I’m a PlayStation 3 owner, and for the most part, I have to say I’m happy with it. Admittedly, I use it for more things than games. It’s a great Blu-Ray player. Nadine and I use it heavily for Netflix. I can watch baseball on it with mlb.tv. There are some fun downloadable games for it on the PlayStation store. I was even able to stream Louis C.K.’s latest comedy show to it over the network from my Mac (as an aside, you really should buy this thing. It’s only $5, it has no DRM whatsoever, it’s hysterical, and you’re helping to support an artist bringing you new material cheaply and legally without making you jump through hoops. Everyone wins, except joke-stealing douche bags like Dane Cook who would never do this). It’s a pretty versatile media machine in my home at this point.
The thing with it, though, is that when it comes to playing games, you have to be invested. Let me explain. Nadine bought me Gran Tourismo 5 for Christmas. It’s good stuff. I like racing games, and the GT series has always been known for its realism and fun. So great. Tonight I decide that I want to try out the game. So I turn on the PS3, pop the disc in, and fire it up to find… a screen that says “Not so fast, you can’t use it until you update it.” sigh Plus, this update is huge. So it starts to download. An error comes up. Turns out my internet connection went down. Click OK on the error (or, in reality, hit the X key on the controller). Game comes up and says “oh hey, this would work a lot better if you install a bunch of data onto your system first”. Allow that, it takes almost 30 minutes. Grow old and feeble. Data install finishes. Game starts to launch and then says “oh hey, you know that update you started? We need to finish that.” Data starts downloading again. Looks like it’s almost done. Rejoice. Going to enjoy driving a virtual car on a virtual track. Update data installs. Get excited. hair starts blowing back in anticipation. Have world crushed when a 1GB plus update starts to download after. Lose desire to play game.
This isn’t the first game this has happened to for me, as I’m sure it’s not for others. The thing is that it’s frustrating. I admit that as big of a geek as I claim to be, I’m little more than a casual gamer. I got other things to do. I don’t even know if there’s a way for Sony to make this better in PlayStation 4 or what have you. Until then, I guess I’ll just stare at this download screen and go on with my real life.
I guess this is why my computer had an error message on it this morning telling me that “another computer has the same IP address as this one” and then exploded.