Video Game Sandwich

As a very recent recruit to the PS3 band-wagon one of my first, most important actions was to seek out the Metal Gear Solid Online beta from PSN. Excitement, over the course of the 12 or so hours it’s taken me to play the game, understandably died. Slowly. Fragment by fragment, like the tragic single-parent kid who’s waiting for his dad to come to his mother’s house and pick him up for a day at the ball park. “He’ll be here any minute, honey.” No he wont…

Konami is that dad, and MGSO is that ball park. So far it’s taken me around 14 hours to play this game, and it’s still a work in progress. Let me explain the many, MANY steps it’s cost me so far…

1. Downloading the game. This was tragically slow in itself. It took around 4 hours to do so, and it’s only 740 megabytes in size.
2. Installing the game. This consumed about 40 or so minutes in itself. Besides, why do you have to install PS3 demos at all? Does this take up room both for the source file, and the installed file? I friggin’ hope not…
3. Updating the game. I actually make it into the game, and I’m not ready yet. Not even close. I need an update. This, using a peer-to-peer system, takes about 10 minutes to find a below-par, barely-reasonable download speed, and from that, if you’re lucky, you’ll have your file in about an hour or so. I fell asleep at this point, and woke up several hours later to work on…
4. Installing the update. I actually have to install the update too? This doesn’t happen automatically? This was another wait, not so long; 10 minutes. After which I had to quit and restart the game.
5. Registering myself. Surely I can just play now, right? WRONG! YOU’RE WRONG LOU! WHY WOULD YOU EVEN THINK THAT! How naive of me. What, in actual fact, I had to do now was obtain a KONAMI ID AND a GAME ID. Not one or the other, but both. The registration for process asks for just about every bit of your personal information; for what reason I’m neglecting to understand.
6. An error has occured. So, I take my time entering all this stuff (dammit, I just wanna play) and upon the attempted submission of all this information I’m told that the server load is too high - please come back later. Are you fucking kidding me? Come back later? I’ve been here. I’ve been through this shit for hours now, and you’re telling me to come back later? I come all this way for the McDonalds breakfast and you tell me you wont serve me because I’m 3 minutes past the deadline? Fuck you Konami! Fuck you Kojima! I’m sure MGS4 will be great, and I’d like to think MGSO will be half-decent by the time I actually get to play it, but your shit is fucked up - sort it out.

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