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WTF! BBQ's New PSP Bricked Itself!

This past weekend I attended a three day long class at the Seattle Camp Wellstone training and rather than taking the ferry every day I stayed at BBQ's place in Seattle and crashed on his couch. Since I missed his birthday and was saving money on a hotel room I thought I would get him a super sweet late birthday present and give him a Playstation Portable.

A local game store had one in perfect condition with a 1-Gig memory card so I purchased it and gave him my old one. My old PSP was in perfect condition but it had one dead pixel since I got it over a year ago when the PSP first came out.

Now it was running the most recent software since I had to update when I got Grand Theft Auto : Vice City Stories but there was an icon left over from when I updated to firmware 2.81 that I never figured out how to get off the memory stick. Before I gave BBQ the PSP I reset it to default, loaded it up with some music and videos and bundled it up in a cannister of spicy SlimJims. I also gave him a PSP USB cable, the AC and my copy of Darkstalkers for PSP. Darkstalkers is one of BBQ's absolute favorite fighting games.

Fast forward to Friday and he was absolutely ecstatic and stoked that he does not have to get a PSP for when Castlevania Dracula X Collection hits this fall.

Then the shit hit the fan. Things were cool until on Saturday his PSP started locking up and crashing while he was playing Darkstalkers. Then it started locking up at the main menu by just moving the selection. After that it stopped turning on at all. The power light came on but the screen remained dark.
I formatted the memory card using my working PSP but his PSP would still not boot up at all.

So I never installed any non-Sony non-US software on this PSP. This is painfully ironic considering I am a contributing writer of a book called PSP Hacks. I never downgraded, never ran any PSP home brew and never did anything hackersih and risky on the PSP.

I called Sony tech support yesterday and described the problem. He basically said that there is no way for us to diagnose or fix it by ourselves and since the year long warranty has expired. He said that we could mail it off to Sony and they would refurbish and repair it for NINTY BUCKS! That is right it is almost a hundred bucks to get a PSP fixed even if the software gets corrupted from Sony's own software updates. I am about a hundred percent sure that it is a firmware related issue since the PSP never really got wet or dropped and I never had any problems until it freaking died on it.

Now I sort of feel like an ass like if I gave BBQ a pet kitten in a box only to have it be dead when he opened up the box. However for one night he had a fun time playing Megaman Powered Up, Ultimate Ghost and Goblins and we had some fun time doing the game sharing thing Tekken 5 Dark Resurection.

So BBQ is going to mail it off to Sony and I am going to split the cost of the repair with him or just pay the entire thing. So on one hand I think the PSP is damn cool and a lot of fun but they have the possibily of freaking dying on you from firmware corruption. That is the scary thing about having an updatable operating system on the Wii, PS3, PSP and Xbox 360 is that there is a remote possibility that and update is not going to take and it is going to kill your game system.

ASS!

Brick (electronics)
Brick is the slang term for an electronic device which cannot function (or has been rendered useless by damaged firmware). This comes from the fact that the device in question can be considered useful as a brick, and little else.

The firmware can be damaged by accidents during firmware update or by malicious software.

Jake at March 13, 2007 Games

Comments

Posted by: Josh WK at March 13, 2007 2:17 PM

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