sociallysour.org

I have been in the mood for a classic style RPG to play for the last week. I ended up trying “Lunar: Dragon Song”, and was horribly disappointed in the game. Next I tried Magical Starsign, which seems to have promise, but could not keep me interested for very long. Some small points started to annoy me, but it looks like a decent game to come back to. Thats when the realization set in that for a classic RPG game I would have to look back to the classics. To much 3D and more complicated combat systems get in the way off a good classic RPG feel.

Last night I started up a copy of Dragon Warrior III for the gameboy color. I have logged about 2 hours into the game thus far, and still feel like getting more time into it. I am guessing 30 min of that time was just grinding to level up the characters and farm some gold. The story line so far is as basic as it can get… I am a 16 year old boy who is now old enough to go out on a journey. My father died on a journey to defeat The Baramos, when he fell into a volcano and burned to death.. My people are now passing that journey onto me. The game has a classic over head view that we see in most the old RPG’s of the day (Final Fantasy). Graphically the game is prob the best I have ever seen for the gameboy color. Loading times are next to none and going from room to room is instant. I was going to actually play the 3rd remake of it for the SNES (was originally a NES game) but after looking at the comparison of graphics for all three I decided to go for the gameboy color version.

The battle system is very classic but stripped down more than I expected for easy controls on the gameboy. When you are fighting more than one creature of the same type it will group them as one. An example of this is if you are fighting 3 slimes and 2 ravens it will show up as attack “3 slimes” or “2 ravens”. Once you pick it seems to sort out the attacks on its own to best eliminate the monsters you picked with the characters you used. It would have been nice to have more options when attacking, but it seems to do a pretty good job.

Like I said the story line is not the most exiciting thing I have ever heard, but I am hoping something more will happen in the game and give it a little more direction. In any case is nice to have a large selection of classic RPG’s I can go back to for now till some developers realize that a market for classic 2D RPG’s still exists.

Last weekend Erika started playing New Super Mario Bros on the DS. I have had the game since it came out ages back, but had never really finished it. I spent most of last Sunday playing it, and ended up finishing the game later that week. It really is a great throw back to the classic Super Mario games. Game difficulty was pretty low and it didn’t seem to increase till the final world after the 2nd castle. Most boss battles could be beat in seconds if you saved a flower power for them. Graphics where some of the best on the DS, but I see little to no replay in this game for me.

Over all the game was fun but not very challenging.

Erika and I are planning to hit up some some Super Mario Bros 3 on the Wii since we got the Classic Mario bug.

So last night after a long session of Fallout 3 on the PS3 I went to look at my Trophies and got a error message saying it could not sync them. No big deal I thought it has happened before that I could not get on PSN for a little while and was heading to bed anyway.

This afternoon a fellow co-worker and 360 Fanboy sent me a link to a engadget article. Seems that the PS3 fat is having some major issues. Sony released the following:

As you may be aware, some customers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network today. This problem affects the models other than the new slim PS3.

We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.

Errors include:

* The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
* When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following
message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been
signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
* When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears
on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install
trophies. Please exit your game.”
* When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the
Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date
and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
* Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the
PlayStation Store before the expiration date.

We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.

As mentioned above, please be advised that the new slim PS3 is not affected with this error. We are doing our best to resolve the issue and do apologize for any inconvenience caused.

For the latest status on this situation please continue to check either the PlayStation.Blog or PlayStation.com.

Lets hope they get this fixed up pretty quick and with out bricking any PS3′s.. I was really looking forward to getting some more Lego Indiana Jones 2 play in tonight.

A few weeks back I had a friend from work come over with his gf to play some Rockband. Being the uber rockstar he is, he some how managed to break the strum bar on the Rockband 2 Guitar controller. Well here is the fix I did and had to just do again tonight. I might look into cutting up a old credit card and making it stronger if it happens again.

Remove all the screws from the back of the Guitar Controller.

The guts of the controller are a little more complex than one would expect, but don’t worry we are only worried about the part circled in red. Click the image for a larger view.

From this photo it actually looks like everything is working normal.. But the small plastic strum bar section that hold the magnet is cracked as you will see in the next image.

This is the section that is the weakest link in the strum bar. It is actually a cheap plastic holder for the magnet that makes contact every time you strum. It would be nice if the strum bar could be flipped as I tend to not use up strokes very often. But it cant so I resorted to crazy glue.

And that is all it takes to at least get back to rocking for a little while. When putting the guitar back together remeber that the 2 small screws are for in the cut away of the guitar, 4 longest are in the next bolt holes, and all the others are the same size.

Keep Rocking!

This was brought to you by the soothing sounds of Foo Fighters Alone + Easy Target.

Ended up doing some work on sociallysour.org tonight and upgraded to the latest version of wordpress finally. You might also notice the fancy new theme I installed. Its called Carrington. I pretty much just used the stock theme and changed some font colors in the css, added some google ads, and presto. Its pretty different than the hack on the old hacked up Kubrick theme I had been using for years now. Hopefully the new theme will get me back into working on the site as it was growing pretty stale around here the past year or so.

In the video game news I have given Rockband2 a break and picked up a copy of the new Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 for PS3. I have not really been playing any RTS games since StarCraft, so it seems pretty fast to me right now. In the campaign mode I seem to be doing ok, but playing against the AI in a one on one game… yah, I don’t seem to last very long and run out of funds and just have to watch my base be bombed and blown to crap.