Lunchtime Discussion: Downtime

“Extra! Extra! Read all about it! PS3s dead!” That seemed to be the consensus of the internet yesterday, with a high number of the ‘Phat’ PS3s suddenly failing to connect to the PSN, deciding they didn’t want to play games and generally being a pain in the ass. The official term for the event will probably be the “8001050F event” but Apocalyps3 seems to have a nicer ring to it, and the one that everyone’s latched onto.

This is probably the first time I can recall so a huge console failure in one go, although certain Zune models suffered from the exact same issue last year. Of course we’ve had the ‘scandal’ of the other console failures this generation, the YLoD and the RRoD that seem to be sweeping through the install base of both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles, although the RRoD still seems to be a much larger issue.

Yesterday’s issues were much nicer than the YLoD or RRoD issues, as they don’t actually completely kill your console. However, even over a day long outage, people seemed to panic a little, complaining about being unable to play their favourite titles. A lot of this panic can be placed on Sony, their poor communication only heightened the fear and uncertainty that was running around the community.

A day’s outage isn’t so bad though. What if it had been days, weeks, the kind of time it takes to get a dead console returned to you. What would you do? When my 360 got the RRoD mostly I just procrastinated about sending it back but, as colossalblue has commented in the past, than again I don’t actually play games much.

So what about you? What did you do yesterday if you were affected? If you’ve ever had a more severe console failure then how did you spend the hours you’d normally spend gaming? Did you take up crochet, or perhaps you created a perpetual motion machine?