Red Ring of Death, Yellow Light of Death, or crazy graphical tearing glitches. I owned each console in the previous generation and not a single one has survived at full capacity, forcing me to replace each of them at least once. This console cycle has not started off with a bang either, now that PlayStation 4 owners are reporting a console-killing blinking blue light error.
In a healthy PlayStation 4, the blue light on the front should flash a blue color for an instant before eventually shifting to white. Those who are reporting the problem do not see the light changing to white, but rather the light continue to flash blue.
Sony has taken to the Internet to provide a troubleshooting guide for this latest in a rainbow array of errors, and many of the problems have been cited as television incompatibility or just straight up hardware problems with either the power supply or hard drive.
If the troubleshooting guide does not work, then contacting Sony will be your only option, once again starting the miserable cycle of waiting to have a console fixed, getting a new one via mail instead, turning it on, playing it for a few months before it dies again, just to have to call Sony all over. It's a tango many of us danced a few too many times in recent years.
I wonder what spectrum of color the Xbox One will have once it almost certainly launches to errors. Purple or green, maybe. Regardless, the guys who design these magnificent error lights must be making lots of money, while the engineers who design the machines struggle to have them survive the strenuous task of simply being used as they were envisioned.
Can we get through a console cycle without this drama ever again? I wonder…
