I thought I’d grab a copy of Guitar Hero 3 today, but it looks like it’ll be as hard to get as GH2 was when it first came out. I checked six places around the Sunridge area after work, but none of them had it in stock, instead reassuring me that they’d have more copies “in a week or two.”
It was particularly frustrating because the Future Shop site showed it as being in stock, so I placed an order for it for in-store pickup as soon as I got to work, and I was supposed to get an email within three hours telling me it’s ready to be picked up. Seven hours later I finally got a response, telling me that my order was cancelled because they were out of stock. Even though their site still said they had some. It’s supposedly updated every hour, so if it was correct, I could have popped down over lunch and picked one up instead. Ugh.
Oh well, I can wait. People are still playing the previous GH games a lot, so the multiplayer community isn’t going to disappear after a week like it does in so many other games. So, instead, I bought a few other things I’d been meaning to get: the PS2->PS3 memory card adapter, Ratchet & Clank Future, The Witcher, and Hellgate: London. After all that transferring, organization, and installation, I didn’t have much time left for actual playing, though.
The memory card reader worked well enough for my 8MB card, but wouldn’t recognize the 32MB card at all. Not too surprising since it’s an unofficial third-party card, and Sony’s only ever officially supported 8MB cards, but it’s still disappointing. I just had to fire up the old PS2 and copy saves from the 32MB card to the 8MB in passes, which was made more annoying by the lack of a card format function, so every save had to be individually deleted to free up more space after each pass. Oh well, it’s a one-time thing, at least. I also got to try the system backup function on the PS3 afterwards, which is something I wish my 360 had.
Hellgate: London is a bit of a risk since the initial reviews are a bit mixed. The gameplay is supposed to be solid, but it’s a bit buggy at the moment, and the choice to make some fundamental features exclusive to the paid subscription players is a bit controversial. Even without having actually played it yet, the installer’s already annoying me — it asked for the registration key twice in a row, on completely different types of screens, for some reason, and then wouldn’t run until a Vista hotfix was installed. Here’s hoping that the gameplay really is great…
I was surprised to find The Witcher at the store at all, since it’s a lesser known title that isn’t even showing up in a lot of online stores here. It’s also a bit controversial since the North American release has been censored a bit, removing some nudity on playing cards that you can collect. It wasn’t really worth importing just for that though. And I’m sure there’ll be a fan patch to ‘fix’ it before too long…