So tonight my beloved fat old PS3 decided it had had enough and beeped its way into the afterlife.
The situation would have been acceptable [I can buy a new one, it had had a good 4 year run and it went out doing what it enjoyed best] if only I had not just found out that there is now no way to get back the data on the hard drive.
Apparently putting the drive into a new PS3 will format it immediately and the only way to create a backup of the game saves on the disk would be to have the original PS3 still fully functional...negating the original need for a new PS3.
Oh well, at least I managed to get it to finally regurgitate my Mass Effect 3 disc (along with an almighty cloud of dust as the fans kicked into high gear) by turning on the power whilst holding down the eject button.
Still, sometimes life sucks hard! This is going to be a costly week.
With the new Mass Effect knocking on the door of release, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to say goodbye to the site (or at least the forums) for a few weeks or so until I've finished Mass Effect 2 on the PS3 which I bought about a month ago and has been sitting on the bench eagerly awaiting its time to step up to the plate (I think I got that metaphor right, yes? No? Ah sod it!).
All because of the possibility of users that take glee in adding spoilers to their headers. I feel it's better to be safe than sorry (or even angry).
Oh, I'm sooo far behind the "in-crowd" with this whole game malarkey.
Skyrim Goes On (and on and on and...) __
Yeah, you better fly away (backwards), dragon!
Of course me starting Mass Effect 2 is entirely contingent on me actually finishing bleedin' Skyrim first! Four months, 58 levels and hundreds of hours later it's still not looking particularly promising for an imminent wrap up... though it's getting slightly closer as I've finally decided to complete the Main Quest at last. It's just that I'm still seeing un-discovered places popping up on my travels even now. That in itself I still find amazing.
Oh, and there's those trophies to consider.
Damn, I'm NEVER going to get to play Mass Effect 2, let alone 3 am I?
BTW. Why can't I marry Lydia? She's been my constant companion for hundreds of hours now. It would just feel awkward to marry a "stranger" now. See, never get involved with someone you work with!
These two seem pretty damned lost to me I finally (and I must say, reluctantly) got to the end of both episodes of the Grand Theft Auto IV DLC on the PS3 this week. But at least now I can look forward to replaying the missions in "The Ballad of Gay Tony" for higher completion percentages at some time in the near future. These two bits of Downloadable Content have proved to be surprisingly good value for money in terms of gameplay time. "The Lost and Damned" kept me quiet for a good 40 hours and "The Ballad of Gay Tony" had me in its thrall for around 35 more.
No, that's not Tony. It's just the way Luis walks... slowly and away from explosions It truly was a real pleasure to drop into the bustling metropolis of Liberty City again after so long away. The greatest buzz coming from seeing how they inter-weaved various elements and characters of the original game's plot to show us the tale from different perspectives over the course of the two story-lines.
That, the arsenal of new weapons, the new content on the radio and TV stations as well as all the added activities like base-jumping, dancing, gang wars and even drinking contests really made sure that, having downloaded this duo of add-ons, I wasn't suffering from buyer's remorse after a couple of hours.
If I Knew Then ... Starting all over again __
Ah, Meals on Wheels I'm a great fan of unlocking things in games. New weaponry, abilities, characters, even trophies. So sometimes getting to a high level in a game and having less to unlock comes with a twinge of sadness. It's at times like these that I fire up my alternate PS3 user and start the game all over again. Just so I can have the rush of unlocking the goodies once more.
An upside of this comes with a game like Battlefield Bad Company 2, going in as a complete rookie. Yes you don't have all the guns and equipment unlocked, but the knowledge of the maps that you've carried over from your time spent before means you're more likely to know where to look out for people and what tactics they'll employ. It's always fun to take out a player ranked about 30 levels above you with your first gun and no enhancements. Plus they get to see who killed them (i.e. a complete novice).
Fear of Forgetting Final Fantasy XIII __
I feel it's been such a long time since I last loaded Final Fantasy XIII into the old black monolith that, when I eventually get back to it, I fear the the tiny, tiny gaming cortex in my brain may have totally lost all the knowledge of the strategies I had settled into in the previous 118 hours of the quest The vast majority of that time being spent on the more open-world section near the end that I've not dared move on from yet.
I had basically the same sort of problem when I played XII. Namely an extended hiatus (sounds painful, I know) leading to a need to start a new game to get myself back up to speed, re-learning the spells and combinations of equipment and characters that had become second nature in the previous run, before I could muster enough courage to inflict myself on my main save.
We're in a long-term relationship... but I may need to see other games Now I'm wondering whether I'll be able to find a big enough block of free time to set aside again for either jumping right back into the fray or starting up the story again to get the muscle memory back. Oh, who am I kidding? It's pretty much a given that I'll find some time to get back into Ye Olde Fantasy eventually, even if it's just for short bursts at weekends. I get the sneaking suspicion, though, that just as I get myself back into the swing of all that switching up the parties with the paradigm shifts, carefully managing items to upgrade my equipment and getting to the a new level on the crystarium to use some of my now maxed-out CP, a new "must play" game will appear on the horizon and have this game slipping down the priorities list once more.
And it's very likely the game to come between us may be...
Little Big Planet 2 __
This week saw many announcements all over that there Interweb thingy of the forthcoming sequel to Little Big Planet. Astonishingly they didn't call it "Slightly Bigger Planet". For some strange and unknown reason they've opted for the rather more orthodox moniker of "Little Big Planet 2".
The original was quite polarizing in various quarters. Some people absolutely hated the "floaty" jumping controls, some dismissed the game's cute aesthetic as being "for babies", while still others called everyone else "heathens" for blaspheming against The Boy of The Cloth and duly cursed them all to an eternity of "Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing".
Thanks to the the new camera, people will be able to create genitalia in top-down mode too!
With all this talk of features like;
Freely rotating cameras allowing for things like top-down games,
Circuit boards crammed with hundreds of logic controls that can then be shrunk down into a little micro chip to control a character,
...it seems like now all of us who have seen a thin film of dust accrue on our copy of LBP over the preceding months can at last crack it open once more and brush up on our popit procedures in preparation for the Second Coming.
Looks like this one's going to be Big... or maybe even Little.
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After my purchase of the wonderful Grand Theft Auto IV DLC for the PS3, it's been a while since I've looked down the iron sights of a bit of digital weaponry FPS-style, so this morning (it being a weekend) I thought I'd dip my toe back into the waters of Battlefield Bad Company 2.
Now I don't know whether it's my rapidly advancing age, added to my shockingly poor fitness levels and just plain "sucking at FPS's in general", but I've come out of the other side of a brace of matches physically shaking, but not in a bad way. I'd forgotten just how immersed I would get in the game and how being invested in basically running around keeping myself and others alive really takes it out of a person (well, a person in such poor shape as yours truly anyway)
Still, even after a couple of weeks of absence, it was comforting to find that not a great deal changes in the world of BFBC2. Parachuting into Port Valdez sporting my bright red "shoot here" medic's cap and "Hippocratic Oath be damned" MG3 machine gun, I was less than surprised to find that our other medics seemed to have suddenly remembered they were wanted on the 15th tee and had taken the morning off. No surprise either that the vast majority of the defenders were all waaay forward trying to get spawn point kills. Snipers on both sides were as prevalent as ever and making the mound overlooking the site look reminiscent of Kashyyk in mating season.
What did surprise me, though, was that when our side armed the charges, it seemed as if nobody on their side was trying to disarm them. "Never!", thought I. "That can't be what's happening". But my suspicions were borne out when, after the first base was captured, I managed to breeze up to A2 (the single story left-hand building) in a tank, hop out and arm the charge unhindered. Now at this point I was ready for the inevitable onslaught that always followed the planting of a charge on A2, looking around at the entrances and waiting for the tidal wave of lead-flinging defenders, heart rate through the roof... but nothing. Nada. Zip. It was like I'd thrown a party (complete with flashing red lights, smoke and sirens) but no-one turned up.
One surprising win later I gave a bit of conquest on Arica Harbour a bash. Needless to say I had my ass and just about every other part of my anatomy handed to me, as is my tradition. But my one saving grace was that I managed to get another demolition 2.0 kill with a bout of 40mm "rapid erosion"... just another bazillion more to go for the trophy. Sigh!
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