Then I thought about my never-used Samsung TV just sitting there and my old, ancient Playstation 3 sitting in a drawer and got an idea. What if I hooked those up and played an old PS3 game, or, get this, watched a DVD?! How quaint, right?! I mean, it's positively, scrumptiously so "tens." (Or is it "teens?" Whatever we call that decade.)
So, of course, it became a freakin' project!
First I had to unbury the PS3 unit, its controller and several cords (yes dearies, no wireless shit from this era at the budget-level price I paid), dust it off (how did it get dusty in a dresser drawer covered in sheets and pillow cases?) and figure out how it hooked together. Then I had to pivot the Samsung TV to expose its back so I could get access to the plugs and hookups behind there. Of course, lots more dusting (there it was expected).
After negotiating the plug space on the extension cord back there (I thought I had a power strip -- probably should put one with a TV, a Playstation, a fan and the small electric clock all pulling from the same outlet, especially after seeing that spark) I got it all set in place and when I went to extract the TV remote from the bottom left desk drawer, I discovered no batteries in it. It takes AAAs and guess what I'm all out of -- and it's not bubble gum. One short trip to Walmart after my already scheduled doctor's appointment later and now we got batteries.
It took me a minute, but I finally got the thing to show up on the TV. Everything looked good. But it wouldn't play the GTA V game even though the disk was in the DVD spindle, it didn't even spin. So I put a DVD movie, one of the few in my scant collection, to see if it was a mechanical issue. No, the movie started up fine. Only thing was it immediately reminded me of one of the main reasons why I don't use this TV anymore.
The video and audio absolutely suck compared to the big one in the living room. And with my DVDs only consisting of Sideways, The Core and Oliver Twist (Oh but I do have one good one: After Hours) I likely won't watch many of these (even After Hours frankly since I've seen it maybe a dozen or so times).
So I took the steps to connect to my WiFi, update the software, and update my Playstation account and there are a couple other games I guess I still have access to since they show up in my games folder but not GTA and that's the one I was looking forward to.
Yes, I bought another copy of GTA V via Steam for my PC a few years back and I've played through that for many hours but the Playstation one is the only one I "beat."
I'm not sure if it's some hardware issue or it's me missing something. In any event, it is a little weird firing up an old game console I last played back in 2017 according to the files. Now it does say 2019 on the home screen for some of those things like catalog, add-ons and apps but that might be the date Playstation last updated them -- PS3 is very old, man. I think I bought this brand-new in 2012 and if I'm not mistaken, I got the model with the "upgraded" 250 GB hard drive!
So this may have been the shortest lived revival ever of an old game system. Although, one of those other games is one I never bought for PC...Alien Isolation and if I remember correctly, it was quite a frightfully good little game. That's installed from a download so I think that'll run...
Maybe the ol' boy has a breath or two in 'im after all?