Community Chronicle: 01/12/13

Alright, it’s December now, and that means one thing: we are finally allowed to acknowledge the existance and impending arrival of Christmas. For those of you not so enamoured with all of this festive palaver, at least you can now bury yourself in the now-current generation of games consoles!

Speaking of which, if you want to share your new set up and gaming hardware, I wouldn’t be averse to breaking out the Gaming Places segment again.

Just as the PS4’s most famous release problem was a flakey HDMI port for some, the Xbox One has had its own issues, with a dodgy disc drive a disappointingly common sounding manufacturing error. Nothing that shouldn’t be ironed very quickly, but it has led to a quite humorous home fix, in which you can punch the bottom of the machine a few times, to reseat a gear which was a little out of place.

3shirts quite delightfully described it as “percussive maintenance”, but these launch issues which people have been seeing for both new machines have recalled some of the unpleasant failures the early machines from the last generation had.

Vallon chipped in, saying, “I had an Xbox 360 Jasper revision (pre-slim redesign) as a replacement for my RROD original launch console – had to get the stock off ebay – anyway when it arrived it was fine, but it wouldn’t read the discs all the time, so I gave it a good whack and it has been going strong ever since. I just figured it was the laser being misaligned by being knocked about during delivery. Seems tech doesn’t change that much after all!”

Elsewhere, it was much to the delight of buyers, and no doubt some chargrin and embarrassment for Zavvi, that they accidentally sent out Tearaway and PS Vita bundles to some people that had pre-ordered Tearaway from them. A console and a game for £20 sounds like quite the bargain to me!

Zavvi politely asked for these to be returned to little success it seems, and boeboe found it quite amusing, relaying a little story of his own. He wrote, “I remember when I sent my first PS3 in for maintenance to Sony, with MW2 still in. Guess what they said when I asked for it back.”

JR. chipped in, as he remembered “reading a story a while back about a cash machine giving out extra notes and the bank asking the customers to return the money. Strangely enough not many people did.”

Finally, there seemed to be one overriding theme to the potential uses for the Remote Play, as Blair looked at the feature built into the PlayStation 4 and Vita. Blackredyellow pitched it perfectly, through his own experiments.

“I was so impressed with this feature,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like something tacked on, but actually a useful and pleasing way to access your games. The other night my wife was watching some damn awful show on TV, and wanted me in the same room for company… I fired up the PS4 remotely and sat playing FIFA 14 via remote play. Superb.”

We’ll start things off this week with a huge accomplishment, as R1MJAW found himself earning his 100th platinum trophy, just ahead of the arrival of his PlayStation 4. The game in question was Lego Marvel Super Heroes, before he delved into his back catalogue to wile away the time.

The particularly tricky Killzone: Mercenary platinum was won by Youles this week, managing to battle his way through tons of online matches and racking up tons and tons of kills, through some particularly gruelling trophies.

Vallon sat down this week and played through New Super Mario Bros Wii U, but struggled with the challenge of some of the levels, which had him almost wanting to throw the controller!

And we’ll finish off this particularly brief entry on practically the opposite end of the trophy gathering spectrum to where we started. Salvodaze won his first platinum this last week, with the quite wonderful Tearaway. Surely just the very beginning of a huge collection.

Just one final shout out to Eldaveo, whose wife gave birth to his son this week. He’s quite obviously spent some of his paternity leave getting to grips with his Xbox One, but congratulations are in order to the couple.

We’re nearly done, but you can head over to page two for the full trophy leaderboards. To finish off this page, we have the usual submission form for photos and accomplishments.

If people want to keep sending photos in, I’ll be happy to post them, but gaming places is no longer a regular feature. If you fancy it, just use the submission form below, get in touch with me on Twitter at @teflon, or just send me an email out of the blue to [email protected].