Holy Crap

We’ve had Rock Band 2 for two days and the Wife has already annihilated the Expert Vocals challenges.  Damn.

Walking With Fossils

Today we dropped The Coffin off at the nearest Purolator courier center, all expenses paid by Sony. If we’re very lucky, we’ll have a new PS3 by the end of next week. It also happens that the nearest Purolator center is within a brisk walk to the Royal Ontario Museum, which has been holding a big ol’ dinosaur exhibit. While it’s still likely not going to hold a candle to anything found at the Tyrrell museum in Drumheller, it’s still a pretty cool exhibit, and for the Wife, fulfilled a life-long dream of finally being able to see a decent dinosaur exhibit. Unsurprisingly, she went a little shutter-bug crazy during the outing, but since no one wants to see 200+ pictures of fossils, here are a few choice snap shots from the trip. You can click on them to enlarge:

Damn It…

So guess what came in the mail that I can now only stare at…

It’s amazing how quickly the PS3 has become the Nerve Center Of Fun for our little house-hold. With that thing out of commission, I can now Not Enjoy Blade Runner looking at its absolute best, and I’ve been literally waiting YEARS for a decent transfer of this movie to hit disc.

At least we got that external hard drive, so transfer of PS3 data commences today, and with any luck, we’ll have a new console by the end of next week or the beginning of the week after next.

We are also quite bummed about the fire on Queen Street West. It’s a great part of town and it’s sad to see a bit of local history go up in flames like that.

Coffin Has Arrived

A term that is borrowed from the leagues of Xbox 360 owners that have had to go through this procedure before. In this case, coffin refers to the box couriered over by the console manufacturer in which you are expected to place your console, and then send back to them. When they receive it, they will send back a new console.

We’re not sending it back just yet. I’d been needing an external hard drive anyway to save data on (since hard drives seem to have a 100% failure rate with me and I’ve actually lost two novels in progress that way) so we’re going to buy tomorrow, use that to unload the PS3 hard drive data, then wipe the PS3 hard drive as recommended before packing it in. That way when the new PS3 arrives all the saved games (and more importantly, the precious downloaded songs for Rock Band) will be intact and still ready to go.

And It Continues

Still playing.

RPG Madness Continues

Wow, the game is 4 CDs and we’re already on the 3rd disc as of tonight.

Still More Final Fantasy

The Wife continues to get sucked in. And to think just a few years ago, she barely tolerated videogames. Now when it comes to RPGs, she’s as hardcore as they get. It’s amazing to me that games are reaching out to people that would formerly have thought them beneath their time can actually find something enjoyable about them. How the hell did that happen?

More Final Fantasy IX

Except now the Wife is playing is as well.

Old School

We dusted off the PS2 and stuck this in. I hadn’t actually finished the game–something about encountering a glitch that made it impossible for me to complete an important side-quest–but getting back to this 4 CD beast is like being back in the 90′s again, when full motion video was the hottest thing, and RPGs weren’t relentlessly Emo.

Despite it having graphics that would make the PS3 weep, it’s still fun to play. And this time I’m gonna’ finish the damn thing.

R.I.P. Playstation 3

I have no explanation other than, perhaps we played it to death.

All I know is that in middle of Gimme Shelter, the game inexplicably froze. Trying to restart the song by pausing produced no results. After doing a reset on the system, the PS3 booted up as normally… and refused to read any disc. Not Blu-Ray game discs, not Blu-Ray movie discs, not DVDs of any variety, or CDs. Everything else worked fine, but it no longer recognized physical discs.

I can only theorize that either the housing for the laser, or the blue laser diode itself got damaged. Whatever the case may be, our PS3, which has been providing endless hours of entertainment is dead.

Fortunately, it died while still under warranty.

A quick call to Sony resulted in something like a 15 minute wait, but when I finally got an actual human being on the line, they were very helpful. After a few minutes to take down the details like mailing address and ask about the receipt–which miraculously, I actually had–she determined that everything was in order and that a replacement was in the offing. The way it now works is that we’ll need to dig out the external hard drive to transfer all of our precious info onto it and wipe the existing internal hard drive. Then a package will be sent by courier–what the 360 owners refer to as a “coffin”–which the PS3 must be placed in. We send back the pre-paid parcel and when Sony gets our dead PS3, they send a new one. Fortunately, we’ll still be getting a 60GB model, because I still play those PS2 games (we were actually still playing Final Fantasy XII together on the PS3) and plan on continuing so as long as my games will work.

It’s good to see that Sony is so on the ball with this, but it doesn’t quite lesson the sudden blow of going cold turkey on PS3 gaming.

Actually I probably won’t go cold turkey. There’s still our half-dead PS2 lying around. It should probably last at least long enough to start on Final Fantasy IX. I can’t continue on with FFXII, because our save file is now trapped on the PS3 hard drive, and there’s no way to transfer it back out and onto a PS2 memory card. Unfortunately the cables used to transfer PS2 files to the PS3 was strictly one-way, with no return ticket.

Oh well, this won’t kill me.

However, staring at the Blade-Runner 5 disc Blu-Ray set that was in bound in the mail at some point… okay, that might hurt a little.