Open Letter to Sony and/or Capcom RE: Resident Evil 5

As with most everyone who is a hardcore gamer I have been anticipating the release of Resident Evil 5. Even though it killed me to do so I waited an extra week to pick it up as the crowds would be a bit much for myself in trying to get a release weekend copy.

I finally got the game for my PlayStation 3. Just about any game that has a major online component I get for the PS3 as the online portion is free to use, no monthly/yearly fee. In these hard economic times this is a great thing.

Before I get to the meat of this article I would like to make the following very clear:

1. Until recently I have never had an issue with the general functions of my PS3. Yes, there have been the occasional hiccups here or there such as the machine freezing up out of nowhere but that was easily fixed with a reboot. It doesn’t happen nearly often enough to make a deal out of it as I think it has happened a total of three times in the year plus I have owned it.
2. I treat the thing like royalty. I make sure to keep up the cleaning of the machine on a regular basis. This includes canned air to blow out dirt from the vents as well as cleaning the laser lens inside the machine with specific discs made just for this purpose. Nothing stiff so the laser lens won’t get scratched.
3. The only two issues with game until this point were with Heavenly Sword and Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. Those issues are that after not playing HS for about a year I popped it in. The game would freeze the whole system within either five or ten minutes. Then it would play but slowly. After getting past the first area it plays perfectly. There seems to be a small, insignificant scratch on the disc so I pass that off to the that scratch as it used to play perfectly.
4. As for MKvsDCU the first disc I got was a bad pressing. The PS3 wouldn’t read it, then it would, then the game would freeze when selecting an item on the menu. I took the disc back to Target and got a new one. It loaded and plays perfectly.
5. All other media reads and plays fine. I have no issue with disc based media. CD, DVD, Blu-ray, PSOne, PS2, and all PS3 games I own play perfectly except those mentioned. I have well over 800 DVDs and not a single one misses a beat. I have near 25 Blu-rays and not a single one messes up. I have around 15 PSOne games, 40 PS2 games, and 15 PS3 disc-based games. None of them have issues except as noted.
6. Digital content plays perfectly. This includes PSN games, DiVx movies, AAC/MP3 files, MP4 movies and more. I have my Macintosh set up as a media server so that I can easily copy over a movie to the PS3 for watching (all made from legal copies of DVDs I own, so back off MPAA).

Now to the series of events that have happened.

This past Sunday I picked up Resident Evil 5 (to be referred to as RE5 throughout the rest of this document) at a local Target for the PS3. I didn’t have much time to play that night so I waited until Monday.

When Monday night came around after a long day of coding I popped the disc in. The PS3 didn’t see it, so I restarted the PS3. The PS3 has seen it ever since.

I told the game to boot. I was aware of the mandatory 5GB install so I made sure there was enough room on my 80GB HDD. (I have one of the last PS2 backwards compatible PS3s.) I had around 15GB free. Shouldn’t be a problem.

First thing that came up was that there was a version 1.02 update for the game wanting to be installed. Not a problem as I have fast Cable internet. The file downloads, installs, and automatically reboots the game.

RE5 then wants to do the mandatory install. I tell it to do so. Things are going and I am expecting at most 30 minutes. Shouldn’t even be that long as Metal Gear Solid 4 would install data between chapters that was equal to 5GB at times and it would take at most 15 minutes, but I like giving cushion on things like this.

I watch the counter go, and go, and go. It hits 28%…..and stops. It sits there. For a long time. A very long time. Over an hour later it moves again as it normally does, but when it reaches 95% it stops and says it is done. I have seen enough installs do this in my life to think nothing is wrong as the install just moved faster than the interface, but it does stick in my head as odd because most installs hang at the 100% mark to do some clean up of files.

The game starts and I play for about an hour. It is not around midnight so I decide to go to bed. (Hey, I am getting older…)

Tuesday comes around. I think all will be good and have another long day of coding. Night time comes and I decide to get some more time in on RE5 as the first two levels of Chapter One rocked. I boot the PS3, tell it to boot RE5 (I don’t have automatic launch turned on) and all seems fine.

But it isn’t. The game wants to install the 5GB file again. What the hell? I let it do it, and again it stops. This time at 29%. One percent more this time. Again I wait for over an hour for the install to finish, and again it ends at 95% and says it is done. The game boots and all is well in playing.

I decide to try something after this short bout of gaming. I quit the game and delete all references to RE5 on my PS3 one at a time. I delete the save file and reboot the game; it wants to install. I delete the installed file and it wants to install, which is expected. Again, it hits 29% and stops. One more hour later and it finished at 95%.

By this point I am getting frustrated and angry. I head over to Capcom’s forums (www.capcom-unity.com for those that don’t know) and make a post about the issues. A nice moderator states that I might have an HDD issue. I don’t think that is the issue but decide to do a backup and restore to see what happens.

This morning at 9am I start the back up. It takes about an hour. I do a secondary manual backup of all PSOne, PS2, and PS3 game saves (except the copy prohibited ones, which I still don’t understand) and restore the PS3 to factory status.

As a big note, I didn’t just do the quick format on the internal HDD. I chose the 4.5 hour low-level format for the HDD. I wanted to make sure that directory structures, catalog trees, nodes, headers, and all that a format entails are taken care of just in case a portion of the HDD got corrupted for some reason.

After that finishes I enter the following back into the PS3:

• Network Information for the Wireless setup I have here so the PS3 can get on the net
• PSN ID information so that I can snag the web update for RE5
• I sync my trophies back from the server
• I downloaded the new 2.70 firmware update

That is all that is on the PS3 at this time. I didn’t restore from the backup at all. I wanted as close to a factory machine as I could get and to do this I didn’t mess with another other settings. I insert the RE5 game disc, still in pristine condition, and it boots itself as automatic game loading is on by default. The web update for RE5 presents itself and I download it.

It once again wants to install the 5GB onto the HDD. Of course it does, this is now a virgin HDD and OS on the PS3. It should be as if nothing has touched it.

The install starts out by going a bit slower but it counts each percentage point as it goes. This bodes well in my mind as it means that everything that needs to be read is being read from the disc. The magic number of 29% approaches and…..yep, you guessed it. It stops.

Again (I am really starting to hate that word) I let it sit for over an hour. It finishes the install at the other magic number, 95%. The game boots. I don’t even bother playing this time as it isn’t going to matter if I play or not. I just want to see if it will want to reinstall after another boot of the RE5 software.

I quit the game and relaunch it. Huzzah! It wants to install again. Oh lucky day!

Next steps in this journey are:

1. Calling Capcom to see what they have to say about it. I have been meaning to do this since day one but like I said, I have had very long coding days. By the time I get done with work their support line is closed. Tomorrow (April 2nd) is when I make the call, during the day.
2. Calling Sony after calling Capcom. Dependent upon what Capcom has to say about this I will call Sony to see what they have to say. Sony was really great about fixing my first run PS2 when it was five years out of warranty. The system was making circular grooves in my game discs. I called Sony expecting to pay to get the machine fixed but all I had to pay was shipping to them. They fixed the PS2, cleaned it, replaced the scratched games, and even gave me a new 90-day warranty. This made me a Sony and PlayStation customer for life. That kind of service for a machine four years out of the warranty amazes me to this day.
3. Taking the game back to Target and getting a new copy. I am loathe to do this as it would be the second time I got a defective game from Target for my PS3, from two different locations.

Observations from this process:

1. Is the 5GB install from RE5 supposed to be exactly 5GB? The installed file always ends up being 4.5GB. Is the 5GB amount an approximation or an exact? If it is an approximation than the 4.5GB install is nothing to worry about. If it is an exact then not all the data is being installed onto the machine. (Anyone with a PS3 and a copy of the game wish to double check this for me? You can leave a comment below.)
2. The Blu-ray drive could be the culprit, but that is hard to believe. I hypothesize this because the data being written to the HDD is coming from the Blu-ray, and when the magic 29% happens the disc seems to stop spinning. I don’t think it is due to the fact that all Blu-ray movies and other Blu-ray PS3 games work fine except as noted above.
3. I can’t decide if it is the HDD or not. I am leaning towards not as, like stated before, all other games and media play fine off of the HDD. Especially since I just did the low-level format and tried from a “virgin” PS3 the same issue is happening. The only way for it to be an HDD issue would be a hardware failure of the HDD, which I would think that Sony would have some sort of S.M.A.R.T. status reader software on the PS3 for the internal SATA 2.5″ drive (which has S.M.A.R.T. status built in to the HDD hardware) that would report to the PS3 then to the end user that there is something seriously wrong with the HDD hardware and service/replacement is needed.
4. No one else seems to be having this issue. I have scoured the net for other people experience this issue with their PS3s and RE5. No one I have found has had this issue. This seems to be a unique issue. I mean, I was always told I was one of a kind but this is taking it too far.

So why is this an open letter to Sony and/or Capcom? Because I am not sure who to exactly address this to. I feel that there is something wrong from one of the two. Either I have a faulty PS3 unit (if it is the HDD I will just buy a new one and replace myself) or the disc itself is faulty. If neither ends up being true and I get a replacement disc from Target and it still happens, then I am not able to play RE5 at all on my PS3, and it would seem that I am the only one who wouldn’t be able to play it.

Somehow that doesn’t seem right. Console gaming isn’t like PC gaming. Creators of the games for consoles don’t have to worry about making sure it work with this video card, that sound driver, this version of that software, so on and so forth. The high point of console gaming is summed up in the mantra of Macintosh users everywhere: It Just Works™.

You go out and buy the PS3 or Wii or Xbox360 labeled game without worry of your system specs because you have the console and know that once you put that disc in it will work without issue. You don’t have to buy a better version of the console to play that game, it is made for that console and will work right out of the box.

This is what I did. I went out and bought a PS3 labeled game and assumed it would play on my PS3 without issue, yet all I am getting is issues.

I think out of all of this I just want satisfaction. I want to have my faith in the It Just Works™ way of gaming restored.

I just want to play Resident Evil 5 on my PS3.

Updates to this process will happen as actions are taken. Stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. Resident Evil 5 delayed; Konami & Capcom talk Xbox 360
2. Capcom Classics Coming to PSN Starting Tomorrow, Resident Evil 2 imminent
3. Capcom Brings Resident Evil Classics To The Wii
4. Resident Evil On Wii
5. PS2 Resident Evil 4 Specials Revealed