.

Play 1.26 for a while - and bask in all it's glory - just click "cancel" when the game launches to avoid updating. This will tell you, "yes, you WERE that good - no it's not in your head"

Once you had your fill of offline fun - update the game to 1.4 - and YES, it's nowhere as good as 1.26 - that said, it worked so much better, I can tolerate it again. At 1.4 the game is 100% better than it was when I was on 1.3 - but still 15% short of 1.26.