Semantic Nonsense: What in blazes is going on with Sony?

The past week or two has been a tumultuous one for people deeply invested in the Playstation ecosystem. It’s reminded me of in no small amount the adventures in preordering a SNES Classic, so I decided to immortalize this journey, too.

When Sony announced they would shut down the Playstation Store for the Playstation 3, PSP and VIta this summer, it started a predictable rush on the service. For my part, I was out to make sure every game I had on each platform was patched up, take one last peruse through their DLC and also look through all the digital-only games.

Treasure hunter

But before any of that could happen, I first had to embark on a scavenger hunt. The power charger for the PSP had gone missing since the Four White Mage Challenge stream concluded, which I found after digging through the storage bins in my office.

However, I was next waylaid by the PSP’s inability to connect to the wireless network in my current home. (After flipping my house, I moved in with a college buddy, who already had a newer wifi router, so I just tucked mine away to save for when I would eventually return to being a homeowner.)

Double however, I had never before connected my PSP to this old router (and thus, never configured the router to put out a 802.11g signal using WEP or lower security). I was remembering the router that had originally came with my cable service. D’oh. But it was just as well that I got it out, as the PlayStation 3 needed it. The VIta got on my roomate’s router just fine.

The scavenger hunt would continue with the PS3, as there weren’t any USB to mini-USB cables handy. I drained the residual charge on both of my DualShock3’s before eventually finding a cable. Sadly, only one of the controllers recharged. The other could be used so long as it was plugged in, but the cable I found was only a foot long. Don’t ask me why I had a foot-long mini-USB cable; I haven’t a clue to where it came. I’d like to think I would never go out of my way to buy a cable of such a worthless length.

But having gathered everything I needed to get started, I opted to deal with the PSP’s wireless issues for later and jumped straight into the Vita.

Geek Babble

Managing the Vita was pretty straightforward. Just seven physical and two digital games. Load them all up, check for updates and DLC, then delete Shantae: Half-Genie Hero and download Timespinner.

Digging through the Vita electronic library found me only buying PS1 Classics. Some were games I’d never find and wanted to try, though a couple were just-in-case digital copies of the difficult to replace Mega Man Legends games. I also grabbed a copy of Final Fantasy V for the eventual Four Job Fiesta stream given I find the translation of the GBA version quite aggravating. It’s like they were inspired by Working Desgin’s translation work but failed to notice WD tended to put their wacky lines in optional NPC dialog instead of dramatic cutscenes.

But I digress. Doing my Playstation Store last hurrah with the Vita went so smoothly, I really ought to have expected encountering enough whammies for two systems on the PlayStation 3. But several of the problems I would encounter I really had no chance of foreseeing.

Channel J

While I had occasionally still played games on my PS3, it’s primary role before I moved was to use streaming services on a non-smart HDTV. Everything but Twitch still works on the system, so that’s nice.

Trying to dig through the store itself was an unrewarding grind. I didn’t remember that the PS3 could barely walk and chew gum while the Playstation Store was open. Do a background download and browse? Sure, if you like pain. And the store would just plain clash when the download was finished. Not to mention the need to go through the checkout process multiple times to buy something, as it just throws an error whenever it feels like it. But I think the worst of all was how every time I added something to my cart, I had to go back to the beginning of the catalog instead of where the listing I had been looking at was.

Still, the clunkiness of the experience wasn’t the only oddity I encountered. Apparently, a whole bunch of developers had given up on their PS3 games long before Sony announced the store’s closure.

Listed! By the Numbers

Out of the 20+ PS3 discs I fed the system a whopping two had patches available. Upon further inspection, I learned that I wasn’t the only one left wondering if their games were truly up to date. Sure enough, NHL ’15 and Dante’s Inferno were not on the newest patch despite it not being able to find an update. I wasn’t the only one affected, either. A tracking list is being curated at the PSN Profiles forum, and they discovered that some of the patches have reappeared since.

Similar to the missing patches, a bunch of DLC is also unavailable. Some of them were still listed, but with the purchase option removed, while other items simply vanished entirely. I have not found anybody making a similar effort to catalog the missing DLC, just a few one-off complaints. There was one I actually wanted to buy; the two new characters for Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. This one is rather annoying as the game tells me every time I load it that new DLC is available only for the Playstation Store to “nuh-uh” me.

Recommended soundtracks

The songs for the Rock Band games are in a weird state of flux. Officially, the music store closed years ago, and is inaccessible from in-game. But all the tracks remain listed in the Playstation store as purchasable. And after erroring more than a dozen times, I successfully purchased a cartful (10) of them. Another oddity is that the music I already had parched sometimes showed up in “purchased” status, and others were instead listed as “free.”

It’s hard to say just when all this happened, as people hadn’t generally been paying attention to the Playstation Store for PS3 until the recent news.

As Sisiphyian an effort as the slog through the PS3 Playstation Store was, the biggest problem and shock was yet to come. Several of the games on my PS3 couldn’t find their save files any more. I was able to verify the save files were still present in the PS3’s UI, but it didn’t matter to the games themselves. My clear field for Ghostbusters, Beyond: Two Souls, Bioshock: Infinite, You Don’t Know Jack, and others became little more than digital paperwights. Which would be useful if I had any digital paper. And just to mix things up, 3D Dot Game Heroes could find the save file, but not the game install data. And then couldn’t find the save after I reinstalled the data.

Naughty and nice

Still, I was considering upgrading a few of my PS3 games to their PS4 versions and for a few, this half the nudge to bite the bullet. The other half was a bit of unexpected comparison shopping. You see, I had South Park: The Stick of Truth on the PS3, and I also had a digital copy of the PS4 version as a freebie with my PS4 copy of South Park: The Fractured But Whole. I decided while I was running every PS3 game I had anyway, I’d compare the versions. And that PS3 version was super choppy. I’m not talking normal South Park animation style choppy, I mean stutters and lag choppy. It didn’t bother me so much when I was originally playing the game, but it’s hard to go back to it after experiencing the silky smoothness of the PS4 version.

So I asked around with various Discords and gamer friends which other games might be worth upgrading for a better experience, and then ordered just the ones that I had lost my progress in.

So naturally, after I placed the orders and sold off the PS3 versions, the CMOS bombshell — and how it affects physical games on PS4 and NOT on PS3 — hit.

Cognition Dissemination

…I’m so good at jinxing things that I ought to be getting paid for it. This sort of thing happens all the time.

Examples of damage control in gaming

Not long after Sony’s announcement, a fact already known well in the hacking and repair communities was put on blast: If the PS3’s tiny watch battery ever dies and/or is replaced, you will not be able to play digital games on it until the system can resync with the Playstation Network by visiting the Playstation Store.

Panic ensued.

Gamers frantically took action. Some preemptively replaced their CMOS batteries while they could still connect to the store. Others immediately tested the PS4 and PS5 for the same issue. They discovered the same was true on these systems for all digital titles, some physical games on PS5, and ALL physical games on PS4.

Several news outlets reached out to Sony, but Sony has not made any acknowledgement of the issue. A support ticket I issued on the subject has not been responded to as of the publication of this post.

But perhaps Sony’s announcement earlier this week that they will be leaving the PS3 and PS Vita stores open for an undisclosed amount of time longer tells us everything we need to know about the CMOS issue. I suspect Sony will not attempt to close the stores again until after it has released a solution that is satisfactory to them (if, indeed, any solution would be).

The PSP got no such stay of execution, and its store will be dying as planned in July. However, I can confirm through my own testing that the PSP does not have such a battery, and has no need whatsoever to phone home before letting you play any of its games, digital or otherwise. Which is another reason why I suspect the CMOS scandal is related to the store announcements.

So the bottom line is the only system I actually need to do all this on is the one system I haven’t yet. That, at least, I should have seen coming.

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Amnesia lane

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