So, yesterday I woke up like any other regular day. When I decided to check my e-mail that regular shit was about to change however. I saw a little e-mail which I assumed to be a boring phishing e-mail asking me to send them my battle.net info. After going over the e-mail it seemed a bit off though, there wasn't any asking for passwords or account numbers. So at the speed of light I jump onto my battle.net page and, tada, the glory called Diablo III Beta was right there.

After a bit of mandatory "rub it in my friends face" I logged in and created a character :)

Played through it first with Wizard in singleplayer and it was an awesome experience. The graphics and style are awesome, and the atmosphere is great too. The gameplay, although without a doubt different from what we are used to in Diablo 2, is great. Multiplayer was a lot of fun, and I definitely agree with Blizzard that more than approx 4 people would bring utter chaos and would make the game too difficult to follow. Seems to me, from my experience with the beta, that this will be an amazing sequel to the Diablo series. And I'm definitely gonna play the shit out of it, check out each class, and explore, untill the beta ends ;)

When Nintendo released the Wii with motion controls they could not simply be beat by Sony introducing the same concept only improved upon slightly; Nintendo had bundled the new motion controls with their new hardware and therefore already had years of software specifically developed for motion controls. The Wii also had the image with the general public of being *the* motion console.

However, if Nintendo is going to release a console with such an amazing IDEA but severely limits it by only allowing one screen pad controller to be used per console they will be leaving too much room for improvement which Sony and Microsoft can use without much effort.

Using the new controller the Wii U will be able to unleash an amazing potential for single-player games but not for multi-player games. So only 50% of the potential will be realized. The only thing Sony and Microsoft will need to do is make it possible for multiple of these types of controllers to be used on their next consoles to pretty much have the upper hand in every single aspect.

I'm not a fanboy and I want Nintendo to do the right thing, but this is an incredibly stupid move. Look the Wii U is sure to have great graphics and expectedly better than the PS3 and Xbox360's, but I don't think many people can argue that the next Playstation and Xbox will be stronger than the Wii U even though the difference may not be as great as it was this gen.

Let's assume that when the next Playstation and Xbox consoles launch they have: better graphics + 4 player controller screen pads + motion controls. What does Nintendo have to differentiate themselves now? Nintendo will have inferior graphics and inferior screen pad support. Perhaps price will be their differentiating point, but I can guarantee you that price will not enable them to succeed in their goal of appealing to core gamers (casual gamers are much more price sensitive than core gamers are) and gaining a lot of third party support.

Look I know they will have great first party games (which I too love), but we can expect less consoles to be sold than the Wii did; because the Wii had something others didn't and did it right (Motion+ is a small improvement in the entire picture). As a consequence third party support may plunge once again after the initial start of the console and it may start to look a lot like the Gamecube (which I love, but it's not good for us gamers when we want 3rd party games, and it's not good for Nintendo).

Well this is my first blog post ever here on the Giant Bomb (and anywhere else).

Steam had been acting up lately and therefore I thought it would be a good idea to reïnstall the bastard.
Just before clicking the uninstall button in the W7 control pannel I thought to myself "hmm maybe I should make a backup of my Super Meat Boy save" (only game not supported by Steam Cloud, which I knew), but assuming that uninstalling Steam would not remove my games I just went ahead and clicked uninstall.

During the course of Steam uninstalling I started to get nervous when seeing how long it took Steam to uninstall, such a small program couldn't possible take that long unless it was taking all of my games with it. It would be an understatement to say that my armpits were not miniature steaming hot versions of the Niagara Falls.

Quickly heading over to /Program Files (86x)/ I found that my Steam folder was completely gone. "OMFG WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE GAME FOLDERS" I thought to myself.
Quickly I headed over to Google and searched where Super Meat Boy kept its safe file, and to my greatest horror I found out it was located in the SMB folder in the Steam folder (not all Steam games have their save files there). It was gone... Hours of fun, achievement, irritation, agitation, anger, tears, and blood; all gone. I tried Googling a possible solution to this by people who had experienced something similar, but I couldn't find any!

Being the kind of person that I am (the one that does not give up very fast, pretty much the target group of SMB) I hopelessly try to find a way to get my save file back.
I do a System Recovery; Steam is back and so is the Super Meat Boy folder but the User Data folder (which contains the saves) isn't there. I install SMB via Steam again and open it up hoping for a miracle, to see all the hard work I put in this game still there... Seeing Meat Boy standing on World 1 and all other Worlds locked made me want to hang myself (NO NO not literally I'm not that kind of person).

Desperately I try another System Recovery, but the User Data folder is still nowhere to be seen. So I start my last desperate struggle before losing total hope. I open Super Meat Boy and close it again (creates a new User Data folder). Right click the User Data folder and click "Restore previous versions" (A function which Windows 7 has). I only see versions of 20-5-2011 (the day this happened), however I see one at a very early time at which this fiasco had not happened yet, a sparkle of hope lighted up in my heart. I copy it, replace the new User Data folder with it, open Meat Boy and VICTORRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY; All of my progress is back again as if nothing had happened.

God DAMN I was (still am) so happy, and now I can continue my life as if nothing had happened.

I'm not the best Super Meat Boy player at all, I have completed the Light World A+ and am half way through the Dark World A+ (dieing bazillions of times). But I absolutely LOVE the game, and to me that was a lot of work to just lose!

/giantblog