Day: May 12, 2014

GameStop Sucks

May 12, 2014
Suckage
1 Comment

I mean, I knew this. Right? Deep down, everyone knows this. Penny Arcade has been called GameStop “glorified pawn shops” for years and it’s true. But sometimes I want a game that’s been out a while and I don’t want to wait for it to come in the mail and I may not want to pay full price and…you know. Excuses, excuses.

Well, a few months ago I was in the market for a PS3 (to replace our stolen one, may the thieves rot in hell) and I wasn’t in the mood to pay full-price. So I succumbed to temptation and went to GameSpot.

I had another motive besides price – I wanted to see if I could find an older one with backwards-compatibility. All my kids have old PS2 games that they would love to play again (like Amplitude, Katamari Damashii and the Spongebob Movie game) so it seemed like an older “fat” PS3 would be a good buy.

And it was! The hard drive was only 80 gigs or so but I’ve never found half a terabyte necessary on a console. We got it home, set it up and started enjoying all the PS3 games we hadn’t been able to play for years, like Fat Princess and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. I also bought Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix for my son and the Ratchet & Clank trilogy for everybody. (The appeal of Ratchet & Clank is universal.)

Then, about two weeks ago. The PS3 died while my son was playing Kingdom Hearts. Now, we had just turned the thing on so heat wasn’t the problem. Attempting to turn off the PS3 and then turn it back on resulted in a green light, then a yellow/white light and then a continuous blinking red light. We never get video. Heck, we can’t even get the Kingdom Hearts disc out of it now.

So I did my Google-fu and found out that on the old PS3s, the continual heating and cooling cycle would eventually cause the CPU or GPU to separate from the motherboard, thus rendering the whole device inoperable. There are YouTube videos that will show you how to disassemble the unit, reattach the chips and then put the device back together, but most people warn that this fix will only last a few months before the chips separate again.

“Well,” I thought, “this is annoying, but there’s a fix, hopefully if I do this it’ll last longer than a few months. I just wish it had happened during the 30-day return period…”

Penny. Drops.

GameStop already performed this procedure on this PS3. They bought it broken, “fixed” it themselves with a fix they knew wasn’t permanent, and then sold it to me knowing that the device would fail, but would probably last longer than the return period.

So, because I didn’t pay $100 for an extended warranty (which would have driven the price of the device so high I may as well have bought a new one) I now have to nursemaid this thing and hope my fix is better than GameStop’s.

GameStop sold me a piece of hardware they knew was defective and would quickly fail and there is nothing I can do about it. Except never shop there again, which is exactly what I intend to do.

On This Day, Twenty Years Ago…

May 12, 2014
FamilyUncategorized
1 Comment

On this day, twenty years ago, my wife Jamie Salter and I were married in the Justice of the Peace’s office in Austin, Texas. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding; I’d already decided I wanted to marry Jamie. But it was…hurried along by the news that our first child, Megan Salter was on the way.

Any regrets I have about the last twenty years are purely on myself. I regret getting overweight and the resulting health problems it caused. I regret moving to Michigan; it turned out to be a disaster for my family. I regret that even though things are getting better, we’re still not completely financially secured and we’re still not where we feel we belong.

Jamie has been at the root of everything great that has happened to me over the last twenty years. She brought me out of my painfully introverted shell. She made me believe a woman could care about and love me. She gave me the experience of being a father. She is the reason I was able to work for Origin Systems, both because she had a contact in Origin’s HR department and because she continually encouraged me to apply when I was sure I had no chance. She gave me two more children, both of which have been blessings, and has stuck with me through thick and thin.

I love you, Jamie Salter. I always have and I’m not stopping any time soon.