So I finally get a new game to play on my PS3, picking have been slim so far Heavenly sword was OK but very short and there has been very little since. So I'm playing Ratchet and Clank which looks amazing really pixar movie in real time at some points, if my TV supported HiDef it would probably look even more amazing.
So anyway I play that for a bit and then it's getting a touch late so I quit and decide to do the firmware upgrade that has just come out. It completes everything looks OK I shut the thing down and go to bed. Come the morning, or afternoon as the case may be on a Saturday, I boot the thing up to play a bit more. It doesn't auto play and for some reason the disk doesn't show up in the games section of XMB. I eject the disk and try putting it in again, still nothing. I try restarting the machine and trying it again, still nothing. By this point I'm angrily thinking that the game disk has become unreadable some how maybe it got to hot or some such. So I reach for the nearest available disk I know works and try it, nothing. Half an hour later I've tried every possible PS3 game disks I have and several Bluray disks, DVD's, PS2 disks and not one seems to work.
I go online and find other people saying the same thing, so it looks like the latest firmware has buggered my PS3 at least if I want to play a game off the disks. The online functions and the games I've downloaded onto it via the playstation network all work fine so the main hardware is functional, they just seem to have fucked it's ability to read any type of media in its disk drive.
Naturally I get straight on the phone, they suggest several things in increasing levels of improbability. Reset the system settings to default, might work but doesn't. Reformat the unit's hard drive, hmmm maybe but no does bugger all apart from necessitating that I erase all my downloaded stuff which I hope I can get back since I paid for some of it. Then unplug the unit completely for an hour and then connect only the tv and power leads leave it for a short while then stick a game in to turn it on, Hmmm no. So now it's too late to call them up but they said on my last call if this failed then the unit is faulty and needs to be replaced. Which is misleading, it wasn't faulty till their buggered up firmware screwed it over. It makes me wonder if my UK ps3 has some slightly different hardware set up to a US/Japanese one that means their new firmware buggered it. Perhaps better testing was needed on this since by the sounds of it this isn't just my machine that's been turned into a very expensive semi paperweight.
So now I am quite annoyed this isn't the first time I've had a console fail my 360 blew up about a month out of warranty (though they thankfully didn't charge me for it and of course now they have extended it to a 3 year warranty). My ps2 which is a launch model still more or less works some 6 or 7 years on from when it was released. Are all new consoles just inherently unreliable and prone to massive hardware and or software failure. It seems a bit off to me.
To top it all I went to see if I could get the simpsons game to cheer myself up a bit and the local sainsburys had sold out, bastards so now I'm just seething quietly. I guess I'll be spending tomorrows on the phone to see if I can get them to replace my still fairly new ps3, bloody sony.
Comments
That sucks, but thanks for confirming what I though all along, the Wii is the best of the current generation consoles.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. You've really had bad luck with this generation of consoles. :(
Well, I say bad luck - it only takes average luck to have a 360 turn into a brick, if the interweb is to be believed. As for this - I can believe they've put out a bad firmware patch. If that's what it is, I'd expect a new one that sorts the problem to land very early next week...
Um... I hope this isn't representative, or you might have some trouble getting your machine sorted... :/
That is quite astoundingly bad, "too much dust" and that coming under acts of god in the warranty. I know this god fella supposedly works in mysterious ways but I can't really see what he was up to with that one.
As for the wii being above this sort of thing, there were a spate of brickings due to firmware updates in the early days so they are not immune to this sort of thing neither.
Sony are now sending me a replacement factory reconditioned unit on tuesday. Unlike the xbox360 where I had to send them the old one first it sounds like they are dispatching the unit monday and I just swap my buggered one for the "new" one when he turns up between 8 and 6 on tuesday. Still an arse to have a machine semi bricked by a firmware update. The speed with which the guy first denied it was anything to do with the firmware then went straight to "we'll send you a new one without even looking at the old one" makes me suspect they've spotted their mistake and are quietly trying to sweep it under the carpet before the gaming press gets hold of it or even worse Microsoft.
This sort of thing makes me sick. It goes to show that if you do give something a feature like firmware updates, you might be making a rod for your own back. Updating the firmware allows you to do less testing because you have a way of updating the system at a later date. You don't have to worry about those 1-in-100 intermittant failures. On the other hand, if you don't test your firmware (or even the installation process of it) then you can balls up a hell of a lot of hardware in one easy hit.
I do worry that the drop in quality due to this sort of technology has leads to a less-than-watertight approach to hardware release. Everything will have bugs in it but being able to upgrade the firmware makes these profit margin carful companies skimp on testing. Very naughty. Ironicly, what makes me a good developer is the backup of a very good test team.
Sorry to hear you're having so much grief with it. The additional pain is that you won't get back the time spent on the phone - when you'd rather be gaming.
Part of the problem is not allowing users a choice whether to update their firmware or if to reinstall it with older more reliable stuff. By making the process one way they are risking any slight miscalculation in their code or lack in their testing causing a bricked unit.
If it were possible to downgrade the firmware then in this I might well have been able to restore the unit's functionality without having to send it to sony.
With consoles and other consumer electronics where DRM is involved the firmware serves a dual purpose of increasing functionality and blocking up holes in the systems security. As yet I don't think they have actually penetrated the ps3 security system (though it probably won't be long both the wii and the x360 have been compromised to various degrees) but to ensure their system remains safe they need to first stop users from installing old more vulnerable firmwares and second force them to upgrade. The former they achieve partly through the firmware itself not allowing older stuff to load over it and occasionally with efuses inside the hardware that can be blown to prevent users from loading in code the manufacturers don't want and the later they manage by having the machine deny access to games (new games are coded with a minimum firmware version they will accept) and or services (for instance the 360 won't log into live if it is out of date) to ensure their customers are forced to upgrade to prevent a proliferation of attacks against software bugs to allow the unit to play pirate games/media.
It's all fruitless anyway merely a delaying tactic there is no DRM system that is unbreakable just look at the psp countless attempts to make the thing more secure but every single time a new hack would appear within days of a new firmware release. All this rush to protect the thing does in inconvenience "honest" customers and also make the presumption of guilt on everyone.
I now have a shiny "new" PS3 sat on the desk beside me. Hopefully it will work OK and come with 2.0 pre installed so there is no chance of it being bricked again. Well at least till 2.1 firmware comes out.
It's like a firmware lottery.
It always is with consoles it may work it may brick the machine. There is no going back once you choose to upgrade and if you refuse to upgrade you can't play any new games or use their services. Wii 360 ps3 they're all the same there is always the chance the forced upgrade will destroy your console and when it happens you just have to hope they replace it. It's the annoying reality of these things.
what about the downloaded content, EMW? Can you get that again or is it lost?
I should be able to get it again, I don't think it's locked to the unit I think it's stored in the playstation network history.
I know with 360's you have an issue where if you swap the unit and have live arcade games you can then only play them while live is connected on the new console due to the serial number change, but I'm not sure if that is the case with the ps3.
I popped back at lunch to try out the new unit only to find it came with 1.90 firmware to low to actually run anything new. So I rolled the dice again and this time it seemed to go through OK it certainly worked afterwards so hopefully it's all fine and dandy now.
Fingers crossed for you, mate. Let's hope it's not 3-0.