What You Can Do With A Banned PS4

Not a whole fucking lot!


Two weeks into being a proud PS4 early adopter and Sony have shut the door on me. It's a whole sad story that I will lay out in laborious detail for the sake of my own catharsis and other large words.

On Christmas day when Santa left me a sparkling new Playstation and a copy of Battlefield 4 he forgot the £40 add on that is Premium, which I put down to diabetes meds or the crippling boredom of working 1/365th of the year, so I was left to pick up the tab. Pointing my web-ship at the the Playstation Store I added the cash to my digi-wallet from my bank via PayPal (At this point in the story a dramatic chord should ring in the background) and purchased my purchase like a good little consumer.

All went well or at least well enough for a couple of weeks, which is the amount of time that I let pass before I consider anything to be okay, like when I got that brain-scan in 2009 and then got a letter saying they found a shadow, I ignored my post for two weeks later and never heard another word about it. Of course now I rarely hear anything which is fine by me, makes the fire alarm less annoying.

Anyhoo, last Wednesday, which was the 8th for all you future folk, I went to power up the big-black-eraser-shaped-thingy only to find my account had been suspended. No warning, no notice, no explanation. After googling the terms of service and finding that twerking against the unit wasn't a banable offence as long as you didn't broadcast it I was stumped and called the support line. After working my way through the robot maze and finding the person in the middle we had a chat and found out that there was a mysterious £40 hole in Sonys pocket which they just couldn't abide. I checked out my PayPal balance and there it was. For some reason the £40  transaction which was made on the Dec 25th was reversed on Jan 4th. Plenty of transactions after that date with no problems, but the one that could cause a problem had to go fuckup. After talking this through with the support monkey (and I say that in the nicest way, like wise old Rafiki) she told me that head office would have to decide if they recharge me and lift the ban which could take a couple of days. I called up on Thursday to check progress and just got a rerun of the previous call. I let Friday pass without bothering them as I had a bourbon-colonic scheduled which left me in no shape for gaming in any case.

Cross-fade to Saturday night and I have gone four days without killing a 14 year old in the digital realm which puts the real ones at increased risk. I call up again and this time I unloaded and told them that as an early PS4 adopter and PS+ member I thought their first offence, no warning, insta-ban with no easy resolution was really crappy. I mean even phone companies will send a reminder and try to re-charge you before cutting you off if you miss a payment. I explained all this and was rebuffed with a bunch of crap about identity theft risks and how PayPal were a bunch of cunts, which distracted me away from my target because PayPal ARE a bunch of cunts.

So what can you do with a banned PS4? Not a whole fucking lot!(See what I did there?) You can play single player games, and considering the only one of those I have is BF4 whose single player requires a large amount of alcohol to sit through' that's a no-no (bourbon colonics really make any further drinking for 7 days a death-sentence).The ban doesn't just apply to the PSN though; Wanna watch Netflix? Not happening. Access online features of Blu-Rays? Es no bueno. Watch porn on the browser? No, fuck off and stop asking me questions!

Anyway, that's the end of this post and I think we can all agree it's gone on far too long. Goodbye.