A Requiem

People of the intertron, my PlayStation has come back to me. You probably don't give two shits, but bear with me for a second. For my wife, it was a happy day because she could finally watch that Blu-Ray of The Social Network that I bought two weeks ago. For me, I could finally get back to mowing down my neighbors in HD Remix.

Then the other shoe dropped. There is a cost to getting your PlayStation 3 repaired by Sony hatchet men, above the $140 you've already shelled out for them to muck with it. For those that have also had this done, they know of which I speak.

They're going to wipe your hard drive.

No, there isn't anything you can do about it.

While the bright side to this (if there can be one) is that you can simply get on the PSN and redownload stuff that you've already bought and conveniently leave out the junk that didn't belong there (I'm looking at you, Samurai Shodown. Like Kathy Ireland, you haven't aged well), all of those save files from games you had sitting on there for years are gone. Lost in ether. While it's true that, unless it's a BioWare game, this saved data is ultimately meaningless, to me they we're more appropriate trophies than the metagame BS that's attached to the console anyway.

So alas, I must say goodbye and continue in my stages of grief for all of the blood, sweat, and wasted time that I've put into the following games.

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS (+DLC and Awakening)

This one probably hurts the most because of the impending DA2 save data transfer, but I went through this game four times. Four fucking times. That's a whole shitstack of Ferelden. Now, I loved this game an awful lot, and going through it now would be much, much shorter than the 75 hours or so that the first trip took me, but these were different characters with different endings making different decisions that I really wanted to see with DA2. Unless I simply decide to take an entire month off of work to reclaim all of that, there's no way in hell that I'll have the time to refill that vault. That's a lot of lost time, and it's driving me to drink.

DEMON'S SOULS

Similar to Dragon Age, I ran through DS roughly three times. The first time felt like I just finished a Ph.D. in thermodynamics. Subsequent trips through the game were not nearly as difficult, since further research led me to believe that I was unnecessarily tough on myself, albeit unwittingly, during the initial run (it wasn't a great idea to choose the Wanderer class, I guess). Yes, this game was pretty hard, but not so much that I wanted to kill animals like the internet seems to believe. The problem is that I got wrapped up in the larger world tendency events in the game and weapon forging to the point where I was spending absurd chunks of my life grinding for soul levels and loot. Think two characters at 150+ hours apiece kind of absurd. Just typing that makes me feel like an idiot.

Of course, I played a ton of DS over long weekends of chemotherapy recoup, so I don't feel as though that time was completely wasted. But when I say that save files are good trophies, I basically mean this solely in the case of Demon's Souls. That game made me work for it, man.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4

The first play through was a week-long blitz of long nights and painstaking detail sponging thinking that this was going to be the fitting ending I deserved from this series. It...kind of wasn't. So when I finally played it for a second time I skipped through most of the cutscenes and just enjoyed the combat with it's faux New Game+ features. I'll probably never play this again, but it was kind of nice to know that if I ever wanted to just go throug the superb opening mission in this game with added hardware I could. Oh well.

BORDERLANDS

Though I only completed the game once and was just getting around to the DLC, losing that character was a bit of a kick in the teeth. See, I'm not really down with first-person shooters. I don't dislike them, they just aren't for me. The only reason I was playing BL at all was because it was the only game that my friends that live great distances away and I could agree on to play together. I'm absolutely stupid for this game now, but starting from scratch to catch up with my pals kind of... well, it fucking sucks. I know that they can just run me through stuff, but that's just wasted time when we could be in the Underdome or whatever. Bunk, I say.

FINAL FANTASY XIII

I think this game is just a step below "pretty good" and just a hair above "piece of shit." Sorry, internet. In fact, I rambled on about it (a bit incoherently) at other places. Why am I sad that the save file is gone, then? Maybe it was a sign that getting old really does stink. My recollection of past Final Fantasy games is starting to get in the way of what they are actually becoming, and waking up to this fact is assy. FFXIII, once was enough, but I'm still sorry to see you go.

ROCK BAND 2

Yes, I know that it's not Rock Band 3; and yes, I know that there really isn't that much that's absolutely necessary to save since you can just unlock all the songs when you just want to quick play them (which is pretty much the only time I want to play Rock Band) in an option menu. The thing is, I have a metric shit ton of music that I need to download and install again. Frankly, I'm way too lazy for that shit.

ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION

This game for me was kind of like Disgaea on the PS2 -my white whale. I got so wrapped up doing other things in them both that I never got around to "finishing" the game. It was the kind of game that I would just pick up and play here and there just to dick around until I would grab something new or I would just quit out of disgust after it locked up on me again. It doesn't look like my character, Fuglypants, would be taking a nap in a random cave to gain a level any more. Them's the berries, I guess.

I'd like to say that these save files are gone but not forgotten or they're in a better place or blah blah blah. But gone is what they are.