Well, yesterday for a bit, I was visiting this hot place seen below and not in a good mood over what I saw was a digital injustice (yaaaaaa!):

(thanks, Cartridge Magazine!)

Today, I’m still in that mindset as far as digital-only content goes, but ha and ha bloody ha, when I screw up, I go for it 110%, plus tax. PLUS TAX I SAY!!!

So, last night a friend comes over to return some Blu-Rays he’d borrowed and asks if I’d updated my PS3’s firmware so I could retrieve my game that was “lost”, which just about made me drop the cup of coffee I’d prepared a few seconds before. Fortunately, he reached out and tipped the cup upwards and pressed the RESET button on my forehead before things went blank.

via GIPHY

Okay, kids – here’s what happened that afternoon (cue dream sequence harp tune):

Before I turned on my PS3, I dusted it off because, yeah, I hadn’t used in in a few months and yes, dust does that thing it does when you let stuff sit around and freely collect it. Anyway, post-dusting, I ended up sneezing a few times as I turned the console on and when I dashed off to get some tissues, I came back to a message that the console hadn’t downloaded some data because I needed to free up some space. 5102 MB, to be precise. So, I started the process of removing a few games (temporarily) while silently cursing the fact that Sony made the PS3 without the capability to add additional storage using a a USB drive of any sort (boo).

When I got to Master Reboot, I decided to fire up the game just to refresh my memory and see if I wanted to keep it or let it slide into the re-download queue, whereupon I got that message that messed up my mojo:

Wait, what? Well, guess what? it wasn’t exactly so at all. Gee, thanks, Sony.

Well, wouldn’t YOU think you went and got a game that was yoinked from your library without a chance to retrieve it if YOU got the same message? Anyway, I didn’t “Proceed to PlayStation™Store” as requested because why would I want to if a game I had was supposed to have not been there any longer? So, my knee jerky mood got me to blast out that post yesterday and run it, only to find out a few hours later that, DUH, I was wrong. Oops.

The funnier part of this was my friend noted he has a PS3 and uses it as a Blu-Ray player and yes, was watching the films I’d lent him all day and didn’t know I’d posted that article until he was on the way here and looked at his phone when he parked downstairs. He’d had the same issue and only when he updated the firmware was he able to retrieve some of his content that seemed deleted thanks to “license expired” issues.

I have a second button I gravitate to when stuff like this happens. Feel free to borrow it for your own purposes. In these times, it’s a necessity.

But can you blame me in this age of a digital storefront snapping its fingers and winking content out of existence like Thanos working at Netflix or some other digital delivery site cheerily humming The Addams Family theme or the end credits to The Andy Griffith Show as he does his dirty work? No? I thought so.

(From Red Ringtones)

Anyway, so I went to sleep soon after that, woke up and did that update thing earlier today and guess the jigoku what happened, won’tcha? Yep, I got my non-missing game back right away. FOO. Of course, I’m still pissed at getting that false alarm nonsense and the fact that many games, films, books and other digital-only data are still MIA for many who paid good money for them. So, the crusade as it is, continues. Amusingly enough, I played that game for about a half hour more and it’s pretty unusual in a few areas, but could have used a bit more polish in spots. No review here, but I think I’ll do one at some point in the near future just to have a complete circle of an experience.

The short version, in case you just skipped to the bottom of this post:

(thanks, Daryl H!)

-GW