Hey. What's going on, dudes? I have been a very, very loyal NHL series customer for a good portion of my life. I remember buying NHL 97 with Beezer on the cover, and on occasion bought multiple copies of the same year for different systems (did I need NHL 99 on my PSX and N64?). But I'm sure a lot of people, like me, have had their loyalty tested with NHL 09. It's the greatest hockey game I've ever played. Too bad now I can't play it and EA doesn't really care too much.

Maybe you've heard about the disc read error. Maybe you've experienced the disc read error. It's okay if you have - we're all friends here, and maybe it will help you to learn that just a couple days ago, even I experienced this great tragedy, a fate which befell me simply because I decided to purchase the Xbox 360 version of NHL 09. Yeah - I experienced this in the first half of October after owning the game since launch. Funny thing, though, you might notice that the support blog up there, it posted the supposed "fix" to the problem not even a week after launch. If it could happen to people that soon after they bought a retail copy of the game, I don't know if I'm supposed to believe that it never happened with review copies or what. What I'm saying is - EA knew about this problem well before I got involved with it a couple days ago, and I would say with some certainty that they knew about it before the people who had issues with it on day one reported it. Did I mention some people IN THAT VERY THREAD are reporting a brick'd 360 because of this? It's a problem with the game on the disc, not the disc itself, so EA's amazing warranty of replacing your game disc doesn't help. Plenty of people have tried multiple copies of the game on one or multiple 360s with absolutely nothing happening. It's EA's problem, not mine. At least, at that level it isn't mine. Spending $60 on a game that I can't play is very much my problem now.

The solution here is to clear the cache. Oh, cool, clearing the cache, I did not realize that I was playing a web browser on this disc, where all problems can be solved by clearing the cache or deleting cookies. I'm just joking, that's totally not the case at all because CLEARING THE CACHE DOESN'T WORK FOR ME OR A GOOD NUMBER OF PEOPLE AAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Maybe you'd like to contact EA customer support, like I did. Well lucky you, after you send your complaint through the website, you're told that it'll be up to 24 hours before you get a response. Awesome, right? That means someone will probably read it. Oh, wait, but no, I'm assuming that's just something that they do to make you feel like that, because you'll get nothing but a canned response for a few goes. In my original email to EA support, I explicitly stated that I had tried cleaning the disc (which was, and remains, oh-so-pristine and without a single scratch, because I know how to actually take care of things I spend $60 on) and clearing the cache but that nothing was working long-term. So what did I get in response? For some fun, let me give you exactly what I got so that you can see how much of this matches what you got in response!

"Hi,
Thank you for writing to Electronic Arts customer support.
If you are getting a disk read error when trying to play the game, you may try clearing the console cache, to see if it helps.
You may also check the disk to see if there may be dirt or smudges on the surface.
If cleaning the disk, and clearing the cache does not seem to help, then you would want to contact the console manufacturer for troubleshooting of the hardware.
For support for your XBOX 360, Please go to the 360 support site [Link: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/contact/]
If there is anything else we may do to assist you please let us know.
Thank you,
Sandy
EA Online Support"

Sweet, thanks Sandy, I'm so glad for this input! But maybe you're thinking "that's not a big deal, a lot of big companies use automated responses to sort problems that could have pretty standard user-caused issues." And I'm like, okay, sure, I'll bite. After I informed "Sandy" that keeping civility was becoming an issue now and that I had very clearly already stated that I attempted to do exactly what she asked, she responded with yet another rousing round of "try cleaning it again, since I'm not convinced that you don't use your copy of NHL 09 as a greasetrap or something." I'm on my third response to Sandy and I'm eagerly awaiting what piece of advice I'll get next. Perhaps I'll be instructed to check the support forums like a few other people, or maybe Sandy will turn into Greg or Peter or Tiger Woods and we'll go through this full-circle, trading "I've cleaned the disc" emails for "maybe you should try cleaning the disc!" a few more times.

So here is the current state-of-affairs for me: my game is broken. The OFFICIAL solution is to clear the cache, which aside from just plain not working for tons of people, means I have to download all game updates to anything I want to play again. I have seen one tiny bit of information regarding a possible "fix" to this, but in all the info about the fix took up about two sentences in the entire post (and no, I will not count a how-to of cache-clearing as a part of it). That was posted, as I can tell from the comments, September 23, two weeks after the initial post telling me to clear the cache, and nearly three weeks ago from today. And yet, here I am, unable to play my copy of NHL 09, unable to convince Sandy to give me any information on when this fix is coming OR information on how to recieve a complete, full-price refund for a broken game, over a month after the problem was "found."

Thanks, EA. Thanks, dudes.