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• 11Oct 09

  A console's bad days

  There had been a number of times in the past where various accidents happened to my consoles and I felt like outlining them here for the heck of it. Feel free to share your consoles' bad days, too.
  
  PlayStation

  
  
  

  Depending on the model you have, the PSX is either incredibly sturdy or incredibly fragile. I heard stories of people having their PSX break on them from a very small fall. Mine fell on the floor 4 times with height varying from 1 to 3 feets, received water/juice a couple of times and suffered from overheating often. It's still working flawlessly - as I'm typing this, my mom is playing Spyro 1 on it. And the most funny part? It's chipped, which is supposed to reduce a console's life.
  
  Nintendo 64

  
  
  Well my cameleon-colored 64 got an overall good treatment, mainly due to the fact that it was on a very low table. I don't remember it falling or receiving any liquid. The worst that happened to it was an EXTREME overheat. It was a burning hot summer day (at least 32C) and my whole family was trying to find some cold - my sis in the bath, my mom in front of two fans, my dad drinking cup of cold water after cup of cold water. Me? I was just sitting there wearing a winter coat, playing Super Mario 64. It didn't occur to me that the console may be overheating until, out of pure randomness, I laid my feet on it. The console literally burned me, haha.
  
  Dreamcast

  
  
  Also known as one of the most fragile consoles to ever grace the gaming industry, the DC has its share of stories. Stopping working for no reason at all, recurrent disk reading errors, corrupting VMUs (the console's memory cards)... mine has an incredible story. It fell on the floor a minimum of 10 times, again with a varying height of 2 to 4 feets. It also received its shares of liquids. But once, it fell from the freaking top of a piece of furniture which was about 5 feets high. And it was caused by my sister running through my controller's cable so it was literally sent flying across the room. It rammed against the floor, the top was opened by the sheer force of the impact, the CD got ejected and the console did a couple of barrel rolls before it stopped moving. All of it happened so fast, I didn't have time to react ; I was just staring at it, fearing the worst.
  
  Today, after all these years of gameplay, it still works flawlessly. And my DC is chipped, too. Incredible, huh? The only thing that's messed up are the controllers' ports, you gotta hold the cables in a certain way for it to see the gamepad. Just a minor nuisance, though.
  
  PlayStation 2/PS2 Slim

  
  
  While the PS2 remains the most fragile console out of the 6th gen (GC, XBOX...), it still is quite sturdy. My friend had a PS2 since it came out - apart from a weird sound coming from the DVD drive upon boot, it still works perfectly fine.
  
  Nah, the big problem with PS2's are the slim versions. I swear I care a lot about my stuff - my Smash Melee disc is still without any scratches and I had it since 2001. But the slims were just manufactered without any care for resilience. Four of them broke on me. FOUR !... Caused by overheating and playing games that demands a lot of loading (I'm thinking Valkyrie Profile 2). Seriously, don't play with a PS2 slim on a hot summer day. Like me, you may be going to the toilets, coming back and seeing a nice green screen.
  
  GameCube

  
  
  My GC hasn't suffered from a lot of stuff, just a few falls and... overuse of Action Replay

  Wii
  
  

  That console hasn't been around in my room for a very long time, yet it already experienced about the same treatment has my DC did. It suffered from a lot of falls (more than 10... blame the abundance of cables) and it received a lot of liquids. A cup full of orange juice that messed up both my Wii's POWER and RESET buttons (they don't even move anymore), a full night receiving heavy rain from outside, and a couple of more cups containing water. And my Wii is also chipped (well actually, softmodded) which I believe may be damaging the console's NAND over the time. But I honestly don't care, the fun and enjoying I'm getting out of the homebrewed stuff finally makes that 300$ I spent on it worthy.

  • Posted Oct 11, 2009 9:07 pm PT
  • Category: Other
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• 8Aug 09

  Metroid Prime Alsatia

  Remember a while ago when I posted a blog named "Most epic Metroid GMV on Youtube"? Well, my friend just released his second one, namely Metroid Prime Alsatia. It's a LOT better than his first one in pretty much every aspects - timing, effects, quality, and level of epicness (lol.) Seriously though, you gotta watch this. Here's the link.

  Metroid Prime Alsatia

  If you have a Youtube channel, don't hesitate to leave a comment on the video and subscribe to him. He already has another one planned. I will also be working with him on a secret project soon, but more on that later.

  • Posted Aug 8, 2009 9:29 am PT
  • Category: Movies
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• 10Jul 09

  Metroid Prime with Wii controls - my opinion

  I got myself a copy of the Japanese "New Play Control ! Metroid Prime" yesterday. This post is mostly for you people planning on getting the Metroid Prime Trilogy.

  The good : you get about the same action you got in MP3:C with the free aiming. I thought before it would turn the game incredibly more easy and boring but I was wrong - it's the opposite ! The way enemies move were set according to the GameCube's controls so when you're playing on Wii, they'll move in a fashion which makes them usually a lot harder to hit. That is, if you have Lock-On Free Aim activated (which I recommend). I can safely say that I got my butt wiped quite a few times just because of that.

  The bad : while free aiming makes for incredibly better fights, it also means you'll constantly be turning the camera. So you'll often bump into walls and/or objects lying on the ground if you're not careful. Even jumping on a platform will be a challenge if you constantly used L-Jumps and Spring-Jumps back on GC.

  There's a learning curve for everything, so in a way you'll be discovering the whole game again. It's a good thing if you weren't expecting updated graphics and/or anything else GS users kept flooding the MP1 board with.

  There ARE few minor differences in the game though, mostly contained in the cutscenes. For example, in the opening one when Samus jumps off her ship and lands on Orpheon, you'll see two very brief bursts of fire coming out of her suit's back. It's a good justification for a jump I always considered worthy of Action Replay.

  So, I believe it's worth it for the other die-hard Metroid Prime fans. It's funny how simple controls can make all the difference.

  • Posted Jul 10, 2009 2:50 pm PT
  • Category: Opinion
  • 7 Comments
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