And sure am glad I did - it was a lot of fun. I originally tried to play it on the Xbox 360, but I was going through it solo and I didn’t even make it to Sledge. I could tell that the game really deserved to be played with multiple people, but most of my friends played later in the night than me. Also, it seemed brutally hard during my first playthrough.

This time, I played it on Steam. Mouse and keyboard definitely helped, though it still was pretty hard. I almost gave up, but I pushed through and, after beating Sledge, the game really picked up for me. I started to understand the gear and the strategy that was needed (i.e. elemental weapons against the right kind of enemy, what kind of shields work the best, good specing of my character, etc.).

Definitely worth your time, but give it more than just a few hours first - it really is a good game. And now… on to Borderlands!

Before this past weekend, I was only familiar with the safe mode in Windows. In Windows, especially back in the 9x days, booting into safe mode was pretty much required for diagnosing or fixing issues with a Windows install.

Who knew the PS3 had safe mode, too?

On Friday night, I was playing FF 13-2 and was approaching the final battle. I had done a little more leveling and jumped into the historia crux to head towards the end of the game. At the last minute, I decided to visit one more place on the way and the loading screen for the level just hung. The screen, the music, everything froze. So I powered the system off. What else could I do?

When I turned the system back on, I got a message about the file system being corrupt and that it needed to be recovered. It brought up a progress bar that slowly counted to 100%. It said the system would restart after it completed. It did. And then it started the same process over again. I let it go through this 3 or 4 times before I hit Google.

At that point, I found mention of safe mode. From there, you could also try to recover the file system. I tried that. It just hung and told me to “please wait.”

I was pretty sure my PS3 was toast at that point. The final option I had was a factory reset, conveniently also located from safe mode.

Thankfully, this option worked for me. Unfortunately, I lost every save game I’ve ever had on the PS3.

Needless to say, I just watched the end of FF 13-2 on YouTube instead.

I was going through my feeds this last week and came across this Joystiq article on JRPG dialog.

The best quote from the post is this:

Thanks to a lot of silly jargon and awkward phrasing, a large chunk of Final Fantasy XIII-2’s conversations elevate it into the “wouldn’t want anyone to watch me playing this” category…

I can’t speak for FF XIII-2, but that is exactly how I felt when I was playing FF XIII. I don’t think it was necessarily the dialog, though, so much as the voice “acting” in the game. Some of it was okay, but I’m pretty sure every breath from every character was fully vocalized.

*GASP* *SIGH* *other annoying vocal sound that sounded overacted*

People don’t talk like that. It completely took me out of experience. Maybe that’s why my favorite Final Fantasy games are the ones prior to spoken dialog. FF IV (II in the US), FF VI (III in the US), FF VII and so on. I also got annoyed by the songs that were added beginning in FF VIII… I don’t play Final Fantasy games to be sung to. The orchestral style of music is what I miss. I’m pretty sure FF VII was the last one that had truly memorable music for me. There are a few high points from FF IX and FF X, but my favorites are easily the earlier ones.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

Oh, and get off my lawn. You crazy kids with your loud music. Back in my day…

I bit the bullet last night and preordered Batman: Arkham City… Arkham Asylum was one of my favorite games after it released so I’m really excited about the sequel.

It sounds like I’ll be getting a $10 credit, too, and that will likely go towards Uncharted 3.

I wonder when I’ll play all of these.