Sadness...GG Sony

Happy New Year to those that celebrate Chinese New Years!

I haven't been on FFXI much in the past week. Skipped Dynamis on Sat since I had dinner with a friend, skipped SPT on Sun since Fuuji and Ascii were MIA, skipped Dynamis Wed since I got out of work late that day, and no Nyzul/SNM Thursdays as no one was on (Fuu and his bro probably still moving or don't have internet yet). I only made it to Limbus, which surprisingly still happend despite the low attendance. That's pretty much it since last blog entry...

I might be on FFXI more starting today though... Lately I've been preoccupied with PS3, but last night while I was playing Fallout 3 it froze on me. It happens, and I'm used to it by now. Unfortunately when I tried to power it down, it didn't shut off. I had waited 5+ mins since holding down the power button (an usually long time), so I had to do a hard shut down and cut power to the system. This is where my nightmare began...

I turned it back on, and at first the disc didn't autoload like it normally does. In fact, the PS3 didn't even detect a disc was in there. I had to eject, soft power down, cut power, turn on power, then power up and insert the disc to finally get the disc to work (lots of trial and error to finally get a method to detect the disc). Skipping any of those steps and it would not work. Game booted up, and I reloaded my save. Everything seemed fine, but then I was greeted by another system freeze. I continued to repeat the above steps and finally I thought that my saved games were corrupted, and game data. So I went ahead and deleted them from my PS3. Game froze after I tried to start a new game... nope, not bad game data... must be something else...

So I restarted the system and put in other games, CoD5, then CoD4 and now I was greeted by a system error, similar to the one pictured here. Error code 80010514. A quick Google search will reveal that this code is basically not something you ever want to see. From what I've read, it can range from corrupted hard drive data to faulty blu-ray drive. Reading through some other ppl's experience, some suggested a system restore... so I went ahead and tried that, which essentially formats your system. I did a quick format, takes like 20 sec and it wiped all my saved games and game data... sadness. But if my PS3 came back working, it's worth it. Sadly it did not. After spending hours on it, I was tired and went to bed. I shut it all down, disconnect power and figured I'd let it cool down overnight.

Friday morning, my off friday, I connect everything back up and booted up to CoD5. Game boots up, I start a new game and I play 10 minutes worth with no problems before deciding to turn it off. Not a graceful power down... as it gets stuck doing a soft shutdown. I can hear the disc spinning and trying to read, like I've been noticing all of the night before. I've had many CD/DVD-Rom drives fail on me before in my PC, and the sounds I was hearing was very familiar... Good morning to you too busted PS3, I was hoping it was a late night fling and we would part ways after last night, but here you are back in my life.

I've since decided to do a full system format, which is estimated to take 4-5 hours. its been about 45 min and 12% as of now. I want to exhaust all my options before I call Sony about it... as from what I've read, fixing it will cost 160 or so since it is no longer under warranty. Red Ring of Death, Sony Style. How wonderful.

With that, I think I'll need something to keep me entertained. I have my TV shows to catch up on, but only gaming option is FFXI. Must be a conspiracy to get me back on FFXI again, how clever of you SE to team up with Sony on this one. As far as shows go, I have Fringe, House, Grey's Anatomy, and The Office to catch up on. For Anime, a few episodes of Bleach to catch up on and a couple Naruto. Naruto has stopped being subbed by Dattybayo group, so I may have to find an alternative group for it now :( (or give up on the series completely).

Oh well, time to head to the movies. Going to watch Taken now and hope the rest of the day turns out ok.

Tune of the Moment: Akon - Right Now (Na Na Na)
(I'm such a sucker for catchy hooks/beats).

Random update

Been away from FFXI a lot lately...still mostly due to Fallout 3, but also had a fun snowboarding trip to Mammoth over MLK holiday weekend that went from Friday-Sunday. Drove up Friday, and boarded Sat-Sun, with a small group of guys from work. It might be the only trip I make this year... :( unless I get my passport and hope someone follows through planning a Whistler trip. I'm too lazy to organize a trip myself so meh, if no one does oh well.

So today we started to do a new event instead of the usual Nyzul since most of my crew got what they wanted out of it, and more importantly we all have our Runic Keys! =D At Wu's suggestion we decided to check out SNMs (Stronghold NMs). Basically this seems to be another version of ZNMs... but instead of collecting Zenis to pop the NMs, you camp the NMs as they are on 2-6 hr timers. These are NMs that appear in the beastmen strongholds in WoG areas and drop some lootz as well as some Rare/Ex items eventually used to get access to SCNMs (Seal Container NM) which is a BC fight up to 18 ppl. At first I wasn't too happy to hear this would be NM hunting with stupid pop timers, but we decided that we'd check out the zones, and if NMs were up, we'd kill them and if not we'd move zones to another beastmen stronghold and see what's there.

We haded off to Beadeaux [S] and with Dexi on RNG, were able to locate some NMs right away. First up was a gob Blifnix Oilycheeks. He seemed like a pretty standard Gob NM, doing regular gobs stuff... until he started to spam mines similar to Cheesehoarder ZNM mob. Unlike Cheesehoarder, he didn't run away after setting a mine, but he did set ~4-5 mines at a time. The mines would blow up in succession and did about 100-200 to each person with Shell V and barfira up. Ended up killing him without much problems with the exception of Wu going down near the end. He dropped this:


We went on and spotted quadav NM Di'Zho Spongeshell... and was it an annoying fight. Every so often he would do a 2hr animation and switch between 2 modes. In one mode, he would absorb all physical attack and be vulnerable to magic and in the other mode be vulnerable to physical and absorb magic. Fight ended taking over 20 mins and he wasn't terribly hard, just had a nasty AoE move a la NM quads in dynamis. The switching of the modes was the annoying part. No gear drop from this guy :(

That's all the time we had before it got too late for some. We'll see how this event keeps up in the weeks to follow...

Tune of the Moment: Morgan Page feat Lissie - The Longest Road (Deadmau5 Remix)

Update...

So it's been a few weeks since my update... but nothing terribly interesting to say. Just SPT on MNK which is now 61. I think I'll take this to 75 next, but at the moment I'm not that motivated to do so. The once a week SPT seems sufficient to get me my exp fix for the week.

I really haven't been around that much in FFXI. I've shown up for 1 Dynamis, 2 Limbus, 1 cancelled Nyzul, and 1 SPT in the past week. No random doing anything besides those events... no farming, no questing, no anything!

I have Fallout 3 to blame for that... that game is just as big a time sink as FFXI, and fun in it's own right. It's my first Fallout experience, but I've been hooked... playing it every night after work. Not to go to much into it, but the character building is very much like D&D based games for the PC, i.e. Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, but the combat system is FPS based. Pretty unique mix and it works surprisingly well. Until I finish it, I'll probably be pretty scarce in FFXI... and I may even play through Fallout 3 a 2nd time... D:

One last thought on FFXI... taru perspective is pretty nice sometimes... ^^;


I mean, look at that subligar on me! You wouldn't be able to see those from a Galka's or girraffe-necked Elvaan's POV! I bet you were thinking something else! tsk tsk.