VideogameVagabond.com

Can a 45-year-old man maintain a marriage and a videogame habit? Let's find out!

Monthly Archives: July 2010

Mass Effect 2 breathing new interest into my 360

I own both an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3. In all honestly, I always try to get the PS3 version when I’m buying multi-platform games, but there are several gems that are Xbox 360-only, and I love each of them.

The most recent addition to that library for my wife and I is Mass Effect 2. We both enjoy BioWare titles in general, and this space trilogy is no exception to that rule. The new story and method of keeping your character intact is innovative and fun.

And Mass Effect 2 is by no means the only title we have our eyes on. My wife and I both want Alan Wake once the price comes down, and we may not even wait for a price-drop once Fable 3 is released. So while I favor my PS3 to my 360, I wouldn’t want to give it up; not for anything.

Kindle 3 announced

OK, so it’s not exactly a videogame, and the announcement didn’t come with a big giveaway of promotional umbrellas or anything like that, but Amazon.com today announced the third generation of the six-inch Kindle, and all I can say is, “Wow.”

For the budget conscious, I see they are offering a “WiFi-only” model for $139… that’s $50 less than any previous Kindle device, and with twice the memory of the K2… 4GB instead of only 2GB. With better screen contrast, longer battery life, a smaller, lighter form and faster performance, it’s everything I’ve wanted to see in a Kindle before deciding to buy one.

I thought I’d have to somehow find a way to save up for a Kindle DX to get all these features, but now the Kindle 3 has everything the DX has, except for a bigger screen. And with the WiFi access, it has one feature even the DX doesn’t have so far.

I’ve been vacillating between a Kindle, a Kindle DX and a Nook for a long time now; but I’ve finally decided that K3 is what I’m looking for, at the price I’m willing to pay. (Plus, I’ll probably re-activate my Audible account to get $100 knocked off my Kindle 3.)

Do I love gadgets almost as much as videogames? Sure… but I love reading even more!

Upgrading my PS3 60GB to 320GB

If all upgrades were as easy as this one was for me, the world wouldn’t need anti wrinkle face cream; unfortunately, the PS3 hard drive upgrade I did is probably the exception to the rule. But it did go off pretty smoothly!

Here’s my tale:

So I finally gave in over the weekend: my wife and I bought a new hard drive for our PS3. We have a 60GB original that was getting too cramped for comfort.

Decided to use the BackUp Utility to copy the contents to a USB hard drive, then swap out the drives using Sony’s own step-by-step instructions, and then Restored contents using BackUp Utility again.

I entered into the operation more than a little nervous, naturally…

I must say, though, the BIGGEST obstacle was a Windows 7 issue, not a PS3 issue….

You see, you need a hard drive (or segment of one) formatted in FAT32 in order for the PS3 to recognize and use the drive (there’s no built-in formatter for external USB hard drives in the PS3 OS).

Fair enough, I can format it on my PC, right?

Ooops… Windows 7 (as well as Vista) LIMITS you to 32GB segments when formatting in FAT32… and I knew I had at least 40-45GB in data to transfer, so I was nervous.

So I finally decided to create THREE 32GB FAT32 partitions and HOPE the PS3 would be smart enough to see the extra space or something…

Fortunately, the PS3 actually COMPRESSED the files to fit… they took up about 31.2GB… very little room to spare.

I was still nervous, though, that I’d come up with missing data during Restore.

After that, things went SLICK.

The Sony directions for removing the existing 60GB drive were AMAZINGLY simple… and all I needed was one small Phillips-head screwdriver. Swapping the drives took MAYBE 5 minutes. Easiest part of the whole deal!

I then hooked everything up; the new hard drive was a Seagate Momentus… the exact same make and model as the one Sony had pre-installed. Only difference was, I installed a 320GB drive (for under $50) in place of the 60GB drive. Over FIVE TIMES more space!

Parts of the PS3 OS must be stored in internal flash memory or something, because even though the hard drive was unformatted, the PS3 booted right up and asked me if I wanted to format the new drive. I did so, then rebooted automatically, then restored from the USB drive… and about an hour or so later, EVERYTHING was still there!

Worked like a dream! A lot of stress over nothing!

And now I have 299GB Total, 232GB available… my PS3 will likely die before I run out of space now… and I don’t have to wince any time I look at a new game like HEAVY RAIN and see that it demands “at least 5GB free space” to run…

FINAL NOTE: Sony needs to add a utility to format USB hard drives to FAT32 without having to rely on a PC to do it… because if I ever DO need something bigger than 320GB, I’m gonna be completely screwed for transferring the data…. I won’t be able to format a large enough volume to FAT32 on Windows 7 to hold all that!

Having trouble getting in?

Are you having trouble getting into my site?

It seems VideogameVagabond.com and a couple other of my blogs have been targeted by a punk company called Score Card Research; they’ve somehow attached something to my site and it’s making calling my site up quite difficult for most people.

As far as I know, they did this uninvited by me; I have my hosting provider on the case and we’re working to get their crap removed so people can actually read my site again.

I hate companies like this to begin with, they are the phentermine of the Web; but they will be gone soon if I have anything to say about it! And I suspect I do… These are, after all, my sites, not theirs, and they are an uninvited guest.

Will Sony’s Move be a Wii-qualizer?

For a long time, my wife has wanted us to get a Nintendo Wii, primarily because of the workout games the Wii controller makes possible. Now, with Sony introducing the Sony Move controller, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much talk of getting a Wii Fitness package.

Sure, we could both use the abs workout a system like this affords; I just have not much interest in buying a Nintendo system to get that. If Sony can come up with some compelling workout games, I know my wife and I will opt-in on getting some Move controllers.

White Knight Chronicles: What a welcome relief!

I’ve written about my vast disappointment in the generally well-reviewed Demon Souls, so now it’s time to talk about the game I traded that crap-tastic title in for: Level 5′s White Knight Chronicles!

Sony published this RPG which mixes action and turn-based elements together quite nicely, and the only reason I didn’t buy it over Demon Souls originally was that Demon Souls was a lot cheaper at the time; but I found White Knight Chronicles on sale this time, so with the trade-in credit, I did OK. Better than most people do in selecting the best weight loss products, at any rate.

Also, White Knight Chronicles was inexplicably savaged in the reviews, usually earning a score somewhere in the six-range on a 10-point scale. I can’t relate to that; after playing the game this weekend for a few hours, it seems to possess all the same laudable qualities I loved about other recent Level 5 titles like Dragon Quest VIII and IX, Rogue Galaxy and Jeanne d’Arc.

The biggest rap against White Knight Chronicles in most reviews was that the game didn’t possess enough innovation … whatever that means. Who cares? The game is what it is and isn’t what it isn’t. And taking it for what it is, White Knight Chronicles is a fun story with an enjoyable battle system and it keeps me wanting to keep playing. What more can one ask?

I don’t know if I’ll do a full review eventually or not, but one thing this whole episode has taught me is that great reviews mean nothing. I hated the well-reviewed Demon Souls and love the poorly-reviewed White Knight Chronicles.

So there.

Demons Souls a total disappointment

Demons Souls is an Atlus PS3 game I eagerly awaited for the time when it would go down in price. I don’t pay full initial release price for videogames much anymore these days; it’s too spendy so I only do that for a few essential, must-have-at-release titles. Demon Souls was not one of those, but at $20 on a special sale, I decided the time was right to take the plunge.

Now, this is not a pronexin reviews; I like most of the games Atlus has made over the past decade or so. Loved most of them, in fact. So I was of a mindset to really enjoy Demon Souls.

It was also a game with great word-of-mouth. Many hardcore gamers praised it for being, well, hardcore. Or just plain hard.

However, my experience was that it was the game’s wonky controls that actually made it difficult, not tough enemies fighting against you. You see, although I’m a very experienced gamers going all the way back to the days of Pong!, I just found the controls in the game to be very inaccurate, loose and prone to making you get your butt kicked.

Even with my experience, I found that no matter which approach to battles I took, I couldn’t get far because for every sword-swing that landed on target, I had to deal with three or four that would clang off a wall because I wasn’t aimed 100-percent perfectly. Even when I was.

I gave the game plenty of time to redeem itself; but there was just nothing for it. I got only slightly better over the five or six hours I played it. But in the end, it was a game that was just too much work to overcome the game’s wonky controls, to make it worthwhile for me to play.

So I traded it in; the game and some extra cash got me a game I’ll talk about on here sooner than expected.