The treacherous tragedy of the 20th Anniversary PS4

So, as you all well know, the 20th Anniversary PS4 was limited to a production run of 12,800 in order to celebrate 20 years of great games on the Playstation platform. The USA got some, and so did the UK, and other countries, too! 

But the UK scheme was a little different...

If you wanted one of these precious rarities, you could either wait for 14 hours in a cold London street overnight and pick one up for the low, low price of £19.94, or you could compete in Sony's strange scheme currently running this week. The scheme involves a web page with around 300 Playstation and third-party character images slapped on it in a horrendous mess. Bascially, the idea was that at intervals during the week the Playstation UK Twitter account would tweet an obscure clue and leave everyone scrambling to decipher the meaning, then once they had figured it out they would have to click on the corresponding character. If they got it right, they'd be rewarded with a form to fill in, which would then be submitted to the raffle. If you're one of the first 100 to submit the form, you win! (The chance to buy a PS4 for £399)

So, what's the issue here? Well, most people have been complaining that they have jobs and thus can't piss around on the internet all day looking for this clue. To them I say "Haha", for I am jobless and poor. The real issue here is that it's a fucking stupid idea in the first place, why not just let PSN users buy the thing? Thirdly, as expected, the site with the images at 4pm yesterday, even after the clue was tweeted, was clogged to hell as desparate thousands tried to get their hands on a limited edition PS4. So Playstation couldn't even make their convluted scheme work. 

It was stuck like this for a good twenty minutes, by which time many others had already claimed their 'prize'.

And finally, as expected, a large amount of these PS4s are already on eBay for hilarious amounts, some well over £1,500, some priced at £1,994 for added nostalgia. Am I saying I despise scalpers? Nah, because frankly I'd sell mine if I got hold of one (I'm a jobless student with Uni to pay for, after all), but at the same time I can't help but hate the way this has all gone down. It doesn't leave much of a legacy for the 20th anniversary and just leaves far more people disappointed than intended. After trying my hand at the game Sony have set before us, I couldn't help but feel like this console generation has really gone to hell after running through whether or not to sell the console if I was lucky enough to get one; nothing about the PS4 (and definitely not XB1) makes me actually want it. I'm still working through the many incredible games on offer on my 2008 PS3 80GB model, and recently I've never felt so detached from gaming, almost as if everyone but Nintendo has forgotten how to make one without caveats.

I never thought I'd say something positive about Nintendo, but there it is.