Shooting my way through PlayStation

No, I'm not literally shooting myself through PlayStation. However, I have been playing quite a good deal of bullet hell shooting games and my PlayStation 3 recently died. That's what the title is all about: The death of my PS3, along with some videos of the latest danmaku demo i=on the market which was incorporated in the blog solely for @Sleven :]

First things first, let's go into the details of a sad moment for me. I am not speaking of the outage that plagues Sony and PlayStation Network, nor am I here to bash Sony for it because quite obviously, people do not know who to throw their stones at and it really makes me mad at some point.. but knowing me, I shouldn't get too much into the subject otherwise it will never end and with such, I decided to not speak about it. Just know that I am not in the wave of "Let's blast Sony for this!" because I know better than those people who think they could of held back the skilled hackers by themselves (and obviously would have never succeeded at doing so).

Anyway, recently my lovely PS3 died, giving me that beautiful and well known Yellow Light of Death. here are the results of my expedition:


Latest incarnation of my PlayStation 3

I actually had to open it because my Portal 2 disc was still inside when it decided to die. If any of you have ever opened up this mighty beast in the past, you will know that the Blu-Ray drive is on top of everything, hardly secured in its place and you do not need to remove a single thing other than the plastic cover to get to it. However, my curiosity got the best of me and I started removing everything, piece by piece. The only pieces I spared the life of were the metal plates surrounding the motherboard, but I do plan on removing them to try and fix it.

I do not plan to repair my PS3 to keep it though, as next month I am buying a new one. The only reason I will repair it is to be able to execute a Data Transfer which is the only way to transfer copy-protected saved data from one system to another and so on that note, I am soon going to be buying some thermal compound and maybe a heat gun, or I'll just thoroughly use a hair dryer to do the job. Hopefully it will work, because I do not feel like losing all those hundreds of saved data roaming on my hard drive.

One funny thing I noticed though is when you open the Blu-Ray drive to take a disc out, this had to be the funniest part of this whole adventure as upon separating the two halves (top and bottom), the springs that hold the disc in place kick back in and literally throw, or spits the disc out of there, sending the disc flying wherever it was that you were aiming the drive towards. No damage done though, Blu-Ray discs are sturdy and I was aware of this, so I didn't intentionally send it flying 20 feet away. Now everything is back up into one mighty beast system, still sitting on my shelf with a nice and lovely shade of yellow when trying to turn it on.

On to the next subject, this is the one specifically for Sleven, because he knows I love these games as much as I know that he still has a hard time understanding exactly why I love them. To those who may not know, this isn't an attack on personal levels at all, it's a public all out war declaration to Sleven the mighty.. haha just kidding. We've both known each other through NoobFeed and as with everyone, there is always something you have a hard time understanding why it is so, and that's really just it. It's the same as me and David, or @David_D for those who do not know his name is David, and him liking Grand Theft Auto so much. I will never understand why, but that's just how things are. Here we go:


Main menu of the game Ten Desires, 13th Touhou Project

Recently, earlier in April, a demo for the 13th Touhou Project (titled: Ten Desires) was finally released. Without a single doubt, I was excited. For the past year, ZUN (creator of the games) has been releasing spin-offs one after the other instead of giving us a full fledged official release and as time was passing by, those side releases clearly didn't quench my thirst for the regular Touhou games as we know them.

Ten Desires introduces once more a new scoring system, making this game unique in it's own way as is often the case with Touhou games. This time around we see the introduction of the "Spirit World". I do not know if this is the official name given to this alternate reality in the game, but that's how I will refer to it for now. The way it works is by gathering souls dropped by enemies in the game. Those souls fill a bar that's located at the bottom of the screen and when it is full, the player can activate some sort of Trance system which basically transports you to a spirit world, granting you invincibility and immense power. Using the Trance, or Spirit system to your advantage is the key to increasing your score drastically in this new release and it also serves another purpose: Dying. If 1/3 of the metre is filled when you die, you are automatically sent to this spirit world for the duration of the meter gained, where you can score big time once again. Your death only occurs once the meter is depleted from which you lose a lot of souls and of course, a life.

Ten Desires also introduces some new bosses and to the delight of many, a new playable character: Youmu Konpaku.


Youmu Konpaku

Youmu was the direct "affiliate" of Yuyuko Saigyouji, the final boss in Perfect Cherry Blossom (7th Touhou Project). She seems to fit the role perfectly fine as a soul eater. The game, as far as I can judge from the demo (it is 3 stages long), is a lot easier than what I can remember from other titles in the series. Of course, I played it on the Normal difficulty, but don't go thinking I didn't try it on harder ones because I did and I must say, this one will prove to be yet again quite a challenge on anything higher than Normal. I still am not skilled enough to beat them on Hard or Lunatic, and Ten Desires might feel easier on Normal than previous titles, but nonetheless I absolutely loved it.

Here comes the best part: Videos. Yep, I've made some videos. In fact, I recorded all 3 stages from the demo version of the game, all 3 of them played on the Normal difficulty and here they are (note that I did not play using Youmu, but rather with Reimu, who has been the main character since the very first game):


Stage 1: Yuyuko Saigyouji


Stage 2: Kyouko Kasodani


Stage 3: Miyako Yoshika

If anyone wants the demo, let me know because since it is in Japanese, you need to be able to install it in Japanese locale on Windows, which I did in Ubuntu. However, I've kept a nicely zipped file of the installed game for some of my friends that run Windows and cannot install it through a Japanese locale.

That's all for today, and for a little while as you've seen, I really do take my time in between blogs now. I hope all of you have a nice week and see you around eventually :]