You may be wondering (though probably not) about why there hasn't been another episode of our trip through the Last of Us. Well, part of that is that my wife and I just haven't had a lot of joint time to sit down and play it. The larger reason, though, has to do with one Sony Computer Entertainment.
Just after Christmas, I switched on my PS3 to see what was new on the putridly run PlayStation store for that week. Even though it was late and I had a few beers in me, I noticed a certain lack of hum from my little black supercomputer. After the requisite 45 years that it takes to boot the system up and log into the store, the PS3 gives me one of it's kindly warning messages that, hey, your system's about to cook itself, and it's shutting off now. Sorry for the trouble. This has happened before, so I was only mildly alarmed. It shut down, I waited a few minutes, and flipped it back on to make sure that everything was on the up and up. Not even five minutes in and it was back to overheating. My cooling fan, friends, has slipped its mortal coil, and lo, My PlayStation 3 is inoperable.
And this is the third time.
No, I'm not saying that this particular PS3 has ceased to bestow enjoyment upon me three times. I'm saying that this is the third effing PS3 that's died on me in the last several years. My first was a 60gig launch model (the kind that was fully backward compatible), and I loved it like a son. I don't get rid of anything anymore, and even though I don't play PSOne or PS2 games on the regular, I will pull a couple out a few times a year. The loss of this machine was a serious hit to my perverse need to make sure I can do whatever I want, whenever I want (which, I suppose, is a problem). So, I called Sony, and $150 later they swap one with me; another 60gig fat bastard of a PlayStation sent right to my door. That love didn't last, either. We were living on borrowed time, this backward compatible PS3 and I, and so I called them again when that one died, too. "That'll be another 150 clams," they said, much to my protest. I'm a very loyal Sony customer, and had even sent back a PS2 on the fritz about ten years ago. Can't you guys help me out with this? Mitigate the cost at all? Stupid, stupid broken-video-game-console-owner. We're Sony. We don't do that shit. I wasn't willing to spend another stack of money on a console that they basically assured me over the phone they'll never replace. The PS3 Fat is dead, and my one-fiddy would only be buying a refurbished Slim. Nuts to that. I convinced myself to get a brand new Super Slim, which was just about to launch the next week.
So, you can probably imagine my fury when all of this was going down a few weeks ago. If you've done a little research and a little math, you've determined that this PS3 Super Slim is only a year old, but just over a year, so the warranty is expired (of course). After waiting for their customer service staff to come back from whatever year-end break they were on, I called them yet again to complain about the fact that this thing they built don't work good or nuthin.' The guy on the phone did what he could, but it had to be sent back to them for repairs, and that was going to cost me $100. He begins his rote spiel about how this is quality service from Sony's own staff and that they'll replace the system if it can't be fixed and ahhhhhh BULLSHIT. Stop right there, friend; this is my third freaking PS3, and you need to help me with this, I tell him. What happens next is truly baffling.
"Yes, I absolutely get it," he says. "Let me connect you to one of the accounts people, but let me tell them what's going on with you, first." Fine. This happened during the end of the Second Era, but it was just an operator "asking her manager" if it was ok to help me with the repair fee. That didn't work then, so I had to prepare my response carefully for when it wasn't going to work now. About five minutes later, I find that I actually am talking to another person on the phone, a very sweet-natured woman whom wanted me to go through the whole thing again. As calmly as I could, I lay it out for her, and ask her if she would kindly help mitigate the cost of fixing this thing.
"Sure," she says without even letting me stop. "As a one-time show of good faith, we'll waive the cost of repairs for you. We're shipping you a box tomorrow." What happened after that was about 15 seconds of shock-fueled silence to the point that she thought that I accidentally hung up on her. I am back to being a happy Sony customer.
So what did we learn here? If you buy more than one stupidly expensive piece of entertainment hardware, the third one can be fixed for free. Less cynical than that, I guess, is that sometimes, the little guy gets his way. So there.
Your homework today is to check out Kat Bailey's preview of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, a game that's dropping in about a month or so. Now, I do this with reservation for a few reasons, but mostly because this is the only preview of the game that I've seen that points out a key situation from the demo that she played and how unsettling it is for all of the wrong reasons, something nobody else seems to mention across the internet. The comments that follow the piece are some of the worst that the internet has to offer, but it's a unique perspective and calls to mind other debates that gaming has to start paying closer attention to from now on. Read the article with interest and the comments with caution.
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