A handy flowchart for playing SOCOM: Confrontation:
1. Purchase game. Timespan unknown.
2. Unpack box and headset. One minute.
3. Be an idiot with gadgets and technology and not understand that a headset has to be paired with a given system. Five minutes.
4. Realize that scanning for devices for ten minutes doesn’t work because the headset isn’t in pairing mode. Ten minutes and thirty seconds.
5. Setup the device in pairing mode. One minute.
6. Attempt to launch the game and realize you need to install 2GB of data from the game disc. Ten minutes.
7. Put the headset in your ear and think hell yeah I’ll finally find out if other people play Playstation 3 games online. One minute depending on ear.
8. SOCOM requires a 480MB update; downloading takes about five-ten minutes. Installing takes about five-ten minutes. Fifteen to twenty minutes.
8a. The Playstation 3 finds 720p to be an optimal display resolution for a 1080p TV; the solution is to uncheck 720p as a supported display resolution and then a game will proceed to use 1080i or 1080p. One minute complemented by profanity in regards to basic usability.
Time from system launch to playing the game? Roughly fifty minutes. Game experiences:
9. The server browser is Battlefield 2 bad.
10. There is no single-player bot mode; I had to learn the hooks of the game with people. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to use the headset.
11. I log out of a server and I’m prompted for a system update.
This is just mind-boggling.