It is a sad "day" (I put that in quotes because it happened last week) for our PSO gaming. A number of months ago I discovered that there existed a version of Phantasy Star Online that had local 4 player split screen support. PSO was always one of my favorite games from when it first came out. I also really liked the original Phantasy Stars. I did try Universe but was mostly lukewarm on it, though I'm thinking that's because I was trying to make it be PSO and it's just not the same game. We've been having epic fun with that game for a while now.

So periodically we would start to see some problems loading our save file. Arg! I had this happen with my other Gamecube card too. Turns out that the freakin' Wii burns up those poor little cards, especially if you have Connect24 turned on. That said, since you can't transfer a save for PSO, back it up, or anything really, we were basically screwed. Billy had some tools to try to do something about it but in the end, it was for naught. So so long our PSO characters that we had so much fun playing as. I certainly am not going to restart with new chars, at least not anytime soon. At best I could consider it if there was a way to save Gamecube games on something -other- than a Gamecube memory card. Like oh... an external hard drive or something like that. That basically leaves us looking for a new thing to spend a lot of time on. We'll find something for sure, just sucks that we were forced, ya know? Hell I just got a Dragon Slayer! I -love- a Dragon Slayer! =(

At the moment I'm trying out a demo of Phantasy Star Portable, and also checking out SCHTHACK and PSO Blue Burst to see what's up with them. I'm not about to play PSO in a "pay monthly or whatever for a guild card" format though. These two don't seem to require that. The gamecube one of course didn't either for local play.

Anyway, we'll miss you PSO. If anyone out there knows of a way to save Gamecube saves on something other than a card, let me know please.