This is as far as I got with Mass Effect. I was recently gifted the legendary edition and found the time to fire it up. You might notice I didn’t get much further than naming my character honkers. I was trying to put Honkers the Goose, but it crashed on the space bar character.

This was a preowned game and the data disc had no issues installing. I took onboard the wisdom of the black square box and inspected the play disc.

Uhhhhh, hmmm, this gash is a feature not a bug, right? And those specks or holes? Probably not good. Given the visible damage, the disc was a very plausible cause of the repeatable crash at that point, although the crash itself did not prove the mechanism.

I guess it will have to go back to the store. That one will not buff out, especially with visible damage you can see light through. As they say, with increased disc density, comes great responsibility.

After having a bit of a read I learnt why damage on the read side of a Blu-ray Disc matters so much. The recording layers sit close to the read surface compared with older optical formats, which is why Blu-ray media relies heavily on a hard protective coating. Whatever caused this gouge, being able to see light through the damaged area was not encouraging.

 

For now, we play Horizon Zero Dawn, which is proving to be a beautiful, stable game so far. The fact that I can play for eight hours and not have it crash once is a refreshing change from the likes of Cyberpunk 2077. 🫠

Sources