Okay, I was trying to decide on what to rant about today but I couldn’t narrow it down to just one topic, so today you get multiple mini-rants because I don’t want to sit on these for individual rants throughout the week. I need these off my chest now, so here we go… three mini-rants…

I’ve ranted on GTA IV before but last night I thought I’d give it another shot… we’ve had two patches to the game itself and at least two firmware updates. I figured my luck would have to change eventually, right?

It hasn’t. The game froze on me within 15 minutes. I’m to the point that I’m considering not even bothering anymore. I’m not sure I’ve even got it in me to trade it in (get reamed on the trade-in) and pick up the 360 version. I’ve played quite a bit of the game and through the continued problems, a LOT of the charm has worn off.

Rockstar… you officially suck. I’m not buying one of your games on launch day ever again. EVAR!!!

Next topic…

Sony recently extended friends list capacity from 50 to 100 friends which was a great move and sorely needed for some of us. Somewhere along the way though, they broke something about adding friends. Just to be clear, I’m running firmware 2.41, but when someone sends me a friend request, I get an email in my inbox. I click on it and choose “Accept” to add them, then I get an error message to the effect of “Sorry, this friend request has been canceled.”

At first I thought I had a lot of really finnicky people wanting to be my friends.  I wondered if they could truly be so impatient that if I didn’t accept within the hour, they were giving up on me and canceling the friend request.  That’s enough to give a guy a complex… having people second-guess whether they want to be associated with you… in numbers!

Then I happened to scroll to the bottom of my friends list and I saw all the people I’d thought canceled their friend requests, listed in white, waiting on me to do something. I highlight one of them, push triangle, and then I could accept the request and this time it worked. I added like 8 people like that. Now, whenever I get a friend request, I still attempt to accept it as intended and it doesn’t work, so I go down and accept this the half-assed way and that works. This is broken Sony, fix it. Although… at this rate, my friends list will likely be full before you do, so I’ll stop noticing it.  Did you test this stuff Sony?  I mean really, it’s not like I did anything “wrong” by accepting a friend request…  to me, it seems like you didn’t test it.

For the last mini-rant today, I want to revisit another annoyance from the past. SIXAXIS controller drop-out. I have been playing exclusively with my DualShock 3 since I bought it, but thanks to my kids and their amazing skill at hiding things, I couldn’t find it the other day and was forced to play Warhawk (the new 1.4 update ROCKS, btw!) with a SIXAXIS controller.

About 7-8 minute into playing, the “losing control of my character” hassle that is the SIXAXIS controller reared its ugly head again. Oh how quickly and easily I’d forgotten. What garbage those controllers really were… had this particular issue not been so persistent for me, I could have easily lived with a lighter, squeakier, rumble-less controller, but there’s no excuse for a controller that will just up and “push left for 3 seconds” on its own. Sony… those controllers suck and I’m stuck with two of ‘em. You should offer some trade-in plan for DualShock 3 controllers… or a rebate or something. If I could mail you my controllers and get $25 toward a DualShock 3, I’d be stoked. As it is now, my kids get the royal shaft when we play multiplayer games because Dad gets the DualShock 3 and they get the sloppiest of sloppy seconds.

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