consoles – Brainscraps.net

This past Saturday, Front Mission Evolved‘s final act wrapped up, and its credits rolled, with the opening menu music on constant loop in the background. I quit to the Dashboard, checked my achievements, and ejected the disk. A languished Forza Motorsport 2 career notwithstanding, I was finished with my Xbox 360 backlog.

Bitprophet was done awhile ago, despite having a few more unfinished games, which he lost interest in after they became too hard. That said, he had no objections when, yesterday, I dug the 360’s box out of storage and pulled the console itself, a mess of cables, and about half of our games for the system out of our entertainment center. Inside the box was, in addition to more cables and an unused headset, the original receipt, dated from March 2008. For a long time before this purchase, we debated which system we would get to complement our Nintendo Wii, a PlayStation 3 or 360, and by that point, time was growing short as Grand Theft Auto IV was due out in less than two months. He eventually decided on a 360, and picked up Assassin’s Creed as his first game for the system. In the meantime, I busied myself with other systems, mainly the PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, and Wii. The first 360 game I bought for myself, Eternal Sonata, was purchased over a year later, and I didn’t beat anything on the system until Devil May Cry 4 in March 2010. A month after that, my Halo obsession started when I beat the PC version Halo: Combat Evolved. From that point on, I was especially glad that we went with the 360.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I repaired my DS Lite yesterday. I had first noticed problems with the d-pad’s down button while playing Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer; just a regular press and hold wasn’t working, and I would find myself having to apply more pressure in order to get Shiren to walk southward for awhile. Once I encountered this same problem not long after starting Pokemon Platinum, I decided right then and there that I would be taking apart my DS sometime soon to rectify this situation.

Though the prospect of doing DIY repair on a home console is one I dread (case in point: I sold my busted phat PS2 instead of attempting to fix its disk reading problem), taking apart handhelds is something I’ve been doing for a long time now. Back in the day, it was a Tiger LCD game that would give me trouble. Fortunately, all it took was a clean work surface and a small enough screwdriver to take the thing apart and correct the problem, which typically involved inverted rubbery plastic nubs, the ones which serve as the liaison between the game’s buttons and the motherboard.

I was facing a similar issue with my DS, and one I thought would be relatively easy to fix. This would be the second Nintendo handheld I would ever open up. The first was the used Game Boy Advance I bought last year. After a bit of bad luck with an earlier seller, the Arctic White GBA I wound up with arrived in excellent condition and worked fine. There was, however, one little problem in the form of a big spot of dust in the space between the clear top layer and the screen itself. I borrowed a triwing screwdriver, brought out a can of compressed air, and got to work. This bit of minor electronic surgery ended up being successful.

I was a bit more nervous about repairing the DS Lite, though. When the touchscreen on my Phat went all wonky, I unloaded it on eBay, seeing my misfortune as a perfect excuse to upgrade. However, I am more attached to my lovely Ice Blue Lite. It’s a Japanese model that cost me more than any of the North American ones would have, and therefore would be expensive to replace if something went wrong. I thought about sending it to Nintendo of America for repairs if something really went wrong, but again, it’s a Japanese Lite and I’m not sure if they would fix something like that, one reason being the button action on the thing is very different from that on my husband’s, which is a North American model.

Tag: consoles

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