So, the new replacement SSD that I got working after beating it around a bit was not able to last even two weeks. It is already in the hands of USPS on a quest to hopefully be replaced with a more functional piece of hardware. I’m not getting my hopes up though.
Spent a little time playing EVE and even reinstalled FFXIV for some reason or another. I have been reading up on a bunch of changes to FFXIV and it seems like they are really putting a lot of effort into making a solid MMO out of this, no matter how long it takes. The fact that it is free to play for the time being doesn’t hurt anything anyways.
At least I finally reinstalled Aquaria on my PC yesterday and actually surpassed the place I had previously reached. Hopefully I can remember to copy over my save games correctly when the new SSD comes in.
Speaking of the SSD, I really need to get some sort of backup system going on my rig. While I made it through the SSD failures relatively unscathed, that was probably due to luck more than anything. Of course, I’ll probably discover in a few months some super important file that I lost in all of this, but until thing I will revel in my ignorance.
So, I’ve been slowly making progress in my old save in Final Fantasy XIII. While I don’t think I am close to end, it still surprises me how incredibly linear this game is. And I don’t just mean in the sense of how your character moves through the world. Even the combat itself seems to have a “linear” quality to it. I feel like I’m always only using two characters at a time, which already limits the complexity of combat quite a bit. But even of those two characters, I only have direct control over one. And even that one character I control is mostly just using the Auto-Attack button the entire time.
Sure, when I start to get low on health I switch to the same paradigms that I always do to get everyone’s health back up before moving back to the standard paradigms a few seconds later. It’s as if the game is purposefully build to provide as little choice in how things proceed as possible.
I’m still going to beat the damn game though, if only to get it off my backlog. The story isn’t amazing, but I at least find myself wanting to continue playing to find out what is going to happen. Not to the mention the game can be quite beautiful at times. I just wonder when the gameplay is going to open up. I feel like I’m playing the longest tutorial in the history of gaming at this point.
So, I finally go the replacement SSD from OCZ yesterday. I was thrilled to finally be able to get my main rig back up to full power. Unfortunately, that did not seem to be in the cards, as the SSD was being remarkably flaky and either not being detected by the system at all, or functioning well enough for me to successfully install Windows onto it.
So, I submitted yet another RMA request and have the drive all packed up and ready to get shipped out. That means I will have burned through 3 of these drives in less than two years. The first was similarly non-functionally on arrival. At least the second one lasted over a year and half before calling it quits, but still, for something storing data that’s not quite a ringing endorsement.
On the silver lining front though, all the time I spent attempting installs and whatnot allowed me to make a little progress in my playthrough of Final Fantasy XIII.
I haven’t really been able to do much gaming at all lately. I am still waiting on my replacement SSD so I can get my main rig back up to full power. I finally caved yesterday and installed Windows on my mechanical drive so I could at least be somewhat productive until the new SSD gets here. Bad Company 2 was downloaded from Steam as I won’t have to worry about game saves being lost if I stick to playing online.
I’m sure I’ll also download EVE to it at some point if it looks like I’ll be using it for a bit so I can mess around there. I really don’t want to start playing any games that I am going to have to reinstall in a week or something.
On the non-gaming front I have been getting out of the house a bit lately. I’ve been doing some camping (actually went the past two weekends) out in the White Mountains. I actually have a decent amount of pictures, just been too lazy to bother uploading anything. But who knows, I might still get around to doing it.
Hopefully I can find some time to get some gaming in. Decided a week or so ago on trying to finally beat Final Fantasy XIII, so I’ll try to get a post up about that soon.
Last week I was finally able to beat this classic title. I will admit, I ran out of patience at parts and used some walkthroughs to for some of the later dungeon sections. There are no indicators for where you need to blow up a wall to get to a passage and I was tired of just trying them all randomly. I figured it would be better to cheat in a few spots and beat the game than give up in frustration and give up on the game altogether.
Altogether I definitely think it’s a great game, especially when you take into account the games of the time.
So it appears that my solid state drive in my gaming rig has crapped out on me. It was acting funky for the past couple days, at one point there was a critical system file that got corrupted. I had some warning, so I was able to pull over most of my game saves. Unfortunately, one of the causalities was my Stalker save, as I had assumed it was stored in one place when it apparently was not. That means I will have to start over from scratch when I can get the drive replaced. :sadface:
Oh well, at least I only had a couple hours into the game and most of those I spent figuring stuff out, so I should be able to make it back to my previous spot fairly quickly.
The drive itself is an OCZ Vertex that thankfully has a 3-year warranty, so I’m hoping getting a replacement will be a quick process. Still sucks not having my main rig available for a while. I guess I’ll be doing more development work and console gaming than I had originally planned for the foreseeable future.
I ended up deciding on Stalker (not going to type out the periods everytime, ugh) last time from my backlog. I also picked up the Stalker Complete 2009 mod that improves upon the game in just about every way.
I was pleased to see that my current rig is able to handle the game much better than my previous one, even with the improved visuals of the mod. The game is as daunting as ever but I’m confident I’ll be sticking with it much longer than I have on past attempts.
So I’ve run into some crashing issues on my replay of Dragon Age: Origins and I’ve decided to put it on the back burner for a bit and move onto something else for my PC gaming fix. I haven’t exactly decided which game to move onto yet, but I was leaning towards something like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
I’ve always wanted to get back into that series of games, especially with all the patches and mods that have become available since the early days of the game. Things were in pretty rough shape back then, and the computer I had at the time struggled to run the game at decent settings.
