How karmic. I wrote that comic Thursday after hearing some early launch/Taco Bell PS4s were having problems. My system shows up on Friday, and two minutes into setup, the screen freezes, and I get the Blue Dickpunch of Sadness.

I double checked HDMI cable seating, swapped cables, reseated the HDD, etc. Occasionally I can get it to boot into safe mode… say 1 out of every 10 attempts. One of those times I reinstalled update 1.50, and at the end when it says it will reboot the system to complete installation, it brought be right back to the pulsing blue dickpunch.

Three hours on hold with Sony customer support later, and I finally reach a human being. He took absolutely zero convincing that there was an issue. He barely questioned it. “Blue light? Of course.” They’re sending me a return box. May be a couple of weeks before I have a (hopefully) functioning PS4.

Oh well.

I’m irritated, but it’s new hardware. This is the risk you take when you buy day-one electronics. Still, I’m getting the feeling from a variety of sources that this problem is much larger than the “acceptable 0.4% failure rate” that Sony said they were expecting. I’ll be interested to see how it turns out, and what the actual problem here is.

In the meantime, AC4, Killzone and NFSR will sit in their boxes. Honestly, AC4 was the only game I was really interested in playing. I’d held off getting it for a “last gen” system because I wanted something to play on my shiny new PS4. I only really got Killzone and NFS because Amazon emailed me last week and said “Hey, we noticed you bought a PS4 game. If you buy one more, we’ll send you a third one for free.”

So I’ll just sit back and wait for my replacement. The Xbox One is now less than a week away, and I’m really excited for Dead Rising 3, so I have my fingers crossed for a smooth(er) launch than this.

I really want to like the PS4, and I expect I will once I can, ya know, use one. It’s hard not to let this sour the initial experience a little bit, but honestly, in the grand scheme of things, it’s just not a big deal. By the time the real exciting PS4 games are coming out (Infamous Secon Son, new Uncharted, etc), this should be all sorted out.

So for now I’ll just enjoy one more week of relative productivity.