As indicated above, the disc reader on my PS5 broke. Game over, it’s now the big sleep, and the disc reader is in dirt nap mode pushing up daises. I’m upset by this because I’m one of those rare people who was very excited to have the ability to watch BD and 4k discs on it. And the unit is now out of warranty, and I don’t see myself sending it back to Sony for repairs.
I read countless articles on Sony’s site and off; I viewed a playlist’s worth of videos, even one featuring a person who was overly pumped about explaining how to wipe your PS5. (He came across like the process was virtually alchemical, and once you’d followed his instructions, a new PS5 would rise up like a phoenix from its old husk.) I did everything I could to troubleshoot the issue, from clearing various caches to reinstalling the operating system; nothing remedied the problem. Multiple discs, games, and films, flipping things every which way to tomorrow — bottom line, it’s still broken AF.
I will say that the reinstall of the OS was pretty easy. I lost some of my game save information, but with any new game, my save points were all downloaded from the cloud fine. I did, however, lose all the pictures and clips I’d saved from gameplay. This was irritating, as I could have easily kept that information if I had remembered. But, on the flip side, now I have a reason to grab all new tourist-styled pictures of my exploits in Demon Souls. Here’s one of my new ones, right after I found a ring in some hell hole bog of blood, bits, and despair. The purpose of the ring I found? It lets you run quicker in bogs (novel), and now I can speed around in an even grosser bog that might be more accurately described as a dimly lit swamp of turds.
Back to the main point; the PlayStation is only a little over a year old. I’ve gone through some controllers in that time, which I expected, but I did not anticipate the disc reader getting toasted. I have film distributors, like Vinegar Syndrome and Arrow, that I’m a big fan of, especially their meticulous treatments of older media, and it was a lot of fun watching some of their BDs and 4Ks on the system. The last film that graced my PS5 was Righting Wrongs (1986) with Cynthia Rothrock and Yuen Biao. Spoiler Alert: Everybody dies at the end of that film; for a Hong Kong action film, it ends on an uncharacteristic downer note, but maybe that’s also fitting if your disc reader is going to go that way as well.
