sorry about it.

Well then, kudos to him! Being the fantastic reviewer you certainly deserve it :)

I can read the numerical parts of the reviews, I made a profile, can watch movies, and do everything I can normally do. A redesign eh? Well I'll certainly be looking forward to that too!

Ah, my bad. It turns out I screwed up the sign-up yesterday. Alright, NOW I'm registered as hazelnutman :P

Ah ha, I see. You should have told him that you were a time-traveler or something to mess with his mind. Ouch, I hate it when stuff like that happens where waiting could have produced better results. Ah well, at least you get to play Bioshock sooner ;)

Actually, all the credit goes to my friend who programmed the whole thing well before he eventually picked me up from another forum, alluring me with the prospect of free games.

I passed the compliments about the user-friendliness to him as well, although I'm not quite sure what you're gonna do on the site if you can't read the stuff :D That might all change anyways, because (and you might be the first to receive this information :D) there's a re-design in the works, although it has been in the works for quite a while now, so it still might be far off after all.

Not sure if you signed up though, I checked the member list and I can't find a hazelnutman yet.

The PS3 is off to repairs, the clerk didn't even wanna check if it was actually broken. Although he did look a bit funny when I told him LBP is stuck inside, asking if I had imported it. Unfortunately, I should've waited, because my friend worked something out with Sony, so I was supposed to send it directly to Sony and get another one back right away. Now it's gonna get a bit more complicated, but I should get a temporary replacement anyways. And he will send me BioShock after all.

Yeah, but they gave us a Blu-Ray movie (which is pretty useless seeing as I don't even have an HDTV) to make up for it...

Damn, mainly two guys did all of that? I'm incredibly impressed. If you don't mind, I signed up as a member (or at least I think I did). Sure, the language is alien to me, but the place was designed really damn well, making it criminally easy to navigate.

Keep up the good work. Now I really want you to get that PS3 fixed so you can go enjoy Bioshock as well as get it reviewed.

Charging full price for a refurb? That's dirty.

The way it works for us is, that right now, we're basically 2 dudes, me and my now good friend who runs the site and mostly handles PR with the publishers. He also found a couple more guys who occasionally help out with reviews, for instance genres neither of us like (such as sports.) I leave the decisions on who gets which games mostly up to him, because he knows my tastes and strengths by now, plus every now and then I hand him a list of upcoming games I'm interested in. I was surprised to get both LBP and BioShock (well, we'll have to see about that now), although I did point out my interest in BioShock and LBP right after they were announced, so maybe he remembered.

But yeah, overall it's just personal taste and time that decides who's gonna do what.

That seems best. When I first bought my PS3 however, I didn't realize that I was buying a refurbished one for full price, so I returned it for a new 60GB. During the returning stage, they weren't very thorough at all in making sure that everything was there. Hell, I could have gotten away with taking half of the PS3 parts. So I'm not sure that would be a problem.

I'm not sure how the whole game journalism thing works for you guys, but does this mean that you're the sole reviewer for the PS3 section or you just get all of the epic games? But damn, what a tease; Bioshock is so close yet so far :|

I'm just gonna remove the HDD and take it with me in case they're bitching about 'duh, of course it doesn't work without the harddrive'

My friend also said he was gonna call Sony PR directly and ask what can be done. I doubt they'd go as far as to send me a temporary replacement though. He also teased me with a nice 'btw, your review copy of BioShock just arrived :P'

Wait, so the whole memory thing isn't an issue anymore? Are you going to swap HDDs or do they do that for you when repairing/replacing it? If the problem all lies in your HDD, then that's not going to be pretty. The disc thing is going to be strange because if they offer to replace it, then you're going to have to fight for the original unedited versions, as well as explain how you got it early.

Starting to feel a little bit better about the whole thing. I just read the back of the warranty and to my understanding it says you can opt to have it repaired free of charge. The question remains how to handle the disc inside...

Curse me and my limited knowledge of PS3 releases in Europe. Well then good luck on Monday and may the power of Haruhi guide you through this time of crisis.

Thanks for the advice. What I plan on doing is calling them up on Monday and ask how they do it. I'm hoping they themselves just send the box to Sony and cover the cost. If not, b/c PS3s are rare in Europe I suppose. As far as I know, only the initial batch of 60 GB (emotion-less) had PS2 b/c and shortly after that (PS3 launched in March in Europe), they released the 40 GB and as far as I know, they never brought the 80 GB to Europe until they removed b/c completely. Maybe if they add a game or 2, I'll take a non-b/c.

The problem with removing the disc is that the system doesn't recognize it has a disc (the blue light is off), so pushing the eject button does nothing :( But I'll make them give it back for sure, after all it's now rare due to the controversial song text

I'll keep trying to reboot, although I already tried that after I got up this morning, hoping it had magically healed (man, I wish I had Excaliborg now *pipiru piru piru pipiru pi*)

Don't worry too much, there's really not a lot you could do. Sharing my pain with you is already a great help.

Does the in store warranty try to fix your PS3 or replace it completely?

If they replace it completely, then try getting away with taking out the HDD before giving it back to them. If you're not sure that would work, then I'm sure you can find really cheap 60GB HDDs on the internet or something to swap it with. So your memory isn't a problem. Besides, tinkering with the HDD doesn't void your warranty.

Now the disk... well, that's a doozy because tinker with that and you can kiss your warranty goodbye. So I would ask the store about it - maybe they'll give you a copy of the game when it's released? If they have some people standing by with some knowledge of such things, maybe they'll find a way to remove it? If you have to fork over the cash for a brand new game, then that absolutely sucks - and hopefully, you won't have to come to that.

I did some research, and here are some "solutions" people have shared via YouTube videos:

"I kept restarting my s*** at the back (I'm assuming the overall power switch) vertically and it eventually popped on... BOOYA"
"It's because of overheating."

Not very helpful, but try making it vertical and try restarting. You only need your PS3 to turn on once temporarily to remove the disk right?

Now the B/C thing... er... around here, we still have a ton of BC in stock. Most stores still have the old 80GB BC versions in stock, but they're at the back I guess.

Damn, and you still have things to review :| To top it all of, some great games are coming. I feel pretty useless right now, and wish I knew some sort of magical spell which could fix PS3s overseas. Again, I'm sorry about all of this, and good luck with it.

Not sure how I'll do it. My 1 year warranty from Sony has long gone, but I do have 2 year in store warranty. The question is how they'd handle it, if I can remove my harddrive (all those save games, downloaded games and Haruhi episodes), if they can remove the disc stuck in the PS3 and last but not least whether it's possible to get a backwards compatible one.

LBP was for a review, luckily I managed to just about finish the game before it crashed, but I still have a copy of Lego Batman sitting here, waiting to get reviewed, not to speak of all the other stuff coming out, like BioShock...

My condolences to your PS3 :(

Are you getting it fixed? Do you have warranty? How much is it to get the big boy repaired? How did you get LBP already?

Again, I'm really sorry about this. I can list over a hundred people who deserve this more than you. Good luck with it buddy :(

... to get a Yellow Light of Death.

Just as I was enjoying my LittleBigPlanet, the picture froze, the PS3 beeped and shut down, only to greet my with a yellow surprise. Oh yeah, and the disc is trapped inside...