Top 10: PlayStation Fails

Let’s kick off our list with the head scratcher that still occupies a dark place in our memories. Sure, every company is entitled to a few bad ads, but Sony spent 150 million dollars on its PlayStation 3 marketing blitz, and all they did was give us the heebee jeebees! Demonic baby dolls, Rubik’s Cubes, a man laughing with a gun in the bathtub….what does it mean?... why would I want to own this console? All we’re going to say is thank god for Kevin Butler.

Nintendo has always had Mario and Xbox has always had Master Chief. It’s that simple. However, Sony’s PlayStation brand has experimented with several mascots for each of their hardware iterations. We’re paying our respects to you Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Jak and Daxter. Let’s just hope Ratchet and Clank, Sackboy, Nathan Drake and Kratos aren’t just fads.

Fanboys will throw a fit, but many of us know that its time for a change. Sony has kept their hand-cramping controller design intact since the mid-90s. While we’re happy about rumble being restored after the PS3 launch, this thing badly needs a facelift. Seriously, why should the D-pad continue to get primary placement over the analog stick?

We’re not saying that we don’t like this piece of motion control hardware. What we are saying is that it’s a little too similar to what was done of the Nintendo Wii, albeit with a glowing clown nose. In any case, numbers don’t lie and the Xbox’s Kinect has outsold the Move by a ratio of five to one.

When the PS3 launched it was an expensive beast, but the deal was sweetened by the fact that you could to use Linux off of it, had extra USB and memory card ports, and play your old PS2 games. Both of those options have been removed, much to our dismay.

The PS2 was the best selling console of all time, so we all figured that the PS3 would pick up where its older brother picked up. Unfortunately, nothing stops momentum like an outrageous launch price. Most gamers draw the line when it gets up over five hundred bucks for the base model.

This is what happens when you give your system an unconventional CPU Design and half the Ram of the older Xbox 360. Despite the potential of the Cell processor to deliver visuals beyond those found on Microsoft’s console, this would only happen for first party games. As a result, most of its multi-platform ports always looked and played better elsewhere, see Valve’s refusal to work on the console and the Skyrim memory nightmare for recent examples.

Back in 2005, Sony thought it would be a great idea to use proprietary game disks on their PlayStation Portable. However these just opened the door to unexpected levels of piracy. This turned off both game developers, and movie studios that had been releasing films in the format. Even worse, these disks and their enclosures were fragile, took forever to load, and caused the PSP to drink up the battery mega-fast.

Making the short-list is the ill-fated follow-up to the PSP, in which the handheld was tweaked to remove the use of UMD and depend on download titles only. This sucker didn’t last long, due in no small part to its inability to use physical media and costing an arm and a leg. It was way ahead of its time, and while that that might be endearing to others, it’s a big fat fail to us!

Taking the top spot on our list is the infamous security breach of 2011. I don’t know what the bigger fail is, that the PlayStation network was hacked, or that it took so long for Sony to warn us that our credit card information may have been compromised. In either case, it was a big downer for online gaming, and forever damaged our trust in the PlayStation brand.