Topics

51

General Gaming / Heavy Rain

« on: February 15, 2010, 03:13:54 AM »

I have to admit, I was extremely skeptical of Heavy Rain ever since it was announced.  I have heard some rather unkind things about Quantic Dream's previous game, Indigo Prophesy, and many of the interviews I had read on this game made it seem incredibly pretentious and full of Peter Molyneux-esque promises that wouldn't likely be upheld.  However, the trailers looked interesting and when the demo came out last week, I gave it a shot and really liked it.  The voice acting and character models seem really spotty in places; some of the button pressing events are a little obnoxious (I particularly don't care for the twister-esque sequences where you hold down strings of buttons at once); and the movement controls are abysmal in close quarters, but I found the story very interesting and the emphasis on your choices intriguing.  Of course, I'm also a big fan of P&C Adventure games, and this game is very much a modern incarnation of that genre.

So, is anyone else looking forward to the release of Heavy Rain next week (2/23/2010) on the PS3?  I was going to wait until the game dropped in price a little (as is kind of inevitable given how niche-y this game is), but I found I needed a game to fill in the gap between Bioshock 2 and Final Fantasy XIII in March.  Besides, it has been a long time since I've seen a really good detective murder movie (not since...geez..."Copycat"?).  I also really like that the pre-order bonus is actual additional gameplay in the form of a code for the first "episode" of the DLC adventures (which feature the Heavy Rain characters before and after the events of the main game), and Amazon has it for sale for $55.

52

Nintendo Gaming / Mistwalker's "The Last Story" out in NA via XSEED!

« on: January 29, 2010, 10:43:00 AM »

Apparently  Hironobu Sakaguchi's been teasing this one for a while, but it looks like Mistwalker's finally going to produce an RPG for Wii.  All we know about the game so far is that it is an RPG on Wii; has a 2010 release date (in Japan, at least); and apparently has gorgeous music as evidenced by this website.

I'm looking forward to hearing more on this game as it develops, as RPGs are rare on Wii.  Hopefully this game will be better than what I've heard of Mistwalker's other projects on the 360.





Mistwalker's Official Blog: link

53

General Gaming / My PS3 "died" tonight...any way to fix it short of sending it in for repair?

« on: July 17, 2009, 12:22:27 AM »

Like the subject heading says, my PS3 essentially "died" tonight.  The system will no longer read any disc inserted into the drive, and on the rare occasion that it will accept it and load the game I get one of two things:

1.  Shortly after the Playstation 3 logo appears on-screen, the system kicks me back to the XMB with the error message "80010514".
2.  Shortly after initiating play, the game crashes.  This particularly happens if the game has to access saved data and you generally know it's coming because suddenly the background music stops playing.

Supposedly 80010514 is related to a corruption of the PS3's disc recognition software and is supposed to be caused by faulty firmware updates and other odd software glitches.  It's a known issue with PS3s, especially ones from the era mine is from (it's an original 80gb model I bought refurbashed 4 months ago, and is long since out of warantee).  I've already contacted Sony to get the ball rolling on the very expensive repair process, but short of doing that is there any way to get this thing working again?  If I have to go through with a repair, I also have to find a way to backup all my data (which is a real problem when there are multi-GB files on the HDD and my largest portable storage medium is 1 GB).

In case you're curious, this whole thing started a few hours after I downloaded the new Disgaea 3 trophy patch and started up a new game on the thing.  A couple hours later, my PS3's suddenly not playing anything anymore.  I don't think the trophy patch itself called this, though.  This system's occasionally done this before, but it only refused to display discs on the XMB a couple times and that was a PS2 game a month ago.

54

General Gaming / Lucasarts to bring backcatalog of P&C Adventure Games to Steam

« on: July 06, 2009, 02:46:11 PM »

http://www.destructoid.com/lucasarts-partners-with-steam-for-retro-adventure-revival-138759.phtml

Wow, this is a pretty incredible development and I've been looking forward to the Secret of Monkey Island SE for a while now (I never played the original).  It's great to hear that Lucasarts' other Adventure games will also become available and compatible with XP soon.  But why, Lucasarts?  Why did you have to go with ****ing Steam?  Why couldn't you just have it up Direct-to-Download on your site or something?  I don't want to mess with Steam...

On a sidenote, I wonder if this basically kills any chance of the Wii getting these re-releases/remakes, since it's likely that Steam has these exclusively.

55

General Gaming / BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger - Anyone else playing this?

« on: July 05, 2009, 03:01:46 AM »

Hey all.  A couple days ago, I decided to do a little backlog clearing and got rid of a whole slew of backlogged PS2 games.  After reading a good number of very positive reviews, I ended up using the store credit to pick up BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, the very recently-released and very anime-inspired fighting game from Arc System Works.  Surprisingly, it's been a great deal of fun with a surprisingly strong (if somewhat tedious if you're going for 100% completion) single-player mode, and I don't usually like fighting games.  Of particular note, this game is very friendly to people not familiar or fond of the fighting genre and its 100-button combination combos.  There are only 12 characters, and each has a relative handful of combos typcially activated with 1 or two strings of D-pad movement and a single button.  More complicated movements are done with a single button known as the character's "Drive" command, and each character has a unique Drive that complements their fighting style (Jin's freezes the enemy in a block of ice, Noel's increases the speed and power of her combo attacks, Rachael's commands the wind to blow everything on the field in a given direction, etc.), and 4 of the more-difficult to execute (i.e. most useful) combos are also alternatively-mapped to the right analog stick.  So if you don't feel like putting your thumb through combo hell or you're just not good at it, slam the right analog stick in a given direction and save yourself a lot of time and effort.

Anyone else pick this one up?  I got mine for the PS3.