I was planning to play Borderlands in the morning after breakfast. I fired up the PS3 and I received a message that stated that an error had occurred and I wasn’t connected to the PlayStation Network. I’ve had that happen before and I wasn’t planning to play on it anyway. I put the Borderlands disk in and when its icon showed, I launched the game. All my characters and saves disappeared. I was offered the only option of starting a new game. Holy Cow! What happened? I tried to get onto the internet through the Browser option on the PS3 menus. It launched, I type in “PlayStation network down” and a number of hits showed up. I selected one with yesterday’s date and it stated the PlayStation Network was down with special circumstances. The ‘special circumstances’ were this breakdown only affected the first generation of ‘fat” PS3s. I was going to check out a few more websites, when the browser froze. I switched to my iPhone and found that an indicator on the older PS3 of the problem would manifest itself as a date change to December 1999. I checked the PS3 and there it was 12/31/1999 (shades of Y2K). I removed the Borderlands disk, shut the PS3 down and moved over to my ‘slim’ PS3. Everything appeared to fine. The date was correct, Borderlands loaded, but because I hadn’t played it on the ‘slim’ PS3 there were no previous games to load. I played for a while, and I hoped that the game Heavy Rain would show up.
Heavy Rain is a PS3 specific game. It had received good reviews and has a different interaction interface. That’s why I ordered it. I was curious about that interface. I had ordered it last week and it was due to arrive sometime today. I played Borderlands for most the afternoon without the package arriving. Around 4:30 pm, we ordered food and I discovered that the game had arrived. I’ll fire it up after we have dinner.
Dinner finished, and I went up to play Heavy Rain. I made another mistake, I sat in recliner after starting the game and fell asleep. 7:30, 7:34, 7:47, times that were recognized on the clock as I began to wake up. Holy Smoke! I slept for over an hour. I started playing Heavy Rain. The interface is different and the learning curve, for me, is a bit steep. The designers have allowed for a getting familiar with this before events get serious. Even when the actual lead in to the game begins, there is a certain amount of leeway so your not interrupting the flow of the game in an abrupt way. There is an interaction with one of your children, a pseudo sword fight, where icons flash up onto the screen, with time to hold a key as a filling square or a spinning indicator inside a circle, or a button sequence to be held for a certain amount of time. The resulting duel has blocks, parries, and strikes. If you err, you get struck or you miss. If sequenced correctly, a strike or a block. Ultimately, I lose, touched on the heart by my 10 year old son. I won’t be dropping any spoilers beyond this, because I think that the game is relatively new. I’m sure that there are individuals who have completed the game, but most have not, including the individual in one of the forum, who bemoaned the fact that today’s network problems prevented him or her from completing Heavy Rain.
Which brings us back to the problem of the network failure. Just before I started this entry, the news online was good. The network was coming back, although a warning was given to hold back until an official statement appears. I’ll check when I finish, hopefully all will be well.
We shall see.
For as long as it‘s needed, I’ll keep closing this way, please check out a good organization that’s providing aid in Haiti and make whatever kind of contribution that you can afford.
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