God of War II

Three and a half years ago, Trev made a long and detailed post about how Fable II was just too glitchy and corrupt for him to ever beat; I, with youth and ambition, condemned the post and the concept in general of posting about a game you'd never beat on a blog whose purpose was to document the experience of beating every game you owned. I feared the blog would quickly deteriorate into a place where people game to bitch about broken games or unreadable prose in books. "I tried to read Ulysses, but James Joyce just made it so damn inaccessible. I gave up after thirty pages, and this is my post. Fuck that book; let's move on." Imagine that? I acted swiftly, criticizing Trev and getting all righteous over the blog's integrity.

Today, I eat crow.

Today, I am posting God of War II even though glitches and freezes rendered me incapable of actually beating it myself. After all of my indignation three and a half years ago, there are no excuses here capable of reconciling my actions today with my stance in 2010. So let me just explain what happened in brief detail and compare myself then to myself now.

Here's what happened.

I recently set up my PS2 for the first time in almost a year; I moved out of one apartment and into another last July, and then out of that apartment and into a house just a few weeks ago. The PS2 never left whatever box it was packed in between the two moves, so I was very excited to finally fire it up again here in my new home. I selected God of War II as my next game to play, a game I bought used at GameStop back in college and one of the oldest on my backlog. I was pumped. I hadn't played the God of War series in two years, and I jumped in with excitement. Things went swimmingly until a few hours into the game when suddenly the game froze while I tried to save it. Hmm. That sucks. Could be a memory card issue, a disc issue, a system issue, a one time thing. I replayed the twenty minutes or so since my last save and, alas, frozen once again. Frustrated and annoyed, I took to the Internet and did a Google search for my issue. Lo and behold, others had the same issue at the same point in the game. Some had even experienced freezes and hangs in the portion of the game preceding the save point. I figured I would just bypass that save point this time around, and I did just that, replaying those same twenty minutes yet again and then going another twenty minutes further. At this point the game dropped the background music. Not good. Then I died and it hung forever while reloading the checkpoint. I powered down, despondent. One last time, I restarted from my previous save, played for forty minutes or so, bypassing the troubling save point. Once again the audio dropped, but I took great precautions not to die. But I was stuck. I had hit a dead end. There was nowhere to go. I opened up YouTube and watched a "let's play" for some pointers, and it was clear right away to me that a bridge was supposed to extend for me at this point, but that bridge hadn't extended for me. Downcast, I backtracked back to the bypassed save point. Maybe, just maybe, the game would save this time, and when I loaded it back up next time, I'd be able to cross the bridge. Nope! Frozen while saving, once again.

Events beyond my control had prevented me from clearing this particular section of God of War II. The disc didn't even look very scratched, relative to other games I've owned and played through without issue. Granted, one scratch in the right place could of course doom the game, but still. Maybe this was a system issue. After all, I hadn't played the PS2 in two years and it had spent the last eight months inside a plastic bin. Who knows what internal damage the system may have suffered? So here, I was at a crossroads. I could go out and purchase another copy of God of War II on PS2, but that would involve a used game purchase at GameStop or over the Internet, and I could still be faced with a faulty PS2. I could buy the game via PS3 download, but then I'd need to start over, and it would also set a precedent for my thirteen remaining PS2 games - if they hang or glitch out at all, buy them on PS3. I'm broke, dammit. Remember how I just bought a house? Or, as another option entirely, I could just shrug and say, "fuck this game, I'm moving on." And in a move that echoes Trev's Fable II post from years ago, that's what I'm doing. The irony is, of course, not lost on me, and today I am a hypocrite and an asshole. So be it.

Look, this blog is close to five years old. When I began it, I had something like seventy games to beat and all kinds of free time to do so. Now, I have something like seventy games to beat and far less time to do so. I've beaten like two hundred games between then and now, and I've had a ton of fun and a few frustrations doing so, but it's becoming more and more clear to me how silly my little quest is. I hold down a full time job, I own a house, I plan to start taking some night classes in the coming year, and it's very likely, God willing, that I'll be a father before another five years go by. My "video game free time" is converging on zero pretty quickly here. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean I'm not nearly as ambitious about this whole project as I once was. I still enjoy the thrill of a good logging spree and I appreciate reading and commenting on other posts as well as when mine are read and commented on, but I'm beginning to have my doubts over whether or not I'll ever really finish every game (and book) I own. So I'm not going to beat myself up trying to find a work-around on this one.

For a few final notes here, I was having a blast with this game before it shat itself. I was playing it on "easy" difficulty as I so often do, which meant it posed virtually no challenge whatsoever beyond figuring out the puzzles and reacting to the quicktime events. I have no reason to doubt that I would have sailed straight through it today in a matter of hours. I also watched - at least in the background - the remaining parts of the game on a YouTube "let's play" series, just to ensure that I had experienced, kind of, the rest of such a good game. I've done everything I can here, short of making another purchase, to see everything God of War II has to offer. It looks amazing. I really wish I could have played it myself. If Sony ever releases the downloadable version on PS3 for free, I will absolutely go back and partake in the rest of this one.

And man, I hope my PS2 is fine, given those thirteen remaining titles.