I don't doubt that they might be speaking the truth, but they could've just put in a five minute reset timer or something. having the unit freeze up is just tacky.

Not that anybody will use it...

http://www.destructoid.com/playstation-3-kiosks-fr eezing-up-on-purpose--28860.phtml [destructoid.com]

For me it never froze (granted I didn't play it "all day long") but it took forever to load. I really wasn't interested in wasting my time standing at the machine waiting 5 minutes for a shitty demo to load.

There were other game systems to play and my wife was tugging at my arm telling me to get going ;)

I asked a Best Buy sales rep how he like the PS3. He said "well I wouldn't buy one just yet, the demo unit freezes up all the time..." Needless to say he didn't sell me a unit that day. Maybe Sony should send a memo to their retailers explaining this "feature" if they want to sell it

As anyone who went to Toys R Us back in the "World of Nintendo" NES/SNES days knows, that's why they make displays that simply reset themselves every so often, via a timer switch on the power outlet. My friends and I used to hang out in the store, annoy the staff, play the demo consoles, and base Tetris/Sonic/Mario/whatever battles on how far one could get before the automatic reset. Why would they suddenly build specially-crippled consoles now? It doesn't really make much sense fom any standpoint I can see.

Thank you for pointing this out as no one is gona RTFA ;)

Seriously, it was a random rep, in a random EB games. Reps lie, that is all they do. Anythign a rep says is a lie. Remember this and you will be much better off. (I will admit, this is all simply personal experiance in working in retail, and I am including sales staff ofr retail stores as reps. They all lie also.)

Meh... the freezing isn't that big of an issue. The 360 was doing the same thing when it first appeared in kiosks. Sure, ideally you wouldn't want you kiosks to be freezing, but the systems aren't designed to be operated in a plastic bubble that traps all the exhaust heat. FWIW, the PS3 kiosks at our local Best Buy and Gamestop haven't been locked up any time I've been buy. Neither has the Wii at BB, but you can't even play that. It just runs some demo video all day. IMO, this is more a problem with kiosk design than PS3 hardware design flaw.

I wrote the story based on a conversation I had with a Sony PlayStation retail field rep. I have no reason to make up a story like this. I write content for Destructoid (mostly news related) and thought it was a) funny and b) informative enough to share.

It's not a bash on Sony or their hardware. The crux of the story is: PS3 retail kiosks lock/freeze/whatever up, a Sony rep played it off as something that happens on purpose, it's been confirmed by a few people that they were told the same thing. That is fact. Question my credibility if you'd like, but I think you'll find Destructoid (as a whole) to be both informative and reliable -- I wouldn't intentionally write and post a tall tale for the sake of hits (or anything else for that matter).

This sort of thing happened all the time with various reps at the CompUSA I used to work at. They also said the same kind of misinformed, unintelligent, rhetorical bullshit as this one did as well. Reps never seem to actually know anything about the company's product, their job is to make sure displays look good.

Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]

As a law student, I'll certify to the limits of my knowledge of the issues that wikipedia is a good source for getting "a sense" of the law. Here's a good example. The shopkeeper's privlege is NOT statutory, it is part of the common-law tradition which is used in almost the entire United States (I believe Louisiana is on purely statutory system, but I'm not stopping to check, so don't quote me on that).

From the Article:

So, to sumarize - most store owners and employees granted the task (ie managers and security guards) can require that you stop and allow them to examine your person for goods when there is a reason to do so. This has been upheld even in cases involving "general" suspicion, where a guard checks every person or random persons on their way out.

Since the guard would have the legal right to retain your presence under reasonable circumstances (can't gang tackle you on your way out) if you respond by threatening violence, you are subject to a suit for: (dun dun duh dun!) Common Assault.

A quick guide to tortious assualt can be found - Here [wikipedia.org]

As a note to the officer above, these are both tortious acts, not criminal - hence no requirement for a statute. They can be governed by common law which is more permissive and allows (broad brush stroke here) only cash damages.

-GiH

The previous statements are nuance deprived - see your lawyer for details.

I don't remember the requirements for newer machines, but for SEGA Genesis you were required to display a copyright / trademark notice on a screen that you could not bypass for at least 2 seconds. I think today the initial logos are just there to hide the initial loading time, apart from any fmv playback. Another problem is that some middleware have special licensing requirements that require you to display their logo as well unless you pay extra for the privilege to not do so (like Renderware). The reason Atari 2600 games can start so quickly is that there is no loading time for old cartridge systems (there was a bit of loading for N64 even if it was cartridge based, but it was so quick that you wouldn't think of it as loading, more as level start screens). Anyway, if you can't skip a logo screen immediately and there is no trademark information displayed on the screen, the game is probably loading something.