Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Disgust for Sony because of Rock Band 2 for PS2

Nothing Wow related here. But I must vent. Excuse the wall of text, but I find the details important.

I've been a big fan of the Guitar Heroes games and then the Rock Band game. While Guitar Heroes was fun, some of the songs became too challenging and while I could still play them, it became more of a chore then rocking out to your favorite songs. Plus, some of the harder songs were just too heavy rock for me. Plus, you could only play 2 players for Guitar Heroes.

Last year (well, 2007) when I was given Rock Band for Christmas, it easily became my favorite game. It's the perfect double date especially since on Easy mode, most of the songs (even the super hard ones) were fairly easy to do. I have the PS2, and I have had it for quite some time now. I kept trying to convince the Mrs that we should buy a PS3 for the downloadable content (aka new songs), but even if I had her permission, I couldn't justify spending $450 or so for basically just one game.

This past Christmas, a buddy of mine bought me Rock Band 2. There was a whole fiasco with Amazon, but I won't go into that now. But I should have gotten it before Christmas, but I got it a few days after. (No big deal, right?) So, the first night, I played it and it froze up on a few songs. A quick reset, and no problem. I played it for a few nights, and then it stopped working altogether. I kept getting the "Disc Error" message from my PS2.

Exchanging the disc to Game Stop did nothing. Same errors. And all of my other discs (granted all old games) loaded fine.

So, I called the number on my PS2 for Sony. The nice (at first) lady first informed me that they were having a lot of problems with RB2 because of the Dual-Layer. She later went back and said that they were having "some" problems with the Dual-Layer. After getting all my personal information, she informed me that if I shipped back my PS2 (at my own cost (about $10)) and gave them $45, they'd send me a PS2 that would work with RB2 (refurbished, of course).

In my quick calculations, that's $55 that I'd have to wait at least a week for, and at this point, I couldn't even guarantee that it would work with RB2 except that they say it would. --OR-- for $59, I could go to Gamestop and get a refurbished PS2 that i could test out the game on before I left the store.

So, to make my point of view clear to the nice lady at Sony, I explained that I didn't really think it was fair that I was going to have to spend $55 to make my system work for a game that they authorized Harmonix to create for the PS2 regardless of model I have. She got very snippy and start accusing me of putting words into her mouth. I asked for her manager, but after 2 minutes on hold, I figured it wasn't going to make a difference anyway, and I hung up.

Off to the Internet to see if I can find answers. The majority of people said they took their PS2's apart, cleaned the lens, and then it worked fine. Being very familiar with computers and taking them apart, I figured I could do this. Having never taken apart a PS2, I was very careful. Did exactly what they said. Put it back together. And now my PS2 won't even power on at all.

So, my options seem to be either buy the refurbished PS2 from Gamestop, or bite the bullet and buy the refurbished PS3 from the same place. (The new ones aren't backwards compatible with the PS2.) I really only have myself to blame for breaking the PS2, but it infuriates me that Sony won't take action to fix their original problem that authorized games won't play on many systems. (They've consolidated all the PS2 issues into one post here, but yesterday I saw one that was 4 pages long.) They claim it's a misaligned laser, but there's way too many people that cleaned it to fix the problem.

Maybe I can raise the money by buying BuyMeAPS3.com. lol.

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