The 2nd Time My Wii Was broke

Well my order from Amazon finally came. I opened my mailbox when I got home from work last night and there was a nice little brown box addressed to me. I grabbed everything up and went in the house to open it up. I swear I heard Mario yell as I took it out of the box and the theme song even played underneath - SUPER MARIO GALAXY!!!

My Wii better be working I thought as I ripped the plastic shrink wrap off. I heard the disc drive start up as I popped the game in. Uh oh!! :(



This was not good. My Wii has never been the same since lightning struck.

(FLASHBACK TO FEBRUARY 2008)
Two days after the Patriots failed to achieve the perfect season (THANK YOU LORD!!) I got a frantic phone call while I was at work to get home quickly. There was a disaster! Apparently across the street from my house a tree fell and landed on some power lines and fried our whole house. The guy right next to the pole got some too but we were really bad off. Maybe I'll tell this whole story somewhere else later because I am getting off track here.

The point is my Wii didn't work anymore. I thought it was toast so I cried and called Nintendo support. They were convinced there was no problem. They were confident that the plug adapter thing was designed to stop that sort of thing from happening and they would send me a new one at no charge. WHA??! That's awesome. What was even awesomer was that when it came, it worked!! The only issue now is that my disc drive is LOUD! I know it wasn't like that before but at least it works. I have regained my happiness. I buried the old plug in the backyard at sundown. It was a martyr. It gave it's life to save my Wii and would always hold a place of honor in my heart.

(FLASH FORWARD TO FEBRUARY 2010)
No problems with the Wii (other than the airport decibel level disc drive) in two years. I got Wii Fit Plus for Xmas and I have been jamming on that lately. I got a lot of stuff unlocked and Isaac and I are having a good time exercising. Until one day it told me the save was corrupt and I had to create a new one. WHA??! All my progress is lost. WTF? I never had that happen before. Ok, I'm not happy about this but whatever. I had to do everything over. Unlock everything again. My awesome 1 full hour exercise session was lost. All my graphs of progress are gone too. I guess I'll live though. I mean I did the exercise so I am that much healthier so it doesn't really matter in the end that those results are not saved. Correction: It didn't matter much until it started happening again and again. Every other week my save was corrupted and the Wii was getting more and more troublesome to get to work properly. I started using an SD card to save off my Wii Fit saves every day when I was done and then deleting the system save and re-copying it over the next day to continue but that was a pain in the neck. I pretty much eventually stopped using my Wii due to this issue.

(FLASH FORWARD TO PRESENT)
So now I'm sitting here with a brand new 10/10 Mario game and no working Wii to play it on. This was a major bummer. I went to my computer and sent Nintendo an email. I was pretty sure that this was it. I'd probably have to send it in for repairs which would cost me at least $50 plus shipping and handling and I'd be without a Wii for a month. I'd probably also have to rip my cool skin off the Wii or they'd ruin it there and where would I put it, how would I get it back on later? This was depressing. An hour or so later I checked my email and they had written me back already. Due to my issue they needed to talk to me personally so they gave me the number to call. I called and got a nice younger kid that seemed so eager to assist me and was sooo sorrry that I was having troubles. Yeah cut the crap kid just tell me what I need to do here. He seemed to think that it was a system memory issue and to reformat the entire Wii. I'd lose all my saves, and channels and Virtual Console games but I could redownload some of the stuff if I needed. I wasn't too happy about having to do that but at least it was a solution, one that would not force me to send it in. I contemplated sticking the SD card in there and trying to save off my saves but what exactly did I need and why? The Wii wasn't responding properly anyway. I doubt even trying that would work so I decided I was just going to wipe everything.

I clicked on Reformat Wii System Memory and waited to see what would happen. It didn't seem to take that long and when it was done it shut down. I gave it a few seconds and then hit power to boot it back up. When it came on it was like I just got it brand new. I had to choose the system language and set the clock and re-establish my internet connection but it was a lot faster now and everything seemed to be working. I went straight to the Super Mario Galaxy 2 disc and hit Start. It fired right up. I could play!! Everything seemed to be okay now. This was fantastic news!! :D

I really haven't played around with the other stuff so I don't realize what I'm missing yet but so far so good. Nintendo has come thru again for me. You can read my SMG2 blog to read about what I thought there which will be published sooner or later.

How I ended up with Red Dead Redemption

Since I preordered Super Mario Galaxy 2 from Amazon that meant I wouldn't have it right on launch day (that will be another blog) but I needed a new game and I got a $25 gift card from Gamestop so what should I do? My thoughts were this at first: Buy Terminator: Salvation used and God Of War Collection. I could get 3 Platinums on these and they were fairly cheap. Although I know Terminator is a POS but lots of people just rape it for the Platinum so I am okay with that. What ended up stopping this from happening (or delaying it) was that I saw the Red Dead Redemption was getting extremely high reviews and I was not expecting that. I remember being on the hype train of the first one back in the days of Xbox (I even bought Dead Man's Hand in anticipation) but this sequel was never really on my radar. Luckily my sense of reason (<3 Alejandra <3) helped me realize that I'd rather have a new exciting game experience rather than the chore of playing 3 games (enjoyable as they may be) just to mine them for trophies.

Once I decide about something like that I act immediately. Sunday morning I knew I had to do a quick grocery shopping run for the week and the Gamestop was right next door so I could hit it then. One thing went wrong here, I walk in, look around, decide to just ask the dude and he says they don't have any. What?! Remember this kids: A game store without the game you want is nary a game store at all.
I tweeted my dissatisfaction immediately to the corporate Gamestop account. I wanted to call around real quick but I had already walked over to the grocery store and told myself that I wasn't in that much of a hurry. I'd get my stuff and call when I got out. Unbelievably the one at the mall didn't have it in stock either. Was this some kind of conspiracy? I had this goal set in my heart and started questioning to what lengths I'd go to to accomplish this. I decided I wouldn't make a special trip to Pittsburgh to get it. I could wait until Monday when I went to work to look but if they had it at this new store I just found out about in Latrobe (Went there on Saturday night with my friend from Derry as he needed to buy an extra PS3 controller) I would make that trip. They did have it. I gave the guy my name to make sure he held it for me and I was off. You can check my foursquare that day. I was all over the place but I accomplished all my goals for that trip and had the game. I didn't play it right away because hockey playoffs were on but I was smart enough to throw it in in case it needed to install or update or whatever since we know what a hassle waiting for that is. I turned the web cam around so Ale could watch the intro with me. She thought we were watching a movie until I took control of the character and started randomly shooting people. Now let's see what can we do now......

I guess I'll make my playthru of the game it's own blog since this little preview thing has gotten out of control.

God Of War 3

Here is a summary of how I played and destroyed God Of War 3 on PS3 in 5 days.

I needed to give Heavy Rain back to Dan so I stopped over there on 05/11 and in exchange he let me borrow God Of War 3 since he just platinumed it. It was his first and he was excited to break that curse of having none. We grew up gaming together so I understand his feelings as I was in a similar position before I went out and got my first Platinum. They come easier after that first one. It's the hardest.

I went home that night and after roadmapping my 'Path to Platinum' I figured the best thing to do was jump right in on Titan difficulty (hard). I must have been tired because I couldn't even beat those water horse/spiders dudes leading up to Poseidon (god #1). They were destroying me so I quit and went to bed. I was kind of bummed. Was it going to be that hard? Will I even be able to beat this on this difficulty? Fortunately the next day I did a lot better although I did face many challenges.

Since I was playing it on the hardest difficulty I was going to need all the help I could get. Since a few of the silver trophies were to collect all the gorgon eyes and stuff I might as well do that during this playthru so I got a printout to help me get them as I went thru. I hate to do that on my own and end up missing one which screws the whole deal.

I love how the God Of War games don't start out with stupid tutorials and lame ramp ups like almost every other game on the market does. They throw you into the fire from the get go. The only problem with that is that when you get past that part the still have to find a way to strip of you of your powers so you have new stuff to acquire. I laughed as a bunch of stupid souls ripped all my powers from me when I fell off Mount Olympus into the River Styx. That wasn't the greatest idea but whatever. Right after that was the cut scene of Athena's ghost telling you what to do. So when u kill a god now they turn into ghost? :|

This is the realm of Hades. None of these boards seem too difficult. It's just the path between killing each god. Hades was a cool fight. I'm not sure why you ripped patches of his flesh out but it was cool that they were still alive and tried to squirm back to him. Why didn't he go for the helmet first thing? Oh and he jumps out of the river for one final round. Now what happened to me when I fell in there should happen to him. 2 gods dead.

Helios is next but one of the titans already roughed him up for me. All I have to do is get up to where he is and rip his head off. Now I have a cool lantern. 3 gods dead.

The next part gives you a little preview of the labyrinth but you don't know what it is at this point. You're just riding around on a couple of huge boxes. Up the chain (you go up and down this thing several times) and into the Flame of Olympus room but can't do anything while the judges hold the chain down. Hermes is here and he mocks Kratos a little. Time to chase him down. He doesn't seem all that fast. Isn't he paying attention to what is happening to his brothers? Look how puny he is. I'd go and hide if I were him. Sure enough when Kratos catches up to him he beats the crap out of him and cut his legs off to get his boots. 4 gods dead.

There's a cool area proceeding thru the next part. There is a music game inspired giant harp puzzle. First you have to adjust the strings at the top and then stand in the middle by the switch that looks like the Playstation controller buttons, then the different shapes of the buttons scroll across and you have to hit the right buttons to pass this part. Reminded me of Guitar Hero a bit. It was kind of weird and it didn't feel like it fit with the rest of everything but it was cool to have something different in there I guess.

I really liked the next battle with Hercules. It wasn't anything too fancy out out there just a fist fight basically. He does send lots of minions at you at first but as you proceed it gets down to just you and him. This is where you get the Nemean Cestus. Hercules puts them on before he jumps down to fight you but as you brawl Kratos rips them off him and uses them against their owner. At the end Hercules tries to upend the whole arena with his strength but with these gauntlets Kratos turns the tide and then just pounds on Hercules' face until there is nothing left. 5 gods dead.

The next god is one you don't kill amazingly enough but it does showcase one of the draws that have been in every God Of War game so far, the sex mini-game. Of course it's the god of love I'm talking about, Aphrodite. Not only do you get a ton of red orbs for 'doing' this but there is a trophy reward as well.

Kratos fights and kills Cronos next. He's a titan though and not a god. It's still a worthy multi-tiered battle that is a stage of it's own as you jump around on his body avoiding his grasp while you whittle away at him waiting to deliver the death blow. It was your buddy Hephaestus that sends you on this quest because he says he can make you a good weapon if you get this stone from Chronos. Unfortunately when you retrieve it and give it to him he booby traps the Nemesis Whip it in an attempt to kill you. Needless to say it doesn't work and instead Kratos turns the tables and murders him instead.

The next part in Hera's Garden was fairly interesting and it a weird way it reminded me of Echochrome. It was a mini maze with a few enemies but high above was a statue with a green jeweled eye. After killing Hera (6 gods dead) Kratos ripped it's twin from Hera's chalice and could use it to 'see thru' this eye. It gave you an unique view of the garden which created a crazy way to do some perspective puzzles. The weight of water filling a giant cup would cause a platform to stick out but in the actual 3D game world it looked like it was off by itself not attached to anything. Switching to this other vision mode however would show from a different perspective that it did indeed attach to another platform allowing Kratos to go where he previously could not. Another area that was kind of short but it being different was a nice change of pace from the usual.

It's time to go back to the Labyrinth and raise it so Pandora can extinguish the Flame of Olympus so Kratos can get to the box to use its contents to kill Zeus. This is where it started to get really hard on Titan. This is what I call the beginning of the end. The first thing you have to do is fight a huge scorpion. It contains a key you need to get thru the Labyrinth. It wasn't that hard but it did take a couple tries to beat him. Now I move on to the Labyrinth proper. One of the trophies was the whole way thru without dying. That was kind of rough. I could easily make it to the spiky floor part but I died a lot there. Right after that was a save. There was a lot of fighting after that. One room enemies must have spawned for 20-30 minutes. Insane. Again it took a while and started to become mildly frustrating but I managed to succeed.

Now I could bust up that chain and take care of those 3 judges. Unfortunately here is where the frustration factor went up by 10. As soon as you get to the bottom of the chain Kratos is confronted with a fire Cerberus which is hard but by itself you could handle it but every head you cut off spawn satyrs which makes this fight extremely difficult. This fight had to take me a good hour or two and a good bout of swearing. I don't think the ending part fighting Zeus was as bad as this part was. Which, by the way, is exactly who you will fighting next after you bust those crystals off the judges heads and then go back up the chain.

FINAL BATTLE:
This whole ending part was very satisfying. Zeus and Kratos get fired up real quick and start fighting on this narrow column which is cool because it makes this part of the fight like an old school fighting game brawl like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. You can only go forward or backward. If you want to get behind Zeus you'll have to jump over him. The main thing here is block. I don't remember this part being too hard but I know it took me a while to get thru it. Most of the things Zeus throws out at you can be blocked then just counter. If he hits you, you lose a lot of energy. There is a second round here once you take enough energy off but it's the same, Zeus just gains one other attack method which is easily avoidable.

Now you take the fight outside to an area you may remember seeing before. Beat Zeus down a little more and an old friend will show up. Gaia tries to kill you both but you end up back in the huge whole in her fighting right next to her heart. This was another rough part. Zeus will sometimes fly around and make 5 copies of himself. If they get you right you can be killed almost instantly. Just pound Zeus with the gauntlets endlessly. Do not even try to recharge at the heart just don't let him get over to it and soon you should get to the final QTE where you take the Blade of Olympus and impale both Zeus and Gaia at the same time. Kratos' revenge is at hand!!

Of course just like those teen camp counselors killing Jason Vorhees, no matter how bad he gets beat, he's never quite dead yet. You have to beat him down a bit more before he finally gives up the ghost. That's what happens remember? Gods die and turn into ghosts. What is not good news for you is that Zeus' ghost messes up Kratos pretty bad and send him on some kind of strange flashback in his mind. I wasn't sure what to do int his weird part but as long as you just keep going you should be alright. Eventually you forgive yourself for all the evils you have done and you snap out of it and kill Zeus' ghost. (7 gods dead)

The gist of the end was that when Kratos opened Pandora's Box in the first GoW yeah he acquired the power to kill Aries but he also released the evils that Zeus had sealed in there and that is eventually what weakened the gods enough for Kratos to prevail. Athena on the other hand used her powers to put Hope into the box to counter those evils. When the evils got free and went to the gods, it was the hope that went to Kratos that kept him going. I find that very 'The Matrix-y'. Choice is what kept Neo going right? Now that the gods are dead though she wants her hope back to rebuild their legacy but seeing his vengeance is over Kratos now impales himself with the Blade of Olympus killing himself and releasing hope for all of mankind instead. This explains why the gods are no more. Kratos took them out and gave their powers to us. Not too shabby. I guess I can live with that explanation.

The End

Kratos ain't lying there dead anymore. There's a trail of blood from his body that leads over to the side of the cliff......


I beat the game and got all the ending and difficulty trophies early Sunday morning 05/16. I know there were a few spots on Titan that were frustrating but having to play the Challenge of the Gods just added to that. I guess it didn't take me long to do, a few hours but it was tough. The challenge where you have to take all those guys out with no weapons was the worst. I could always get it down to one big guy with the circle over his head or 2-3 of the little guys left but I would always run out of time. I needed like 5 more secs to do this. MAN. How did I finally do it? I killed everyone but the cyclops and with like 1 sec left he lunges me and falls off the side. Pure luck. The 'turn yourself to stone 10X' was another hard one but besides though the rest weren't that bad. Once I got that trophy in the early afternoon there were only 3 easy ones left I needed but enough for now. I need a break to do some real life things.

I started over on easy later in the evening to get these few final trophies. Burn 100 enemies with the arrows. This time as soon as I got the Bow I started doing this. I got it before I even got to Helios which was the next one I needed, Blind 100 enemies with his stare. Just did this to everybody as I went until I got it. I needed one last trophy now, Kick 50 hounds. Well I've been doing it since I started this over so I should be to 50 soon. Best place to do this? Posiedens Palace. There is a part where you have to kick these mutts thru a portal to weigh down a platform. If you kick them in the water by mistake they die so they have to constantly respawn so you can't get stuck here. Boom there's 50, there's my trophy. BOOM There's my Platinum. That was the quickest one I got so far.
I think I should go back and get the God of War Collection now. GoW1 & GoW2 on the same disc redone in HD and with trophy support. I can get 2 Platinums on one disc!!

All in all a fine game worthy of the hype it got. Kratos is a fun videogame and I can't wait to see what they do with the series going forward.

Heavy Rain

This isn't a review exactly. I just wanted to write a little bit about what I thought of the game and my quest to acquire its Platinum.

I started out by borrowing this game from Dan. He's the man. Dan likes to buy all the hot games brand new so he is a good person to trade with. All I have to do is wait until he plays thru it and is done and then he'll usually let me borrow it. That's a good friend. I do the same for him too. Don't have that many old skool gaming friends anymore which makes me sad. I thought more people than ever were supposed to be gaming. Why can't I borrow their games?

This game was on my radar not because it was a new awesome game that was supposed to be the next big hit but because of the uniqueness of it. This was game that had never really been attempted before. The developer, Quantic Dream, developed this game building on what they had done previously with their amazing motion capture technology in a game called Indigo Prophecy. (I don't have any experience with that game) These are not crazy spiky haired anime cartoon characters running around. These are hyper realistic humans walking around. It is freaky how real they look. They look real, their mouths move realistically when they talk, they walk and interact with the environment just how you'd expect a real person to. They did a really excellent job with that aspect of the game. It's far above what you see in 99% of other games out there and I would expect that if they make another game using this technology it would look and respond even better.

Heavy Rain is a murder mystery type of game (actually I think they refer to it as an 'Interactive Drama') that focuses on a group of people finding out the identity of the Origami Killer and stopping his crimes. Rather than be a 3rd person action packed adventure game like so many others they slowed it down and made it more for the mind. You can control the movement of the main character and as you walk around each scene if there is something you can interact with a button press icon will appear. Most of the action portions of the game are quick time events (QTE). There were two old games I kept thinking of as I played it. The control system reminded me a lot of how you played Dragon's Lair back in the day with the 'waiting to see what happens and then hurry up and press the control the correct way' and the mystery part of it reminded me of the old Sherlock Holmes game that came with the Sega CD (minus the INSANE load times that game had).

There are 4 main characters you play as throughout the game: Ethan Mars - a father and architect, Scott Shelby - a private detective, Madison Paige - a journalist and Norman Jayden - an FBI profiler. I think most would agree that the story mainly revolves around Ethan however. All the bad things are happening to him, his son dies, the other one is kidnapped, the cops start to believe that he's the killer and the whole time to save his son he's forced to endure these horrific trials. Madison is just looking for the story about the Origami Killer but she starts to see what Ethan is going through and it becomes more about helping him than the story towards the end. Scott is hired by the families of prior victims to search for clues to see if he can discern the identity of the killer. Finally Norman is trying to help the local police find the killer by searching for clues but a lot of internal politics are against him.

So knowing all of that (and of course having in the back of my mind the potential for acquiring this game platinum) I popped in the disc to see what was in store for me.

For the most part I enjoyed this game. As I noted earlier the graphics were amazing and the story was very intriguing. I had some guesses about the killer as I played but unfortunately didn't guess correctly until about 5 minutes before it was revealed anyway. I enjoyed playing over again once I knew who the killer was. A lot more made sense as far as motivations etc once I knew. Some things didn't make much sense then though (blackouts?). I would call out some of the better parts of the game as getting to drive the wrong way as fast as you can on a highway and having to cut off your own finger as two of the trials you were forced to endure to get more clues to find your son. Those trials reminded me a lot of the movie franchise 'Saw' with the horrible things you were forced to do to yourself and others to either live or save someone you care about. I know this has become on of the holy grails of the gaming industry too: the 'emotional attachment' to the characters your playing as. Well I can honestly tell you I felt it. When I thought about what I would do had I been in this characters place to save my son it greatly affected me. I love my son Isaac very much and to have him taken from me would kill me. I could really sympathize with what Ethan was going through. They did a very good job on that aspect of the game I thought.

Of course there were some parts that were pretty lame. I don't consider changing and feeding a baby or cooking some scrambled eggs a very fun video game activity to do. I guess it kind of fit in there as far as the story, etc but still.

I decided to start my trophy run. I was able to keep everyone alive for the end of the game the first time so that got me some endings trophies I needed. There is another way to play through to make sure that the bad guy wins. I needed to get that one next. It was kind of a bear to play through this over and over after a while but it wasn't difficult just time consuming. The last major trophy I needed was to get all 18 variations of the ending. Luckily there were FAQs online that told you exactly what to do and soon I had that one as well. It wasn't that hard since most of the decisions you made that affected the ending weren't that many chapters back. Once I scored that trophy there were just a few easy bronzes left to get and I could pick and choose the chapters to go through to get them. Boom! Platinum! Took me about a week I'd say.

Good game, good story, got the platinum, Thank you very much!!