Slim Second Chance

So Sony has finally gone and done it, they have relaunch their Playstation3 in dire attempt to breathe some life onto the hardware which is still lagging behind Microsoft and Nintendo in this generation's console war. It seems there's a price drop with this new revision but i rarely keep track of the console price anymore seeing i already owned the 80GB for more than a year now. As far as i'm concerned the ps3 is still a pretty expensive hardware when compared with the other two reigning console. What struck me as pretty unusual is Sony's ps3 was the last of this generation console to hit the market but was the first to introduce a new slimline version, guess lagging sales does drive a company in all sorts of funny direction.

The Freak Accident

Someone living very close to me had their collection completely damaged by the one thing that was there to protect it; dehumidifiers. All the moisture absorbed by the dehumidifiers seems to have leaked out from the container designed to hold it and with no where left to turn, the water ended up soaking into the CD case and sleeves. It's not a pretty sight i can tell you, the kind of freak accident that have to be seen to believe and the whole irony of where the source of damage actually came from is not lost on me. I have done this many times before, in fact i have placed my dehumidifiers in far more precarious position without a thought of what damage it might do should such a thing happen. Let this be a lesson to us all not to get carried away with over-protecting our precious collection because some times it does more harm than good.

Ever since i was little i have always had the habit of over-protecting my stuff what ever it may be. I guess i derived some sense of pride from how good my things still look but the fact is, it also doesn't make me very popular with friends as i have the tendency of not sharing my things. So if i have something i'm not willing to share with you, please don't take it the wrong way. Then again if i'm not sharing it with you, maybe it's because you are too much of a dick for me to be so nice to anyways.

Wait a Minute(Man)

I just recently purchased Watchmen The Motion Comic blu-ray which is a bit out of the norm for me because

a) it's published by rival company DC comics

b) purists like me prefer to read the actual comic books

One of the things i was really excited about it was the digital copy of the movie included as i was planning to use it on my psp. So i popped the disc onto my computer to hopefully extract it onto my psp only to discovered that it required me to update my window media player before i could view it. Being curious why this would involved my media player, i logged onto Warner Bros website to read the troubleshoot and it seems that the digital copy is only playable on window media player. What's the point of a digital copy of the movie if you can't even extract it onto your portables like a Sony PSP?

Sooner or Later

Some gamers liked to use their ps3 to watch blu-ray movies while me i'm somewhere in between, i'll decide depending on which movie and other reasons i rather not indulge here. I did notice that blu-ray movie have a pretty long loading time and the playstation3 tends to load the movies faster than standard blu-ray players. The only problem with that is the movie disc will also download certain files onto the playstation3 hard disk without even prompting the user whether or not to do so, and i'm not just talking about the BD Live download here.

Yes i guess you could say the inevitable has happened, i'm starting to get addicted to blu-rays.

The Common Enemy

After a rather long hiatus, i'm back at blogging though i sometimes wish i didn't have a self-imposed quota of posts to meet. As you might have known i have recently gone back to collecting comic books so i thought it might be an appropriate time to reveal some of my early collecting habits and how they have influenced my game collection. There are more here than it meets the eye so rest assure this is not some lame post about comic books.

When it comes to comic books, it's usually reprinted several times either in magazine form or collected trade paperbacks especially if it's a popular issue. This is where i first learnt of the importance of first printing and how subsequent prints vary in cover art or even re-coloring if we are talking about paperbacks. Granted it's not entirely the same when it comes to games but the similarities are there; games that are re-issued as budget labels also tend to have different cover art and of course the value of these games will vary depending on which print it is. For those who are actually concerned about the value of comic books (or even games for that matter), the first printing will always net the highest value and beyond that really depends on what incentives were thrown in for subsequent reprints. Yes these two very different hobby are much more alike than you may think and unfortunately the bad must also come with the good so i'm afraid to say in my experience with both, neither one is safe from one common threat.

Yup you guessed it, fungus.

Coming To America (Not)

The truth is finally out, it looks like Yakuza 3 won't be leaving its native home Japan after all.

Can't say i'm really surprised though it does leave me with the inevitable decision which i knew i would have to arrive at, playing the import version. I foresee it to be a long and ultimately unrewarding process since the real charm of the Yakuza series has always lies in its side missions. To top it off, the game is still selling at its original price so it likely won't be cheap to import at this stage. I certainly have the time to go through this meticulous process of playing the import version but i would probably have to finish the second one before i even consider it right now.

You Only Live Twice

There was a common theory that Separate Ways was conceived or at least the idea of it before the Gamecube version of RE4 even shipped. That it was held back so Capcom would have the added incentive to tempt gamers who played RE4 on the Gamecube to pick it up again. There are parts of the game that feels pretty clever how like the developers manage explain what happened to leon jacket but then there are also parts that doesn't make any sense at all.

Take the part where chapter 2 ends and chapter 3 begins, at the end of chapter 2 we see ada watching in the shadow as luis sera dies and the sample falls into saddler's hands. Then she proceeds to radio wesker and tells him the location of the sample only to arrive at the start of chapter 3 when she meets krauser and ask him the same thing wesker just asked her only moments again. Ok so the scene where krauser is having a conversation with ada while playing with his knife was in the original game but you would think the developers could have done a better job of making the scenes all tied up. Of course this could go on forever like did krauser actually die in Separate Ways or the end of Assignment Ada? It's pretty clear that ada was the one who put him away for good but it's as how mikami intended in Assignment Ada or what kawata envisioned in Separate Ways?