I can’t play Uncharted 2, or why the PS3 experience is terrible

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Wow, the Playstation experience is still terrible. I wanted something new to play so I went down to Best Buy to waste a gift card I had and bought a copy of Uncharted 2. Here’s my experience so far:

  1. Boot console, insert game (1 minute)
  2. Game starts, decides it needs to update. This game is a few years old, so this isn’t too unreasonable. The first problem is number of updates. It says there are nine updates. Great. Would a combo update be so hard? Uncharted 2 is only the 5th best selling game on the system, and one they heavily promoted and bundled.
  3. The PS3 download about fifteen updates. For some reason, many of the updates don’t increase the counter of how many updates are applied, even though the change the percentage of total updating done.
  4. Also, the downloads aren’t fast. Despite my 12mb connection, I know they’re not going anywhere near that fast.
  5. And I could start the DLC process, but for game updates can’t be downloaded in the background, because the dashboard obviously couldn’t function while a download was going on.
  6. Finish all updates (20-30 minutes), they installed, game booted.
  7. I want to install the DLC that comes with the game (since I bought the Game of the Year edition). That means opening the PSN.
  8. Nope! I need to update my PS3’s firmware. Hit download, it gets the file, reboots, and installs. (10 minutes).
  9. Sign into PSN. Now I have to agree to two new license agreements. Not one but two.
  10. Get in, go to the redeem codes screen.
  11. The code is case sensitive, so I have to switch the keyboard to upper-case mode. But when I do that, the numbers become symbols, so I have to switch it back to lower case to type in the numbers. This means lots of switching.
  12. The code comes in three sections (ex: DF8R-34KF-FJ83). Each section must be entered individually, and the PS3 doesn’t automatically move to the next field when you’ve entered the content for the first. (5 minutes)
  13. Done! It authorizes me, now I can download my DLC. There is only… 28 pieces.
  14. Luckily, the PS3 will download it all for me. Wait… no… I have to choose each piece of DLC individually and hit download. There is no button to download all. (10 minutes).
  15. Some of the downloads are hundreds of MB. So I choose “download in background” for those. How do you know that’s working? You don’t. Of the 28 pieces of DLC, there is no way to know which ones I have already downloaded, which are downloading, and which I haven’t triggered yet.
  16. So I exit that screen and go to the “Downloads” screen in the PSN. It shows all 38 downloads I have access to (due to previous purchases). Yet it does not show which are downloaded or downloading.
  17. So instead I went back to the dashboard, and found the download screen there. It does show the 6 files that are still downloading. It does not estimate how much longer it will be until it’s done with all the downloads. (5 minutes)
  18. So here I am, waiting for downloads to finish. My PS3 has only downloading one thing at a time, averaging maybe 600KB/s on my 1500KB/s line. Left to download? That’s not shown either. But I’m guessing it’s over 3 GB (again, some of that content is BIG). It ended up taking 1 hour. (60 minutes)
  19. Downloads are done, it’s time to go install the downloads. I have to do each one individually. On the plus side, only 6 or 7 need installing. On the minus side, one of the largest ones won’t install, and three downloads are corrupt. Which two? Who knows! The one that won’t install gives a cryptic error number, which isn’t defined anywhere. But Google searches suggest it means the download was corrupt. (15 minutes).
  20. Now I get to go back and re-download a ton of stuff, because there is no way to know what I installed successfully and what I missed. So instead, I’ll skip re-downloading most of it, and hope I don’t miss anything I care too much about. (15 minutes)

What a mess. The interface has been terrible, and provides no useful information. It’s nice to know how valuable Sony things my time is. To play this game, I’ve lost 2.5 hours of my life. That means I’m giving up on trying to play tonight, and will go to bed hating my PS3. Right now I like my XBox 360 better, and it’s dead from RROD.

You know, when I bought the game there was a used copy for $5 less, and it wouldn’t have included any of the DLC. Spending an extra $5 cost me more than 90 minutes of my time.