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.

Tatsunoko Vs. Schizophrenia

I guess I should have titled this Autism Vs. Capcom, because if I ever really get consistently good at this game I'll be able to do absurd mathematical calculations at Rain Man speed. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Yesterday, I told you that my PlayStation took a shit on me. In what I'm now thinking was probably disgust, I decided to play my Wii for the first time since... well, you know. Anyway, after doing what little research that I deemed necessary on the subject, it seems almost abundantly clear that last year was a pretty damn good year for Wii games: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on many (many, many) best-of lists, Kirby's Epic Yarn has seen universally strong reviews, as have Donkey Kong Country Returns and Cave Story. And that's just the big stuff. A lot of people, though, seemed to have forgotten Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.

This is fine, really. It did come out last January, and unless your name is "Mass Effect 2" then coming out in January means that folks are going to forget that you exist when the spring rolls around. This is where you also pour one out for No More Heroes 2. Sad, but I don't make the rules. Now, to be fair, this wasn't exactly a game that got completely looked over when it first hit retail. From what I recall, sales numbers were pretty good; at least good enough that Capcom went ahead with plans for Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (which, and I could be wrong about this, but TvC was the deciding factor).

Now, I'll preface this by saying that I play a lot of Street Fighter. Notice that I didn't say that I was especially good at Street Fighter, but a SF game is played more often in my home than just about anything else by a landslide. My fundamentals are good, and I can hang pretty well online in 4 and HDR. When I finally met my local crowd of tournament players, I could hang with them, too. This is about where they decided to try and teach my Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 -a game I have never cared for. Too little choice at high level. Too frenetic. Too much. Not for me. Anyway, the guy whom I was learning from, a hepcat named Chris who runs a bigger midwest tourney called Seasons Beatings in October, told me completely straight faced that by learning MvC2, I would be good (or at least better) at every other fighting game I'll ever play. At first, I thought this was arrogant. After a while, I see what he meant.

Fast forward a year or so and we get TvC, a game I bought day one. Now I won't bore you by bringing up the common mud slung at it like "it shouldn't have been on the Wii" and "there's no competition, it's a dead scene." But I will level a few strikes against it now a year removed from a release date:

First, it is a misconception that there is not crowd or competition for this game. It isn't often that I go online with it and not find an opponent. The problem is that fringe players are gone at this point and we're mostly left with the hard core. This is something that you should expect; even Super Street Fighter 4 will ge to this point eventually. It just happened a bit faster in TvC's case, making picking it back up after nearly a year like climbing Everest without a rope. This being the first game I played when I decided to started playing my Wii again I knew what I was getting into, but I still needed to spend some time in Training Mode to get my thumbs up to snuff.

That brings me to the second major problem: there just aren't that many stick options. Yes, you can find the MadCatz Fightstick on the internet for around 40 bones (which is a pretty good deal), but your only other option is to get a PS-to-GameCube converter and plug in a custom (if you have one) or an older stick that may just have laying around. Me? I live in a smallish apartment with a wife and wifestuff (which is now a word), and the PS3 MadCatz TE stick is about all I can justify, especially if I'm not playing this game every night to get ready for a tournaments (which I'll probably enter as far as this game is concerned). I'm stuck with a classic controller. I am gimped.

Lastly, and probably most crushing, is that the Wii's online components just aren't that good. Now, I will say that I just started Monster Hunter Tri (we'll get to that later) and haven't fully tested that game's online portions yet, so TvC is really the only litmus test that I have, but it never feels like 100% to me. The thing is, the Wii is a wi-fi machine with no innate hard wiring. In comparison to playing online via wi-fi to my PS3 and Street Fighter 4, there are more consistent lag-free matches on the PlayStation (I tested this. You should have been there; it was downright scientific). After grabbing the USB LAN adapter for the Wii things got a little better, but probably 50% of the time I get a good, stable fight. This is a problem, especially if you want to get better at the game. If there's no level playing field, it's just about impossible to rise to the level of an opponent better than you.

But TvC is good. It's not as chaotic as its Vs. game predecessors, but still nuts enough that you have to be acutely aware of everything around (meter level, opponent meter, height of attacks, how much beer you have left, etc.). In flipping on the Wii after so long, I actually feel kind of bad that I let this game languish for so many months. I find myself back to looking up combo videos on YouTube and checking the Shoryuken message boards for the first time since Super SF4 dropped. As far as Wii games go, it looks pretty effing good. But I don't need to sell it to you.

All I need now is some local competition. Online, too. That's where you come in, I guess.

The Yellow Peril

So two weeks ago my PS3 decided to take a shit on me. Cruelly, right in the beginning of Armory DLC for Borderlands. Much, much more cruel, it was a week before the release of DC Universe Online; something I've been planning on playing with a large group for months now. For those not in the know, your game will freeze on you briefly before the machine shuts itself down, followed by the fuck-you of a blinking red light. When you try to turn the thing back on (because you can delude yourself into thinking that it simply overheated), you'll be greeted with something of a bitter rainbow of blinking lights as it cycles from green to yellow to red. See, the yellow is the writing on the wall; you get that and you may as well chuck the thing out the window and into traffic. If you plan on sending it back to Sony to fix, though, then a cat will do.

Shitty as this happens to be, it's hardly a surprise. Between my own gaming habits and my main squeeze's use of Netflix, the thing is basically on at any given moment when either of us are home. I'm (usually) pretty good about keeping it tidy and vacuuming the air vents, but this was bound to happen eventually. It isn't exactly a precedent, either. I sent my PS2 back to Sony twice for repairs back in the day, but at least they didn't charge me. It's $140 to fix a 60 gig backward compatible model. Do you know how many Snickers bars you can get for 140 clams? Well, none in your case. You just broke off a chunk of your soul that could be refilled with caramel and peanuts and handed it over to Sony via your credit card.

Now, as one of those nuts (there it is again!) that found the need to own all three of the current consoles, you would think that I would naturally just shift over to my 360, especially since the thing's only about 6 months old and I haven't gotten a ton of use out of it. However, maybe it's because I played it so much when I got it that I became burned out quickly. Or maybe that since I played all of the exclusive games for it right off the bat that I feel that there really isn't that much left. Maybe I'm spoiled by not having to pay for internet play with the PS3 and am still disgusted at the notion of it. Maybe I feel especially gun shy about it Red Ringing on me given what just happened. So I decided to play the Wii.

Sit down, because this is going to sound stupid: it was weirdly liberating to turn on my Wii and play it. Sure I'll occasionally flip the thing on when other people come over, but anybody that even comes close to reading about this stuff on the internet will agree that this is becoming an exceedingly rare occurrence. In fact, I'm not that far off in saying that the Wii takes its share of shit on the intertron almost daily. This always bugged me a little bit in that I'm pretty good about being impartial in my love for my console children. But since I never really play my Wii either, I can't help but to agree a little bit deep down in the cockles. Hitting the power button and seeing a field of downloaded games (good ones. I don't buy shit) after a pretty long stretch gave me an oddly warm feeling, though. Kind of like when you first buy a system and realize the scope of games you can pay now that you have one. Sure, it wasn't exactly like that, but still kind of close.

Outside of the normal "lose a little weight/ drink less beer/ stop getting into bar fights" bullshit resolutions, I think I finally found one to stick with: This year, I will rekindle the love affair between myself and my long-dormant Nintendo Wii. For the cynical, we can say that this year, I will rejustify having it hooked into my TV. As with all resolutions, we'll see how long this actually lasts, but I think I'm off to a pretty good start. I'll tell you all about it later.