As we already know, this year's holiday season featured a slew of games that will take a long time to finish. It is even more enhanced on the PlayStation 2, where two of the biggest releases can take upwards of 120 hours to finish. Twenty of those hours will be needed for Metal Gear Solid 3 (more if you want to uncover all the camouflage patterns and face paint), and San Andreas takes about 100 hours to achieve 100% completion.
Needless to say, having a memory card for your PlayStation 2 is a must, short of backing up your files on the Final Fantasy XI hard drive. Still, with FFXI being the only possible exception, one can't save games on the hard drive.
Now what would happen if by some mysterious happenstance, your memory card was suddenly erased? Well, thanks to Sony, playing their latest PlayStation Underground Demo Disc made that a possibility.
It turns out that anyone playing the PlayStation Underground Demo Disc, dated Holiday 2004, will lose everything on their memory card if they run the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo. Lucky for me, I didn't receive this disc. I thought I did, but it was another disc that didn't contain Viewtiful Joe 2. But for those who did pick the disc up and played it, I can only imagine the disgust and anger they will be feeling towards Sony.
Look at it like this. If you spent many hours trying to get to the end of San Andreas and you are ready to play the final mission, but before that glorious day, you ended up trying the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo first. You then load up San Andreas, and it reverts back to the opening cutscenes. Thoughts of frustration and anger will run rampant, and will even result in blaming your friends or family for corrupting your precious memory card. But in the end the only one we can blame is Sony.
Just last week, Sony came out to PlayStation Underground members about the glitch, and stated that members can still play the demos, even Viewtiful Joe 2, as long as they remove the memory cards first and even went as far as offering members a free game to make up for the trouble. However, this doesn't change the fact that Sony failed in their Quality Control testing. As a result, Underground members have to start all their games from scratch.
Now can you imagine if this happened on an Xbox? The advantage that Sony may have in this situation is their memory cards are only 8 MB in size, compared to Xbox's 8 GB hard drive.
In my case, all the files on my Xbox are the result of over two years of hard work (keep in mind that I replaced my Xbox after the big power surge of 2002). Now those two years are not just game saves, but also created files, downloads that even cost me money on my Xbox Live account, all my Madden rosters and created XFL teams, and most importantly, my Halo 2 characters.
I would have to be shot if what happened to a PlayStation 2 memory card happened to my Xbox hard drive!
The end result would be scary"
CURRENTLY PLAYING: Evercrack 2, Halo 2 Multiplayer (now a member of clan Team Wasted)
MOST WANTED: Gran Turismo 4