So, according to this, we're in Goblin Valley.

Don't call it a comeback.

2010-12-02T18:43:00.001-05:00

I'm reviving this wee beastie, with a more consistent format and plenty more old games to talk about. Actual content forthcoming; I'm kind of drunk right now.

I thought this day would never come.

2009-04-16T18:05:00.002-04:00

Just fired up Phantasy Star Universe to play the last available story mission for Chapter 3. Tomorrow, they're doing a big mission fest that wraps things up and should, finally, give up the last achievement, for killing Dark Falz 2.

I AM SO GLAD TO FINALLY BE DONE WITH THIS MESS and will probably just move on to Phantasy Star Zero on the DS but still HALLELUJAH.

Chop chop.

2009-03-31T18:41:00.003-04:00

Man, Afro Samurai would probably have been a good enough game, and easy enough to beat, if it hadn't been for the fact the copy GFly sent me was scratched. I was just getting good at the focus slicing and everything. Grr.

Yeah, it's been awhile. Finally got my own system fixed now that my friend took his backup back due to a red ring, and have been sticking mostly to Rock Band 2 and Burnout Paradise. Got to the final license run, and I must say, the Takedown 4x4's upgraded version wins pretty much everything by using my old Wipeout Fusion tactic: get in the heaviest, fastest thing you can (in Wipeout's case, a Tigron ship with upgraded shields) and just plow through everything else while you ride the walls. 50 wins left to go, and the only things this beast can't handle besides Burning Runs are Stunt Runs.

My other recommendation? Drink up before you drive. At least for me, it lessens my concerns about other cars on the road.

Might start using this to discuss the crappy movies I've been watching, too, as well as the good ones. Instant Queue is the stuff of the gods.

I'm still here.

2009-01-13T14:33:00.002-05:00

Haven't been posting, but have still been playing. I'm not sure if I want to keep up with the reviews so much since it's all old content and has already been pretty well covered by more reputable gaming media. I will at least try to keep track of my progress through the alphabet of 360 games here, and probably do writeups of stuff I find notable, but really, it's not like you can't find achievement discussion at Xbox360Achievements.

Right now I've been getting a lot of games beginning with the letter F, and most recently, Frontlines: Fuel Of War. Probably giving that a spin later today. Also been playing a decent amount of Left 4 Dead. If you have friends that have it, get it, and play with them, because the single player blows but multiplayer is amazing.

Look forward to next month, when I post pics of myself dressed as Peter Pepper.

We built this city on cock and balls.

2008-11-30T17:20:00.002-05:00

A Kingdom For Keflings
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 180gs, 2 online for 20gs)
MS Points: 800

The first game to employ the new avatars in gameplay, A Kingdom For Keflings takes the resource management and asset building elements of an RTS and puts them in a sandbox setting. In other words, you build stuff so you can build more stuff and tell your little people what to do, but you don't have to worry about a tower rush while you're at it.

Sounds kind of boring, but it turns out pretty fun, if you're into games like SimCity or always get sacked when you're trying to build up a civiliztion in Age Of Empires. The music volume tends to be set pretty high by default, so you may want to turn that down right away, but other than that, no real warnings.

While those ten achievements can be garnered offline, you can save yourself some time and trouble by just hosting an online village and saving that as you progress; if you're like me and like to organize things, however, I suggest you lock said game until you've gotten things pretty well built up, especially if you don't have a headset handy. Without direction, random visitors will prove to be the most braindead twats on the face of the earth, building random garbage and throwing it everywhere. That, and if you have a sweet town built up by the time you let anyone in, it's pretty much just showing off by that point, and any damage idiots do is less consequential.

Another hit from NinjaBee, aimed at the more strategically-minded crowd. I say buy it.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 110gs, 4 online for 90gs)
MS Points: 1200

The best Street Fighter, if not the best 2D fighter, all prettified. It's solid. Just buy it, since the demo is just the multiplayer beta they let you download if you bought Commando 3. Which is totally a dick move, but whatever.

Blitz: The League II
Achievements: 50 (45 offline for 905gs, 5 online for 95gs)

Augh.

That's the entire review.

Go home.

Time for a booster!

2008-11-16T13:53:00.004-05:00

Here's a list of games and the achievements in them I'm looking to trade currently. I'll try to keep this as up to date as possible. Please message me ahead of time so I can make sure I have room on my friends list for you.

Note that these are mostly just achievements that require online play; I'd be happy to help or be helped with anything that can be done both offline and online as well.

Last updated 8/4/09

3D Ultra Minigolf
Open Champion
Host With The Most

A Kingdom For Keflings
Friend

Aegis Wing
Diplomat
Epic Warrior
Teamwork

Assault Heroes
Twin Medal

Band Of Bugs
Third Time's The Charm
Good Host

Battlestar Galactica
Aquaria Wingman Citation Ribbon
Libran Survivalist Citation

Big Bumpin'
First Victory
Slippery Like Eel
Mine!
Outclassed!
What Happened?
Knockout King
Striker
Not Playing Anymore!
Hat Trick
Charge!!

Bomberman Live
The Name's Bomb, Dangerous Bomb
You Die So Good!
The Bomb!
The Good, The Bad, And The Bombed

Boogie Bunnies
Better Together

Burnout Paradise
First Win
Online Champion
Firestarter
Party Animal
Burnout Skills

Carcassonne
Top Of The Heap
Metropolis
Lord Of Carcassonne

Commanders: Attack
Bravely Bold

Culdcept Saga
Triangular Battler
Quadrangular Battler
Alliance Maker
Neophyte Cepter
Apprentice Cepter
Adept Cepter
Master Cepter
Grandmaster Cepter
Legendary Cepter
Fighter's Honor
Knight's Honor
Berserker's Honor

Dash Of Destruction
Extinction Event

Dead Or Alive 4
Achieved Grade "SS"
Achieved Grade "S"
Achieved Grade "A"
Achieved Grade "B"
Achieved Grade "D"
Achieved Grade "E"
5 Straight Wins In DOA Online
10 Straight Wins In DOA Online
20 Straight Wins In DOA Online
5 Straight Losses In DOA Online
10 Straight Losses In DOA Online
20 Straight Losses In DOA Online
10 Wins In DOA Online
50 Wins In DOA Online
100 Wins In DOA Online

DOOM
ROOKIE
DESTROYER

E4
Big Head

Gauntlet
CO-OP
CO-OP Master
Max CO-OP
High Score

Gears Of War
A Series Of Tubes
Domination
I Can't Quit You Dom
THIS! IS! ANNEX!
Inconcievable!
Nub Pwn3r
You Down With E.P.I.C?
Green Thumb
Mind The Gap
Purdy Mouth
All That Juice

Geon
getting out more
gimme gimme world domination
variety is the spice of life

Golden Axe
Co-op Win
Online Co-op

Guitar Hero II
Joe & Steven Award
Keef & Mick Award
Page & Plant Award
400K Pair
600K Pair
800K Pair
Millionaire Pair

Guitar Hero III
Life Of The Party
Back Up Hero
Guitar Wizard
Button Masher
Two Timer
Dynamic Duo
Streak Masters
Millionaire Club
Higher Than Most
Easy Duo
Medium Duo
Hard Duo
Living Legends
Leaders Of The Pack

Halo 3
Campaign Complete: Legendary
Vidmaster Challenge: Annual
Double Double
Alas, Poor Yorick
Came... From... Behind...
Defend This
Flag Dropped
Road Rage
Look Both Ways
Hammer Time
Pull
Blades Of Fury
Ghost Patrol
Post Mortem
Get The Horns
Aww, Too Bad
Killtacular
Have Fun Respawning
Save This Film
Delicious Brains
Zombie Repeller
Tank Dropper

Joust
CO-OP
CO-OP Master

Marathon: Durandal
Tastes Like Chicken
Pfhor Score And Seven Years Ago
I'm Invincible!
Make Someone Pay
World Domination
King Pfhor A Day
You Think You're Big Time

Marble Blast Ultra
First Place
Gem Collector
Veteran Battler
Blue Gem Hunt

Marvel Vs Capcom 2
I Am Doom
Hyakuretsu Kyaku
Berserker Barrage
Shun Goku Satsu

n+
Complete 5 Co-op Episodes
Complete 10 Co-op Episodes

Pocketbike Racer
Multiplayer King
Pro-Gamer

Poker Smash
Champ

Rock Band
One Million Fans
Hall Of Fame Inductee
Vinyl Artist
Gold Artist
Platinum Artist
Big In London
Big In Paris
Big In Amsterdam
Big In Berlin
Big In Stockholm
Big In Rome
Big In Boston
Big In NYC
Big In Chicago
Big In LA
Big In Seattle
Big In San Francisco
Big In Japan
Big In Sydney
Big In Reykjavik
Big In Rio
Big In Moscow
Riding On Coattails

Rock Band 2
Comeback Kid
Victory!
Band Savior
Overdrive Overdose
Million Point Club
Stage Igniters

SEGA Superstars Tennis
Surf The Net
Top Of The Tree
Ball Buddies
Top Ranker
Let's Get Friendly
Space Channel 5
Swinging Report Show

Small Arms
Six Degrees Of Small Arms
Barbaric Recruiter

Sonic The Hedgehog 2
All Multiplayer
Xbox Live Racer

Soul Calibur IV
World Traveler

Street Trace: NYC
Pickup Tournament Pro
Cash Tournament Pro
8 Player Award

Streets Of Rage 2
First Versus
Online Warrior
Online Co-op

Tetris Splash
Online Rookie
Online Back-To-Back
Online Expert

TMNT 1989 Arcade
Slice And Dice
Real Ultimate Power

Undertow
Swim Pals

Uno
Multiplayer
Uno Shark

Wing Commander Arena
TCS Tiger's Claw
Paladin

WOTB: Commando 3
Armored Attack
Combined Asssault

Yaris
Plays Well With Others

Reference city.

2008-11-16T13:00:00.002-05:00

Triple threat for today, but not much to say on two of 'em.

F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault Recon
Achievements: 47 (25 offline for 685gs, 22 online for 315gs)

Oh man. Fuck this game, too. I thought F.E.A.R. Files might've just been ground out quickly for a fast buck, but now I see the pedigree is pretty shitty, too. It looks a little better visually when it comes to character designs, but the environments are definitely more limited, and the gameplay is just as crap.

To make things simple, I got to the third Iteration, and two or three times into the water treatment plant, I figured I was done, only to learn the game was loading another section of the same damn area. Thanks. Eventually, you get to a point where the guy you're tracking drops some mines and disappears again, and if you shoot the mines (since, if you don't, you splodey), they blow out this electrical box on the wall, sending electricity shooting across the hallway. I imagine you're supposed to use your slo-mo powers to get by it, which I tried about a dozen different ways unsuccessfully before I stopped trying to pretend I gave a shit.

They also nickel and dime you something fierce when it comes to some of these achievements, especially the online kills with different weapons and anything that isn't the basic clearing of the game with a decent difficulty setting. You guys could've afforded to spread some points around and made more ten-pointers out of the pile of fivers.

I imagine I'll be saying, "Fuck this game," to the sequel as well, so look forward to it!

CSI: Hard Evidence
Achievements: 5 (all offline, 1000gs)

Totally phoned in, as all your achievements come from just beating the five cases with any grade. They couldn't even make a few for finding all the insect easter eggs in each level, or stackables for certain grades. Thanks. On the plus side, that leaves this game an easy full-perfect run, if a tedious and moderately long one. Wouldn't take more than two or three days, though, so it's perfect for even a brick and mortar rental.

I've watched all of one episode of CSI, and I think it was Miami and the sound was turned down so I can't say I have much background in the series, but the game basically pits you as a new recruit getting partnered with different investigators on the different cases, for a delightful point-and-click-to-find-shit adventure. The writing isn't bad, but there's a bit too much attempt to insert wit at weak places, and almost all of the characters, main and suspect, look like they were pulled out of a session of Poser 101. Poser as in the 3D imaging program that a depressing number of people seem to use for porn.

The thing that really bugs me is that I don't think they resolve some of the less consequential evidence, especially this one fingerprint you find in the fourth mission that places one person at the scene of the crime, who ends up never having been there at all, if I remember correctly. That, and another person gets tied there but they never explain why he was kind enough to vaccuum a key piece of evidence before he ran back out, terrified. I dunno.

Get your points and forget this game ever existed.

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway
Achievements: 43 (36 offline for 1000gs, 7 online for 0gs)

That's right, the online achievements don't get you any gamerscore. Clearly, online play was tacked on at the last minute. Still, that doesn't make the main game any worse.

Another damn WWII game. Great. At least in this one, Gearbox took the time to focus more on the guys you're working with rather than the situation, and the story they crafted is pretty solid. On the downside, there are a great many references to the previous Brothers In Arms titles, and in some cases character faces aren't that distinct from one another, so those new to the franchise are bound to be confused, but other than that, things are all right.

Hell's Highway, set against the backdrop of the massive botch that was Operation Market Garden, is a squad tactics FPS, in that you command other groups of soldiers, often with special abilities like a crew with a bazooka or heavy machine gun, to help you work your way around enemy emplacements and lay down fire so you can get in there and clean up. Run-and-gun is not the name of the game here, but the squad command controls are simple and intuitive while still being somewhat robust, so the pace of the game doesn't drag often.

The achievement spread is decent, too. You're rewarded for each completed chapter, in increasing amounts as you get closer to the end of the game, and most of the other achievements come from stuff you'd inevitably end up doing or trying to do as the story progresses, so even the secret achievements aren't tough to acquire. There are a couple of easter egg hunts with the recon points, which reward you with brief cutscenes as well as more info on your map, and the Kilroys, which mostly aren't hidden anywhere too obscure and are a fun real-life reference to a trend from the war itself.

You might groan, however, upon noticing the three constant play achievements. You get points for playing every day for a week, once a week for three months straight, and every day for one hundred days. Nice way to get people to buy instead of renting, guys! Too bad you didn't account for Gamefly in that equation! So yeah, it looks like I'm going to be hanging onto this one for a bit. Thankfully, the game counts "playing" as merely loading things up and going into a menu or two, so once I'm done with the story and possibly trying to get some of the online stuff, I can just pop the game in for a minute during breakfast or what have you until sometime in February.

There's also an achievement for playing the game on September 17th, which is kind of dick since the game came out a week after that, but the optimist in me makes me think they originally aimed for an earlier release. Not all developers are evil, right? For that one, I'm just going to put it back in the queue sometime next summer.

All in all, it's not a disappointing game, and even if you're not invested in the series thus far, it's worth checking out.

All I ever wanted.

2008-11-10T20:26:00.002-05:00

I'm on vacation this week from my real job, so I've got plenty of time to pay attention to this. High on the agenda is getting some images to pretty things up around here and make it not so type-type-type, though I haven't finished editing them down for this update.

Catching up from this past week, I've got a handful of games I played. Not as bad as the past few huge updates.

Vigilante 8 Arcade
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 180gs, 1 online for 20 gs)
MS Points: 800

I missed out on the original Vigilante 8, but the demo gives me the impression this was someone's answer to Twisted Metal back in the day. Cars drive around and pick up weapons and powerups to make other cars go splodey. Eh.

Not that I'm knocking it, really. I just wasn't particularly impressed, either. If I had experience with the original, I could judge things based on the faith of the translation, but ah well. I do kind of dig the 70s motif. Achievement spread is nice and sounds easy, if a bit grindy at points. Guess you should buy it if you were a fan in the day or like mindless missile-fests. Can't say I don't.

Battle Fantasia
Achievements: 48 (44 offline for 880gs, 4 online for 120gs)

From the dudes who brought you Guilty Gear, Arc System Works, we have another similarly awesome fighter, but decked out in 3D sprites and a fantasy RPG feel. I skipped most of the story scenes to save time, but the basic gist is that a bunch of people are on quests that end up pitting them against this badass suit of armor from hell.

Pretty solid fighter, as is to be expected from Arc, but if you were hoping for much of anything from the RPG side, too bad. At best, you get the same sort of storyline shifts from doing certain things in certain battles as you got in some of the later GGX iterations, and little numbers pop up whenever you hit or get hit. The rabbit wizard's wand levels up as you do better, too. The end.

My one gripe, as mentioned in an earlier brief post, is that the autosave isn't automatically set to ON. I ended up clearing three characters' basic stories before calling it a night during my first session, only to find the gallery stuff I'd unlocked gone the next morning. Always make sure it's on, since some people don't bother defaulting that for some reason.

Achievement spread is mostly simple, with fight counts, story completion, and progress in every mode coming into play, but there's about 200gs worth of CRAZY SHIT you need to do if you want a perfect completion. Mostly insanely high combos, but there's one thing that requires you to hammer your parry button at 212 bpm to survive the last boss' ultimate attack.

Yes. 212 BPM. Someone clocked it. If you want to see how to do it (the achievement is Perfect Hero), peep the last video here. Yeah. Whoa.

Still, love it to death. I highly recommend if you're into 2D fighters, or dudes that rock a combination hoverbike/chainsaw.

Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath
Achievements: 44 (34 offline for 890gs, 10 online for 110gs)

Didn't spend any time in campaign mode, so I can't comment on that, but OH MY GOD THE INTERFACE IS SO MUCH BETTER THIS TIME AROUND. Not much changed, to be honest, save for the addition of a whole pile of factions, but instead of the PC-esque build menus they kept for C&C3, Kane's Wrath implements a radial pop-up that is worlds easier to navigate, and therefore speeds things up handily.

Gameplay, as I hinted, remains pretty much the same, though these new groups have their own tricks. For gamerscore, they want you to run the campaign, then do everything else (skirmish, quick matches online, and a challenge mode) with everyone possible. The only non-story secret achievement is skipping the Boot Camp when you first start campaign, which you can probably only do right at the beginning of your save file, so just say no. Then go back and do it for some points anyway, since once again, it's linked from the main menu. It's also the same damn training course, save with new menus. Ugh.

Solid RTS, though at this point I'd probably just recommend you go out and grab C&C: Red Alert 3. George Takei as the head of Japan? Madness!

Beijing 2008
Achievements: 50 (46 offline for 925gs, 4 online for 75gs)

Ugh. Thanks, Sega. This isn't your daddy's Track & Field, I'll say that much.

This game is all about perfection. Save for the handouts you get for merely hosting a match (good luck finding anyone), making a custom dude, and playing the game with your Rock Band setup (seriously, there's one for playing with 4 controllers on one console, and so long as you've got A buttons to work with, the thing gives it to you), you have to play until you're absolutely amazing.

I didn't even waste a half hour on it, nevermind the normal hour. I'll come back to it when there's nothing else I want to play, or I find someone with whom to boost the online crap. Bleh.

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam
Achievements: 15 (all offline, 1000gs)

OH HELL YES. For some reason, mindless, repetitive button mashing to execute mass murder is so much more satisfying when giant robots are involved instead of random, faceless Chinamen. I'm not even that big into Gundam, per se, but that doesn't matter, because the game follows the anime plots decently enough, and has a character profile section to blow several key plot points in case you haven't watched a given series! NICE!

Really, it's just a reskinned DW, so it's still crappy old DW, but whatever. 'splosions. You get your 1000gs mostly just from beating the game with everyone ever, leveling someone and their machine to the max, and playing a lot of missions, so I think I might bother to grind this one out.

Cool if you're into Gundam, but even then, I'm not sure you really want to buy it to own. Rent away.

I believe Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway is next up. No, I haven't bought anything new since RB2 this holiday game season, and if anything, the next thing I pick up will probably be DDR Universe 3, because I'm a huge douche. I swear, I've been invited to more Gears 2 games in the past week than I have birthday parties in my entire life.

A couple of reminders.

2008-11-04T11:51:00.001-05:00

- Always make sure you turn on your autosave, kids. Always.

- Get out and vote. Now. Put the controller down. Run a defrag or something, and try and help un-fuck this country.

SUCCESS! RICE!

2008-10-30T00:05:00.001-04:00

PHILLIES WIN THE WORLD SERIES WHA TTHE HELL IS UUUUUUUP

I may find myself delayed.

2008-10-29T09:17:00.003-04:00

Before anything else, I'd like to point out that they finally released Darth Vader as DLC for Soul Calibur IV, and you want him. Bad. I'm not that great with him, but some dude schooled me with him online and trust me, the man is siiiiiiick. He is possibly also the only thing that sounds funnier than Yoda with a Japanese voice track.

Also, Siouxsie & The Banshees pack for Rock Band/2. Killing Jar, Hong Kong Garden, and Kiss Them For Me. You need it.

Portal: Still Alive
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
MS Points: 1200

Sure, it's just a port of the version on the Orange Box, but given that it's still one of the best games ever put together, why not pony up for the extra challenge levels and developer commentary? Or save yourself a few bucks if you haven't gotten Orange Box already, in case you really, really didn't want the rest of that extra content, and are stark raving mad to boot?

Achievement spread is mostly a few tricks and the challenge levels, since they realize most people out there played the OB version already. Worth the money, just make sure you have drive space for it.

Armored Core: For Answer
Achievements: 41 (24 offline for 570gs, 17 online for 430gs)

And with this, I have played every retail game beginning with A released in the US to date. Ding!

This follow-up to Armored Core 4, in case you couldn't figure that out from the logo, could be dubbed Armored Core Of The Colossus. There's the usual spread of area clearing and target elimination missions as per previous AC games, but every chapter seems to end with a raid on a giant walking base bristling with firepower, called an Arms Fort. They tell you the weak spots you have to take out during the briefing, and then the "fun" part is actually getting to them before you get raped.

There's also an arena of sorts this time around; versus missions against other AC units with a ranking system you can climb, and they're nice enough to pay you as well.

The one innovation that did impress me somewhat is that they finally provided an alternate control scheme, where your firing buttons are the bumpers instead of A & B, while A & B are swapped to the weapon switch roles. Still a little weird trying to fire your lefty weapon while jetting around, but I think it's a vast improvement regardless. Veterans will probably disagree, but whatever. I've been playing AC here and there since the PS1 versions, and I've never gotten used to the setup.

Offline achievements are all story and mission rank, as well as different endings, and online play gets you stuff for climbing the ranks and blowing up a lot of shit (10,000 online kills? Excuse me?). Basically more of the same, but it didn't get any worse.

Baja: Edge Of Control
Achievements: 50 (50 for 990gs, 1 online for 10gs)

If DiRT was Gran Turismo Rally, this is Gran Turismo Dune Buggy. I should mention now that as soon as I saw the THQ logo starting up, I went into this with some severe bias. I hate THQ. I hate them lots. This was only ratcheted up when I found myself looking at an intro screen featuring full motion video. It's like I have a Sega CD all over again! NICE!

All in all, the game isn't that bad, thankfully. The controls are a little clumsy until you get used to them, but the customization and tweaking is at least second-rate, with lots of little slider bars to adjust your camber and other terms I'm only mildly familiar with, and plenty of parts to buy.

Even on easy, I was getting my ass handed to me, but then again, I wasn't so good with the controls, and the early races are easy enough to repeat, as well as the rewards being decent even early on, to justify playing them a few times to get the hang of things.

Not great for an achievement blitz, since most of them are for digging through career or beating races against hard AI, but good fun if you're into desert racing. I love that they included both short courses and the actual marathon runs through the desert.

Before you ask, I don't understand the whole thing with the single online achievement, either. It even sounds like they were expecting to put a few more in, since it's called Basic Multiplayer, but it's like they just forgot. THANKS THQ YOU'RE SUPER.

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 190gs, 2 online for 10gs)
MS Points: 1200

I'm not actually sure if the last one is an online one, but it sounds like a viral achievement so it probably is.

This would be a great easy achievement run if it didn't cost an unjustifiable 1,200 points. I blew through the demo questions in about five minutes, and if anything, they should be paying me 1200 points just to sit and listen to that fucking theme song.

Wait for the price to drop. No one should have to pay this much for Jeff Foxworthy, real or virtual.

Penny Arcade: On The Rainslick Precipice Of Darkness - Episode 2
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
MS Points: 1200

Unfortunately, I'm avoiding the demo on this one due to having not yet finished the first episode, but if it's anything like said episode, it's awesome. I don't need to play it to know you should buy it.

Umpteenth verse, review gets terse.

2008-10-24T20:22:00.002-04:00

Dynasty Warriors 5: Empires
Achievements: 36 (all offline, 1000gs)

Beat all the scenarios, and then grind your way to a pile of Generals in the Gathering Of Heroes scenario. Unless, of course, you actually like these games. In which case, seek help.

Been working on playing fifty online matches in Beautiful Katamari; while sparse, there are still people who play, usually early to mid evening from what I've found. Beyond that, I'm just waiting for Armored Core For Answer, since that'll leave me with all letter A retail games played. Woo.

Rock Band 2 is still awesome, but I hear Guitar Hero World Tour has Jesse's Girl by Rick Springfield. GUESS I NEED BOTH.

Baby got an atom bomb.

2008-10-16T14:05:00.002-04:00

Is this what it feels like to be back on schedule? Righteous!

Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant
Achievements: 48 (all offline, 1000gs)

There's really not much to say about this. Mind Over Mutant is just more of the same (admittedly solid) railed platforming, which sees the return of the titular Titans from the last game and gives you the new ability to store one while you run around. Oh, and you can dig underground now. Other than that, nothing new.

If anything, I think this one was a bit easier when it comes to extra challenges, as well. The grind this time around, instead of meeting certain conditions on each level, is more leveling up yourself and all the different kinds of Titans.

The co-op was handled a bit better this time around as well. Instead of carrying the other person on your back and swapping with a double jump as in CotT, now the second player can switch between being another bandicoot or a mask, in which case they follow around the lead player and have the ability to fire projectiles aimed with a crosshair onscreen. While the old way was a bit more fun when it came to actually cooperating with someone, this setup makes it a lot easier to bang out the coop achievements with just having a second controller on.

Worth a rent, but no more than that unless you collect these games for some reason. You could probably bang out all the achievements in about a week, two tops.

Age Of Booty
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 160gs, 2 online for 40gs)
MS Points: 800

From the demo, this seems like a pretty clean cut semi-strategical game. You control a pirate ship, and you're out to take towns, and I'm going to assume other ships as well as the game progresses. You collect resources floating on the sea or from the towns and tribal villages you wipe out, and use those to upgrade your ship back at your base.

Cashing in on "internet people" and their hard-on for pirates, it's a fun little game but nothing mindblowing. Achievement spread looks fairly easy, mostly clearing all the challenges and doing some fun stuff with items, with the online stuff just being winning some matches. Eh.

CrazyMouse
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 135gs, 4 online for 65gs)
MS Points: 800

You're a blue mouse that eats stuff, in some moderately puzzle-like levels. Sometimes you're up against a rival, sometimes there are enemy creatures out to end your pig-out session.

Controls are well and good for such a simple game, but visually, it feels really phoned in. Very flat-looking 2D characters on a vaguely 3D background that looks off-putting, like a really cheap Flash game. In some ways, it actually reminds me of those LCD handhelds from back in the day, where all the characters and objects on screen were just specific areas that were darkened when active. If things had been kept a little more on par in one direction or the other, it would be less jarring.

Oddly enough, a quick google turned up no results for a previously existing Flash form of this game, but there is a Windows Trojan by the same name. Go figure.

All you really need to do for most of the gamerscore is let the game ~~sew your asshole shut and~~ keep feedin' ya, and feedin' ya, and feedin' ya. There're a few tricks that require a bit more thinking, but really, it's cake.

Not a pun. Not the best use of your funds, either.

F.E.A.R. Files
Achievements: 41 (34 offline for 850gs, 7 online for 150gs)

Fuck this game. I was willing to look past the blocky graphics, vague and disjointed story, and mediocre level layout until this piece of shit bugged out twice in the exact same place.

After you get through what I guess is the prologue chapter of the first campaign, you're running around in the catcombs under a church, following this ghostly thing with red eyes and shooting anything that shoots at you. Eventually, a few of these red-eye things run into a small room, and given there's nowhere else to go, you have to follow them and then get locked in said small room.

The first time I followed them, it was basically a closet with a bunch of crates, and you could hear this weird whispery noise. I tried messing with everything, and eventually just grenaded myself to go back to the last checkpoint and try again.

The second time, the room went all black, with a small light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel glow in front of me and a bunch of the red-eye things dancing around in the darkness. Thing is, you can't move towards the light, you can't jump, your flashlight doesn't work, your time dilation doesn't work, shooting things does nothing, and grenades just get thrown into the ether with no effect, not even on you.

You can turn around to look at a whole lot of nothing, but that's it.

PS - fuck this game.

Eragon
Achievements: 37 (all offline, 1000gs)

Shitty game for a shitty movie based on a shitty book. A bunch of swarm-based combat sections tied together by a few short platforming elements. Everything is ugly. The end.

Your achievements come from beating all the levels on regular and hard difficulties, but regular was pretty damn easy, so Hard is probably a breeze. Oh, and there's one for finding all the hidden eggs, of which there's one per level.

Easy 1000 if you can stand the lame, and I think you actually have to play through twice as I do not believe the Normal/Hard clear achievements stack. Rent it and then never touch it again.

Fatal Inertia
Achievements: (48 offline for 940gs, 2 online for 60gs)

What we have here is the 360's answer to the Sony-exclusive* WipeOut series. Anti-gravity craft racing around tracks with an assortment of exotic weapons, with the sponsorship of different corporations, whose craft all look and handle differently.

The nice thing is, they actually took a somewhat original take on how the weapons function, and gave almost all of them two firing modes, to boot. The focus seems to be more on screwing up your opponents' driving than blowing them up, which in Wipeout seemed to be a more 50/50 balance, especially in the higher-level cups.

Replay value is pretty decent with Fatal Inertia as well, as there's a lot of stuff to unlock, between all the different craft, all the upgrade parts you can get for them, and all the optional logos and paint job options available.

Given that the tracks aren't smoothed over in any way, being built out in the wilds outside the cities OF THE FUTURE to avoid collateral damage, the environment comes into play a great deal more when it comes to piloting than it has in similar games, with some collision points being a very good way to ruin your entire day. There's a "reset" button that puts you back on the track instantly, but without any acceleration, so your opponents tend to take advantage of the situation very quickly.

Achievement spread is based mostly on game completion, with achievements for each of the cups in the game, and some side stuff for using the different weapons well and learning other essential skills and when to use them, like doing barrel rolls to clear weapons off you and so forth.

All in all, a much better game than I expected for a title that's been dirt cheap for a while and looked kind of shoddy upon first glance at the ship designs. If you like the WipeOut games, give this a try.

Unless, of course, you have a PS3, in which case you should already have WipeOut HD
and be going through several packs of fresh underwear. Oh man, WipeOut HD.

If I weren't trying to pick up the pace when it comes to getting through the alphabet, especially with the holiday gamedump dragging down my Gamefly queue, I'd keep this one around a bit longer. It's definitely getting some priority when I start coming back to things.

* - The exception being WipeOut 64, the Nintendo 64 port of WipeOut XL. I'm still not entirely sure how or why that happened.

Next person who says, "Shenanigans," is getting pistol whipped.

2008-10-13T17:27:00.002-04:00

I just noticed Call Of Duty: World At War is coming out next month. They're using the CoD4 engine again, which is a great idea, and putting it in yet another World War II game.

COVER KOREA OR SOMETHING. REVIVE THE BLITZ ON 'NAM GAMES WE HAD A FEW YEARS AGO. MAYBE GO ALL THE WAY BACK TO CRIMEA. ANYTHING FOR A CHANGE OF PACE, YOU BASTARDS.

Band battles in Rock Band 2 are great. If you ever completely paste a band called A Dude Named Napil, that's me.

Things that I do: Suck.

2008-10-09T21:38:00.002-04:00

Wow, gone almost a month. Sorry about that. Want to hear something funny about that month, though?

You know how I called Microsoft and they said they'd be shipping me a coffin and what have you? Well, it never showed up. I finally got around to looking into things today, and oh, look, they registered my system but never put in a repair ticket. I've been waiting about a month for jack shit. Thanks, guys! I filed a repair jont earlier and now things should start getting straightened out. In the meantime, however, it's not like I haven't been busy.

This stuff's going to be all over the place. Don't mind me.

Beat'n Groovy
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 150gs, 4 online for 50gs)
MS Points: 800

It's Pop'n Music with whitied-up characters and a small songlist. For those of you who have no idea what Pop'n is, it's like DDR for your hands.

These hamburger/balloon/whatever things descend from the top of the screen in designated bars, and you have to hit the button corresponding to them to pop them as they cross the line at the bottom. The main difference between this and a very similar Bemani game series, Beatmania, is that the songs and characters tend to be more on the cutesy, twee-pop end of things rather than serious techno/DJ stuff.

That being said, the Americanized characters are kind of hideous, but the songs seem to be at least partly Bemani classics; I spied 100 Second Kitchen Battle in the list, though it was unfortunately not playable in the demo.

Achievement spread is pretty much mode completion and point accumulation, with a few online victory notes for good measure. If you're into rhythm games, it's not as if there's a dearth of material to keep you otherwise occupied, so I'd say pick it up.

Duke Nukem 3D
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 150gs, 3 online for 50gs)
MS Points: 800

Since Duke Nukem Forever is never coming out, you're going to have to be satisfied with this. It was a fun enough shooter for it's time, even if it was just a gussied up Doom with hookers and one-liners.

Achievements are pretty much all completion, with a couple of "fun stuff" ones for game-related humor and special weapons, like stepping on 30 enemies you've shrink-rayed. Personally, I was hoping this lead to a future release of Shadow Warrior, because who doesn't want some Wang, but you know what I really want to see?

Rise Of The Triad. Hand of God, baby.

Grab this if you liked the original or can't get enough FPS action. Personally, I can wait.

Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm
Achievements: 20 (all offline, 1000gs)

I like crab. I've seen a couple eps of the show, too, and it was kind of cool. It's a shame the game is the slowest thing I've ever played. Taboo: The Sixth Sense, on the NES, was more exciting than this. Waiting for Xenogears to stop repeating itself over and over so I could beat up god with giant robots was more exciting than this. Funny, for a premise focused mostly on the life and death nature of the industry.

You captain a crab boat. Crab boats move slow. Your deckhands, who are moving huge crab pots in and out of the water, have to move slow. The bajillion tutorial levels you have to endure before you can even go crabbing are sloooow, and the captain they got to guide you through all of them? Talks kind of slow. Sorry, duder.

Still, it's not an awful game in and of itself. They went the sim route, and they did a decent job of that, and even did an okay job of introducing some of the more dramatic elements of the show, with storm issues and other boats getting in trouble. That and they at least tried to add a human element, where you have to keep up the morale of your crew who are douchebags to each other, and to whom you can be a douchebag if you like.

Most of the achievements are tied to the career mode and hard to miss, and it's not that difficult a 1000 if you're patient. I'm not patient, so I'll come back to it eventually. Don't think anyone should buy this, ever.

Dynasty Warriors 6
Achievements: 48 (all offline, 1000gs)

You know, it's not entirely implausible how they've milked this franchise for so many damned games, because chances are, China really had enough people to conscript into being murder bait for all the iterations to date, including the "Xtreme" editions and the Orochi crossovers.

Umpteenth verse, same as the first. You're one of a gajillion selectable/unlockable Chinamen with silly names beating the crap out of everything with a red bar over its head, until you run out of stuff to beat or die. Experience earned and weapons found can help you beat more of your countrymen faster and more brutally as you proceed.

You can level your horses, too. Lovely.

Achievements come half from unlocking more people to kill with, and half from killing more people well. Meh. If it's your thing, well, I don't know what's wrong with you, but then again, even I like to destress with a dose of wanton murder.

Devil May Cry 4
Achievements: 46 (all offline, 1000gs)

I'll be honest here, I hated the first few DMCs. The set camera angles in the first one bugged me, and I've never been much of one for games where remotely realistic firearms don't have an ammo count or need reloading, and 3 was really goddamn hard. Didn't much expect to be into this one, though like many of Capcom's other series that I suck at, I like the effort they've put in the story thus far.

Pleasantly surprised, I was. DMC4 does a nice job of giving you plenty to do in whatever difficulty you're playing, and the achievement spread backs that up by rewarding you even for playing the easiest mode. Things are well-paced, and it's pretty fun working your way toward new and exciting ways of tearing demons limb from limb.

This time around, you're a different blonde pretty boy with some sort of mystic heritage, as evidenced by Nero's devil trigger and weird stuff going on around him, but Dante does show up eventually, as does pretty much everyone else from the series who was cool, ever. So yeah, it's a bit fanservicey, but the gameplay doesn't get bogged down by this fact in any way.

Hell, I'm not even upset that it was the game I was playing when my 360 decided to take a massive shit. Recommended for DMC fans and freshmeat alike, especially since it seems to have gotten really cheap really quickly. Might as well buy it, because going through everything is going to take some time.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Achievements: 48 (27 offline for 570gs, 21 online for 430gs)

Battlefield 2 collides, rather clumsily, with the story established in Quake 2 and 4. Kind of a nice idea, but cheesy and really lacking in narrative once you get past the eyecatch movie.

In short, the Strogg, those ugly alien guys from Quake the second and fourth, have found their way to Earth, and decided to invade, as races who find Earth are wont to do. Humanity fights back, on fronts in Africa, North America, the Pacific, and one other (Asia? I wasn't paying attention), and a whole lot of nothing is explained while you're accomplishing objectives in the campaign mode.

There are different classes you can respawn as, all with different abilities and weapon sets they can select from, and only certain classes can achieve certain objectives. For example, when a barricade or wall needs to be blown, you need to run in there as a Soldier, as they're the only guys who can plant heavy explosives. Stealth Ops hack things, Engineers fix things, etc.

Bots can achieve objectives too, but things usually go quicker if you handle them yourself. As you use the given classes and do certain things with them more and more, you gain experience and star rankings, which improve... something. I didn't really pay enough attention to figure it out. But getting more stars is pretty much the core of the achievement lineup, so, uh, do that.

Another big, fat meh. Quake 4 was more fun than this.

Dark Sector
Achievements: 38 (32 offline for 800gs, 6 online for 200gs)

Something's weird, and it don't look good. Who you gonna call? Some shaky assassin who's got problems with killing people, apparently. Out on a mission to infiltrate a gulag and eliminate some guy with access to a weird alien (?) infection that turns people into monsters, you get caught and infected yourself. Taa-daa! Now you're Xena, Warrior Princess, complete with chakram growing out of your hand!

Moderately cheesed out story aside, there's a lot of good in this game. First off, it's really, really gorgeous. Everything looks sooo good, though it gets a little less clear in the actual gameplay. One of my favorite elements was the fact that, to keep you more reliant on your powers rather than running and gunning, is that every firearm has a fuse of sorts that destroys its operability after a certain amount of exposure to an infected person (like you!). In other words, you can usually pop off a handful of shots before you have to ditch something or go back to what you've been dealt.

On the downside, most of the level layouts seemed pretty straightforward and drab, though that might improve later on in the game, and in most cases there doesn't seem to be much strategy involved besides "shoot the hell out of it until something happens" whenever there's some sort of obstacle.

Worthwhile rent, however, and you can get pretty much all the achievements just by screwing around as your powers increase and improve. Not hard at all.

Lego Batman
Achievements: 46 (all offline, 1000gs)

I could go on for days about how all the Lego games are awesome, stupid fun. Traveller's Tales did another bang-up job on this baby, though it feels a great deal shorter and somewhat easier than its Star Wars-y cousins.

Formula's pretty much the same, though they cut down the character count this time by giving Batman and Robin (and later, Batgirl and Nightwing) several different suits with special abilities, mostly to make progress through the Hero storyline possible without having to bring villains into the mix. Free Play puts all those suits at your disposal, which can be slightly annoying to scroll through if you're trying to find a specific character, but still, it makes banging through tasks when you're hunting for extras a lot easier.

Villains, as they're more numerous, tend to overlap a bit more, save for a few unique abilities, like Joker's hand buzzer and Mr. Freeze's freeze ray. Super strength seems to have been handed out to at least half the crew, and the half that didn't got guns for the most part.

As par for the Lego course, the achievements are a mix of completion, catch-em-all stuff, and specific-character related kills, like killing Catwoman 9 times or smashing Comissioner Gordon with Harley Quinn's hammer. Easy 1000, fun 1000, feels kind of bad once you've gotten it done in just a few days' worth of playing.

My only problem with the game? There's a minikit in the last level of The Penguin's chapter that's just a huge fuck in the ass. You've got to clear the first two thirds of the level just to get to it, and to get the damn thing, you have to hit five gates on the way down an ice slide. You finish the ice slide, and you can't go back up and try again. It's bullshit. Best way I found to do it was start with your controlled character on the right side, hit those gates, then hit Y to swap to the other guy and hit the three on the left. You're welcome.

Disney's Meet The Robinsons
Achievements: 38 (all offline, 1000gs)

Kid's game based on some Disney 3D movie that never grabbed my attention, but has Adam West playing a space pizza deliveryman. Can't be all bad, right?

I got through a bit and it was mostly a more tedious Ratchet & Clank with some annoying minigames on the side. Bleh. The 1000 is fairly easy, but requires a little bit of hunting for some of the files and items later on.

Rent it, kill it quickly.

Battlefield: Bad Company
Achievements: 50 (30 offline for 610gs, 20 online for 390gs)

Whereas Quake Wars went the Battlefield-style class route, this new Battlefield shifted towards something more along the lines of Quake, or at least, the Call Of Duty games. Specific characters, no more parachuting in over and over, similar control schemes.

In Bad Company, you're in with the expendable criminals and mental cases, and a handful of you happen upon a bunch of mercenaries who get paid in gold bars and, conveniently, carry their pay on them. Shades of that Three Kings movie, really, but with less Mark Wahlberg.

I think it was cute of them to hide weapons all over the place and make them "Collectables," which is especially nice given that most of the ones you find are pretty sweet or specialized for needs you'll have when you find them. It's a shame that beyond that, it's mostly justanotherfps. Worth a rent, as the story and dialogue seem decently written, and it's not a terrible game.

Samurai Showdown 2
Achievements: 12 (7 offline for 80gs, 5 online for 120gs)
MS Points: 800

Oh man, SS2 was totally my baby back in the day, and the only SNK game I can recall being even remotely good at. They had a machine in the corner of this shady-ass pager and bootleg video store near one of my friends' places growing up, and we used to hang out there with this huge black guy and a couple of his friends, taking turns after they turned the game to free play when business was slow. Which was always, since most of the drug deals went on in the evening, and we'd be around mid-day.

Fighting game, ancient Japan, goofy characters in part based on Japanese folklore and in part history, crazy moves and swords and just sweet 2D fighting goodness. Must-have if you're into fighters.

Mega Man 9
Achievements 12 (all offline, 200gs)
MS Points: 800

If I have to explain Mega Man, you probably shouldn't be holding a controller, ever. Little blue dude, pew pew laser hand, evil robots, new powers, same villain behind the scenes every time. As a nod to the history of most of the original Mega Man series, they decided to go back and do this one up 8-bit style, both graphically and musically, and it's beautiful.

One thing you may not be familiar with, even if you do know Mega Man, is the term "Mega Man hard." This was an assignment of difficulty that was mildly less difficult than "Contra hard," but still pretty tough, based mostly on the twitch-wracking gameplay of the first game in the series. That baby was unforgiving.

In this iteration, they based things more on Mega Man 2, which was a bit easier but still one of the better games in the series, and went so far as to remove the chargable Mega Buster and slide move bullshit they started handing him in games 3 through 8 to make life easier and/or more intersting. IT IS ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

Of course, because of all this, Mega Man 9 does not coddle you. It does not coddle anyone. And since you haven't played a real Mega Man game in forever, because no one has (unless you've played the Zero games on the GBA), your ass is just as much grass as anyone else's.

Get your blue bomber groove back and get a taste of some solid roots. Buy this game. Buy the endless stage and the Protoman pack, too, because Protoman is badass.

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit
Achievements: 50 (48 offline for 990gs, 2 online for 10gs)

I managed to avoid the DBZ franchise, for the most part, from the end of the first airing of the Frieza saga in the US until now. I thought I would regret coming back to it, but you know what? This game is pretty fun.

The cel-shading's a bit obnoxious (and this is coming from a cel-shade whore), but other than that, the game's solid. The button layout felt pretty comfortable, as it's essentially a tweaked version of the Soul Calibur format, and the gameplay kept a decent pace without being insanely fuck-you-if-you-miss-a-move fast or too slow to be true to the show.

The achievements come more from completion than anything difficulty-related, too, which I thought was nice since the prime audience for this stuff is likely to still be kids, or so I'd assume. I dunno what all they show on TV when it comes to anime anymore, seeing as how I don't watch TV.

Definitely not a bad time if you've got even a passing interest in DBZ. Which you must have, because you can't hate Dragon Ball. I'll see you guys in line for the midnight showing of the Dragon Ball live action film, ~~if only because I want to rub one to James Marsters as a Namek~~.

War World
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
MS Points: 800

A poor man's MechAssault. Smaller mechs run through indoor-ish stages shooting each other until someone wins, and they all have different specialties.

The game loses a lot from the fact you're not towering over city blocks obliterating pretty much everything, and I must say the demo was the worst example of a demo I've ever played. Congratulations, Blue Dragon, you've been usurped from the shitty demo throne. I think I got maybe a minute of gameplay before it prompted me to unlock the game or quit.

Eat a dick, War World. You and your shitty "just beat this on all the difficulties" achievement list.

Shadow Assault/Tenchu
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
MS Points: 800

Puzzle ninja bullshit. You pick up traps as one of the Tenchu series characters to assassinate unsuspecting nobility who step on them. It's really, really annoying, and you have no way to defend yourself or escape if you get spotted by a sentry.

Don't waste your money. I don't care how much you like ninjas or Tenchu or whatever. This game is a crime.

RocketBowl
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 125gs, 4 online for 75gs)
MS Points: 800

Bowling meets Kirby's Dream Course. Crazy ramps and obstacles and shit, and all sorts of stuff to pick up on the course as you bowl. Kind of fun, looks pretty and I dig the retro aesthetic, nothing amazing.

Grab it if you like this sort of fun-ish puzzler stuff. Next.

Soul Calibur IV
Achievements: 50 (44 offline for 840gs, 6 online for 160gs)

AW HELL YEAH I'M FINALLY REVIEWING THIS REALLY.

Soul Edge/Blade/Calibur whatever has been running for a while now, with characters dying, coming back from the dead, and what have you, and it's still one of the best 3D fighters around. Granted, it's starting to show its age in that things have just gotten downright goofy this time around, what with Star Wars characters showing up, but somehow they made things at least as sensible as Link, Spawn, and Heihachi showing up in SC2. I admire them for that.

Gone is the shitty campaign mode from 3, and along with it, those foot blades or whatever that gave you the closest thing to a hand-to-hand style you could get, but who cares? Everyone ever is back, along with a few new people, some new styles that aren't just hybrids of other styles, and THE FORCE, BITCH. It's crazy.

Character customization is back as well, and now you can actually level up the styles of each character that you can assign to your creations, in order to give yourself more options as to weird special powers tied to those styles and their weapons.

Story mode is a breeze and kind of weak, but if you're looking for a solo challenge, there's a tower mode with specific challenges of increasing difficulty going one way, and a survival mode you can unlock going the other, both of which help you unlock more things for customization and lead toward more gamerscore.

I can't really fault this game on anything, save for playing ranked matches will almost always land you in special match mode where some fuckwit has pimped out a Siegfried and the shit can only use one move that rings you out or kills you in three hits. Other than that and a lack of a training challenge mode like they had in SC2, perfect.

Now could someone please tell me when the hell they're going to make the console-exclusive characters available on the systems they didn't initially come on? They said we'd have to wait a month or so. It's been two.

Buy this game, and it wouldn't hurt to get an arcade stick while you're at it. The Hori one is pretty tits.

MLB Stickball
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 160gs, 2 online for 40gs)
MS Points: 800

For those of you who never played it at recess, Stickball is baseball lite, though in this case, they toned it down a bit more and you don't even have to run, just bat and field. You make progress around the bases based on the distance of your swing and whether you hit various stuff in the field, like windows and parked cars (since you're playing in the street).

You take that, add superdeformed actual baseball players, and there you have it. It's fun, but I'm a terrible pitcher, and was not doing so good with the Phillies against the Mets in the demo.

Fuck the Mets.

You could do worse than getting this game.

DiRT
Achievements: 49 (46 offline for 940gs, 3 online for 60gs)

While I normally hate to compare games to other games they're not directly related to somehow, DiRT is a rally-centric Gran Turismo/Forza sort of game. You buy your own cars, have a bit of customization room when it comes to livery (paint jobs) and parts, and compete in different events, in some of which only certain cars can participate.

Unlike GT, however, you can set the difficulty you're racing at before you race for any event in the game; you just make less money for playing easier difficulties. That doesn't matter so much if you're running just for score, since none of the achievements that I can recall are difficulty-centric, and if anything you'd just have to grind things a bit more to make the money to collect all the cars and liveries. Even if you aren't just whoring it, the difficulty switchup gives you a chance to learn essential rally techniques like sliding and when to shift when it comes to corners, as well as what the hell all the crap your co-driver is spouting even means.

Decent game, pick it up sometime if you're into realistic racers. Don't know how far the replay value might go once you finish everything achievement-wise.

Don King Presents: Prizefighter
Achievements: 39 (32 offline for 855gs, 7 online for 145gs)

Fairly solid boxer, with some minigames to break up the monotony. Using buttons instead of sticks took a little getting used to, but at the same time, it made the game feel more like a fighter than the Fight Night style of things. Which would make sense, since 2K games did this one, and we all know how much they looove Electronic Arts.

There's a fairly stock career mode, where you assemble your own custom boxer and set him against a bunch of real boxers, and I really like the addition of classic fights, based on real bouts of the past wherein you can make or rewrite history.

Your gamerscore comes mostly through slamming away at the career mode, with some asides for those minigames I mentioned and some boxer-specific items like taking down someone with a lefty and making a comeback after getting dropped a couple times.

Great game if you know anything about the ring, and still good if you're going in fresh. Who rules? The Marquis Of Queensbury does, fool!

Rock Band 2
Achievements: 50 (48 offline* for 985gs, 1 online for 15gs)

* - Actually, pretty much all the achievements can be obtained on or offline, and may be easier online, but one is specifically for Xbox Live versus matching.

I didn't think this game could get better, but it did. All the good stuff from before came back, but they did fans a few solids this time around as well.

First and foremost, which you've probably heard about, is the exportation of the first game's songs off that disc for use in this one. It eats a gig and a half of drive space, but for whatever reason, I found I'd downloaded that much garbage in the form of Tetris Evolution skins. What the hell? In the end, my drive space came to about the same as what I had before exporting, after deleting all that.

Secondly, this time around, the solo tour is just like the multiplayer tour from the first, with gigs at different venues, the mystery and make-a-sets, and special themed sets for certain venues. No more slogging through the same songs over and over again while working through higher difficulties or different instruments, as progress is tied to your band instead of your characters. The other nice thing about this is that it gives bass players something to do in the solo campaign, instead of just hosing them like the first iteration did.

As for the characters? THEY CAN DO DIFFERENT STUFF NOW. The guy you created as a vocalist? He can pick up a guitar now if he feels like it. Your drummer can also be your guitarist if she needs a change of pace. So much less to keep track of now. Money pools are still character specific, but gained across all instruments, and again, all star/fan progress goes towards whatever band you've assigned the character to rather than just the character. HALLELUJAH LOVE THE LITTLE BABY JESUS THIS MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE.

I've only played a little bit, but the song list this time around is just as amazing as the first one was, and you can believe I peed myself a little when I suddenly fell into Journey's "Any Way You Want It" in a mystery set. The giddiness I felt when they dropped a Guitar Hero III pack featuring that song was nothing compared to being able to sing along.

If you care about music games at all you already have this. Good night and god bless.

Someone shoot me if I ever take this long a hiatus again; writing all this up took me about two hours, and I don't even feel like I put enough effort into a lot of it.

Proxy!

2008-09-14T23:17:00.001-04:00

Kudos to my friend Dave for lending me his backup system to use until my system is fixed. The GV project lives on! Time to fire up DiRT and see what's up.

Bound to happen sooner or later.

2008-09-09T17:33:00.003-04:00

MS is shipping me a coffin. At least the hard drive seems to be fine. I might actually have to review games on *gasp* other systems for a while. WHOA. This does mean I can finally get back to work on Mario Kart Wii and .hack, though. Que sera.

They will have a giant rumble.

2008-09-08T09:28:00.002-04:00

Got my new car, with a little more work involved than I thought. No, the free Arcade game did not make me buy the Yaris I got, at least I don't think it did. Her name is SOPHIA, a la Blaster Master, because I am a handjob. Anyway, catchup time, more elaborate than last time.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Achievements: 22 (18 offline for 880gs, 4 online for 120gs)

RTS has never been done all that well on consoles, but I'd say this is one of the first times they sort of got it right. Sort of. I think the key here is decent cursor scroll speed, though the way they handled the pop-up menus makes sense once you get used to them and to not having a mouse.

The story isn't much to write home about, being standard sci-fi shlock. To summarize the previous games in the series, which were on the PC: comet or other celestial object hits Earth, leaves behind weird glowy rock that starts infesting the planet, called Tiberium. Terrorist/cult group thinks it's the future and tries to get its hands on it to accelerate things, what organized government is left thinks it's a menace and works to stop its spread. Stuff blows up, fast forward to present game day, after a little while aliens who love this crap show up and things get nuts.

What's remarkable about the series is how they handle the storyline. Like some amazing '90s throwback, C&C3 is chock full of FULL MOTION VIDEO. That's right, kids, real actors playing characters on real sets, delivered straight to you on your lightning box! This is made doubly amazing by the fact that they almost exclusively got B-list actors, all of whom I love, to portray all the parts. Not five minutes into the storyline and you'll be squeeing over Michael Ironsides (Jester from Top Gun, among many, many other things) and whatserface who played Boomer on BSG.

It's as if they have this hotline straight to the SciFi Channel that they call whenever they're about to go into production and ask, "So, who's not starring in one of your amazingly terrible original movies/series in the next four or five months?" I love it.

The in-game graphics are sweet, too. Things have come quite a ways since the days of 486 monitors and sprite animations, and a neat feature in this one is the camera zoom and rotation, so you can peer in on just what your little mans are up to at any given point in the battle. Just don't do it too long, or else you'll miss out on all the rape coming at you from every other direction.

If you dig real-time strategy games and have been waiting for a decent one in this console generation, dude you've been waiting too long this game's been out since last year go go go now. If you don't dig them, then you're probably not interested. Also, if you still haven't played this, you'd best hurry because the sequel's already out and probably due for a review here soon.

The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Achievements: 50 (all offline, 1000gs)

I haven't seen the movie and it's been forever since I read the book, so I can't really say how true a translation the game is of the story. As a game itself, though, it's okay. Not great, but not terrible.

Made by Traveller's Tales, the same crew who gave us the Lego [Insert Franchise Here] games, gameplay's pretty similar to those. Third person view of X number of dudes relative to a given story mission (varies from two to four, though only up to two players), all with different abilities you'll need for clearing different aspects of the maps. Chapters are built much like lobbies were in Lego Star Wars, with different side missions you enter from a larger main area and respawning goodies every time you come back.

Other familiar mechanics return as well. Instead of Lego studs, you're collecting these metal fragments or some such, of different colors reflecting different values. Instead of improving a rating in a given level or allowing you to buy anything, however, they accumulate and eventually increase the strength of your life bar. The minikits have been replaced by treasure chests scattered throughout the various areas, and given that there's nothing to build, really, some just give you a pile of those shards I mentioned, while others just give you nothing besides counting towards your chest count.

All in all, it's not a very compelling game, but the achievements are easy enough that, like the other Tt games, it's a simple but tedious grind if you're looking for an easy 1000gs. Rent it, give yourself a week tops.

Dead Or Alive Xtreme 2
Achievements: 46 (all offline, 1000gs)

To be honest, I was not expecting much. I remember, vaguely, playing the first DOAX on the Xbox, and it was a tedious grind-o-rama with a side of jigglefest and decent volleyball mechanic. Round two is much the same, with a couple of new characters, a funnier intro sequence, and Wave Race 64.

I tried to grind this one. I really did. All the achievements are just accumulation based. GET EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. DO IT. Whatever. For some reason, I recall the suits available in the first one being much better designed than this batch, which just reduced my desire to go anywhere even more.

My breaking point was when, at one point where I'd left the game to idle, the eyecatch screen switched to a poolside video of Kasumi putzing around on this inflatable orca. At first she's just laying there in the sun, but then she starts moving around, eventually switching her position so she can ride the thing like a mechanical bull. Then things cut to this insipid crap with LeiFang prancing around on the beach while Hitomi was snapping away with a far-too-expensive camera. After about thirty shouts of, "Oh, come on!" I finally threw it back in the GameFly envelope and got it the hell out of my house.

In conclusion, you need to be really lonely or really drunk and have a lot of time to even bother with this tripe. Please kill me.

Def Jam: ICON
Achievements: 37 (29* offline for 685gs, 8 online for 315gs)
* - 15 of these are actually doable in online Ranked matches or Solo Hard matches.

Hoo man, I haven't played a Def Jam game since the first or second one. My, how things have changed. Summary? You're a rap producer who beats people up to get other people to sign to your label. I don't get it, either, but there've been worse fighting game premises out there. It's certainly a lot more clear cut than, say, Soul Calibur or Street Fighter.

One thing I really don't get is why the default setting for the HUD display is Off. No life bars, no other status indicators, just two dudes beating the crap out of each other on stylized backgrounds with clouds that roll through like a slideshow. Sure, the stages are kind of neat, but aren't that cool after the first or second time. What makes them even less memorable is that, rather than having different music for each stage, your character has a given "fight" song assigned to him, at least the characters you create, and that's all you hear EVERY DAMN TIME YOU FIGHT. Sure, you get more songs as you play through the Build A Label quest mode, but they're rather few and far between. Getting sick of the limited soundtrack is pretty much guaranteed. That might be why they give you an achievement for setting up your own playlist.

Gameplay itself isn't bad, though rather limited when it comes to movesets. There are four or five different combat styles, and there's a Mortal Kombat feel to the quick high, quick low, hard high, hard low button mapping, only without the abundance of specials, combos, and finishers. All the backgrounds have hazards, which get annoying at times as their hit recognition tends not to be the best.

There's also a button to activate turntables in a fight. I have no idea what this does, despite trying it every time I fought. Seems superfluous.

I'd say the worst part is that the gameplay is downright tedious. I had to go through nearly ten fights before I had any real money coming in and anything was actually happening in the story, and by then, I was pretty disinterested. All the fights were the same and I'd seen every stage at least three times, at least the stages they offered up to that point. Even playing a huge black dude with a fauxhawk and a crazy zig-zag chinstrap couldn't really redeem it for me.

Which reminds me, second place in the realm of failure goes to the character creation. There's a lot of customization available in the body type area, with stick-sliding and adjusting your build and even specific areas of your facial structure, but they really phoned in the hairstyles; all of them cut straight across the forehead, and there're maybe a dozen or so, and they all kind of suck. The clothing was all phoned in as well, as besides the wifebeaters, everything is a baggy sack with some logo mapped to identical, potato-sack models. Lame.

I liked this series better when it had actual rappers with distinct fighting styles just beating the crap out of each other. This turn is definitely one for the worse. Ugh.

Last week's XBLA offerings weren't bad, but they weren't remarkable for the most part, either. Here's that Pub Games nod I promised last time, too.

Shred Nebula
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 175gs, 1 online for 25gs)
Cost: 800 MS Points

Semi-open shooter a la that Genesis game with the caves that I can't remember the name of, with a dash of Asteroids when it comes to ship control. Button layout could've made more sense, but it looks cool and the first demo level was pretty fun. Wish there was much anything remarkable to say, but it's just another okay game. Worse purchases could be made.

Gin Rummy
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 140gs, 3 online for 60gs)
MS Points: 400

Yet another card game with something of a graphical overhaul, this time with a weird cameo silhouette aesthetic going on. Not bad, though, and thankfully only 400. Grab it if you're a casual card gamer, as it definitely tailors to its intended market.

Fable II Pub Games
Achievements: 12 (all offline* for 200gs)
MS Points: 800
* - I'm not sure if the two for playing/winning tournaments are online only. If they are, then there're 40 points between two online achievements.

In all honesty, I hated the first Fable and got really burned on Lionhead Studios because of Molyneux's bullshit factory leading up to it. If he'd said "This is what we'd like to do," rather than, "This is what we're going to do," things might have been different. But no, he had to be a shit, and thusly, fifty eggs were not eaten and the game was disappointingly narrow in scope. So, despite this being only loosely affiliated with the franchise, I was leery going in.

Let's just say I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not entirely sure if these games were all original, but if not, the veneer they spread on them to tie them in with the Fable II atmosphere is good enough that they may as well have been freshly created. I'm impressed, and both games I tried out were actually pretty fun. There seems to be a decent spread of both solitaire and competitive offerings, and while it's basically a glorified bar touchscreen, I dug this title.

Love that one of the achievements pretty much forces you to play Fable II (play a pub game with your Fable II character), too. Nice shameless tie-in, guys.

Pirates Vs Ninjas Dodgeball
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 95gs, 4 online for 105gs)
MS Points: 800

Hey, you remember when this game was announced, and the ninja/pirate rivalry was already fading into obscurity? Well, guess how little of a shit anyone gives about the two stereotypes now!

This game is way, way overdue in the relevance department, unless you're some weeaboo douchebag still clinging to the memes of 2003. Which is a shame, because it's a fun little dodgeball game. Instead of your standard set field, it's more freeform, with a set arena but no set sides to stay on, and thusly attacks can come from any direction and get intercepted by various environmental obstacles.

Oh, and just to infuriate me more, since I am still huddling in my All Your Base cave in the early '00s, the other two "races" offered? Robots and... zombies? I can kind of understand them as both being cultural obsessions, but where's the rivalry? Bugger zombies, where the hell are the Monkeys?

Way to drop the ball. I swear that wasn't a pun. I guess you should buy this, but don't expect me to be happy about it.

EA Sports Fantasy Football Live Score Tracker
Achievements: 12 (4 offline for 80gs, 8 online for 120gs)
MS Points: 80

I still don't understand Fantasy Football. My mind is kind of blown by the fact that all the achievements come from just logging in to the damn thing or tweaking some settings. I might grab this just for an easy 200.

Still need to do a writeup on Soul Calibur IV, but this batch took a lot out of me. I'll see what I can do tomorrow, since I have off from work.

Resurrection #2890572

2008-09-01T09:09:00.004-04:00

Okay, I'm back again. Took a little longer than I expected, but right after MAG finished up, they started another, slightly less awesome, event in PSU and I had to hit that. Expect a writeup on all that within the week. That, and I've been working more as of late, trying to set aside some money to downpay on a car.

Catchup reviews might be a bit truncated, since there's a lot to catch up on, but I'll do what I can.

College Hoops NCAA 2K7
Achievements: 49 (30 offline for 650gs, 19 online for 350gs)

Another basketball game. I think the only points I got were for spelling out "WIENERS" as my online play availability. 20 points for WIENERS. Good show.

Conflict: Denied Ops
Achievements: 44 (29 offline for 715gs, 15 online for 285gs)

The poor man's Army Of Two. AI was retarded and spent a good ten minutes running into easily avoided obstacles in a fairly open area while driving a vehicle. Dick. Got right up to the extraction point in the first level and died. Bugger that.

Crash Of The Titans
Achievements: 47 (all offline, 1000gs)

I'd never actually played a Crash Bandicoot game before this. I'm serious. I may have played a demo at some point back on the Playstation, but that's it. I actually kind of liked the whole on-rails platformer deal they have going on.

Achievement spread is fairly easy if a little grindy, but the grind never really got to me. I like that they state what you have to go back and do at the level clear screen to get whatever you may have missed, too. Looking forward to picking this up again and slamming the rest of it sometime.

Dark Messiah Of Might & Magic: Elements
Achievements: 49 (32 offline for 610gs, 17 online for 390gs)

I could have sworn I already reviewed this. Fun enough, but I could definitely stand to scream at the item placement for a while. I played 4/5 of the way through the first lengthy chapter, where stuff actually starts happening, thinking I'd gotten the key I needed to finish the level, and struggled through a bunch of drab, poorly-light-sourced hallways to get back to the door I needed to open.

OH HEY, YOU ONLY PICKED UP AND MOVED THE BODY NEXT TO THE KEY YOU NEEDED AND DID ALL THAT WANDERING FOR NOTHING.

Easy enough game to blow through, I guess, but I got really pissed and sent it back after that. Also, why does this game have online competitive multiplayer? I am confused.

Kung Fu Panda
Achievements: 39 (all offline, 1000gs)

Typical kids' game, in that it's relatively easy and all the achievements are mostly progress and scavenger hunt related. Fun enough, though, and the combat was pretty solid. My only reservation is that the little multiplayer minigames were all kind of stupid and not online in any fashion, and the Jack Black impersonator grates on one's nerves very quickly. Especially if you're not that much of a Jack Black fan.

Don't think I've been ignoring XBLA Wednesdays, either.

Bionic Commando Rearmed
Achievements 12 (all offline, 200gs)

Oh man, Bionic Commando was the bee's tits when I was a kid. Swing like Tarzan at will and kill Hitler? SIGN ME UP. I would've played this if it was just a port, honestly, but the graphic overhaul is kind of nice.

Controls took a little re-getting-used-to, and the directional control kind of SUCKS SO BAD, since it's not great with the stick and the d-pad on the 360 controller is trash. Still, meeeeeeeemories conned me into buying it the second it dropped, and it's totally worth it once you get the hang of things. Not a pun, that. I swear.

Braid
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)

Everyone's mooning about this being this great, moving game that's so deep and a huge puzzle and blah blah blah. I dunno, I only played the demo, and it was a neat little platformer. I might pony up the cash eventually, if only to see what the big deal is. I mean, come on, NPR even interviewed the guy who made it. Something's got to be up.

Castle Crashers
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 195gs, 4 online for 55gs)

I don't know why it took The Behemoth so long to crank this out, but it was so worth the wait. These guys can do no wrong, which you already know if you've played (and gotten raped by) Alien Hominid.

This time around, there's more of a classic beat 'em up thing going on, with some RPG elements thrown in to boost your characters and give you stuff to collect as you go on. Also, very tweaked in favor of the multiplayer experience, but that's not a bad thing at all in this case.

Sure, you can do a lot playing on your own, but that's a) boring and b) really hard. Get some friends. If you don't have some, make some. Then get this game.

Galaga Legions
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 gs)

This shit is crazy! It's like Galaga meets R-Type. Now you have these little pods you can deploy to help you out and shoot in different directions, which is pretty much key if you don't want to get obliterated. The nice thing is, the game tells you where enemies are likely to appear, so you can strategize in the brief second it gives you before they start popping up.

Things get crazy pretty fast, and you'll be throwing your satellites everywhere, but it's actually really fun. Recommended buy.

Coming soon: a Phantasy Star Online/Universe omnispective, and I wax poetic on the merits and further merits of Soul Calibur IV. "I'm gonna beat you naked, hee hee!" Oh, and a review of Fable II Pub Games, since I just realized I never got around to playing that demo.

Everyone makes mistakes.

2008-07-27T10:31:00.002-04:00

Three more games down, though I didn't do so much. I thought it might be a good idea to start playing games on the hardest difficulty if they had stackable difficulty clear achievements. Bad idea. Back to easy blitzes for completion achievements, and then going back for Hards. So here's what I've been playing.

Bully: Scholarship Edition
Achievements: 38 (all offline, 1000gs)

Welcome to Grand Theft Auto: Lite. Like its big brother series, Bully is your typical Rockstar sandbox game with way too much to do. It's fun, though, since you get to do it as a two-faced snot kid beating up other snot kids, with the lack of a fatal edge to things being a nice touch.

Definitely a grind whore, though. I eked out a whole bunch of achievements just by killing time in the first chapter, which wasn't so bad since progressing in the classes gives you bonuses you can use elsewhere. The one problem is you can't just sleep anytime you want; you have to wait until 7 PM rolls around, even if you've cleared any classes you might have to take for the rest of the day, which basically leaves you little more option than to just screw around, especially if you've cleared all the optional errand missions for that chapter.

Still, it's pretty fun, and I look forward to getting back to it when I have more time for it. Worth a playthrough, and the achievements aren't particularly difficult, just time-consuming.

The Darkness
Achievements: 50 (38 offline for 795gs, 12 online for 205gs)

There's multiplayer for this? Mmmkay. Yeah, I'm a little confused, too. However, the single-player game is pretty excellent. I remember being impressed by the demo, and I'm really glad this popped up from Gamefly, finally.

FPS with special-powers sort of game, with the powers combined pretty well with your shooty gameplay. You basically try to keep things dark so your powers will work, summon buddies to do dirty work or distract enemies for you, and proceed to make a mess of things. I'm down with this.

Achievements are progress based, with a fair amount of exploration and secret-based ones for nitpicky whores like myself, so remember to find all the phone numbers you can. I actually really liked the phone bonus/secret system, as it added a level of depth and gave the setting a bit more life. It was cute.

Still, didn't get so far since this was the first game I pulled that Hard playthrough nonsense on. Ugh. Play this game, but go easy at first so you can get the hang of it. The beginning, before you even have powers, is pretty unrelenting.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Achievements: 38 (24 offline for 600gs, 14 online for 400gs)

Oh man, the first game was sooo good, can this one live up to the legacy? And there's multiplayer here, too? WTF?

Actually, the multiplayer aspect seems pretty fun, since this time around, they really polished and upped the focus on the melee combat system. You must learn decent timing and combo techniques if you want to do well without dying, and I both appreciate and hate this fact.

Fortunately, they also provide a "Bloodshot Fight Club" mode where you can set things up to practice your combat with pretty much any melee weapons in the game against several types of enemies, and it's also a good place to grind out the specific kill type achievements. You also unlock new levels to do so in through completing the game, which is nice for variety's sake.

As for the single player campaign, you're back as Ethan Thomas, about a year after your getting kicked off the SCU and doing quite a number on that little orchard. Drunk and depressed, it looks like your buddy Vanhorn is back, your comrade Rosa's still working and lost some weight, and they're both looking for you because there are... problems.

A lot of the elements from the first game returned, including the forensics aspect and tools, which makes me happy; if you'd just been running around pummeling things this time around while the situation just got weirder, I'd be kind of disappointed. Instead of collecting dead birds and metal, however, you're tuning TVs for story-related info and breaking the sonic emitters that are attracting and killing the birds in the first place.

One other thing is that this game clearly came a long way from the visuals of the first. It's beautiful, for a crumbling city full of posessed bums and monsters. Yeah, monsters. They've got claws. They're dicks. The bums are smarter and tougher now, too, which is why I mentioned you really need to learn how to fight.

If you dug the first Condemned, you need to play this. If you didn't play the first Condemned, you need to play that and then play this. There are no excuses. Go. Now.

As a heads up, I should mention that Sega is finally starting up the Phantasy Star Universe Maximum Attack G extension they promised on 8/1/08. What this means is a) if you have PSU, with the AotI expansion, you should be playing for the boosted experience and goodies out the wazoo, and b) this is the only damn thing I'm going to be playing for the three week's the extension is running, most likely, so it might get a bit quiet here. If you want to run with me, I'm most likely going to be playing as my main FO, Picklebutt, running C-grade runs to finish get the badges I need for the limited edition casting Mag, and then hitting higher grades for better loot and experience, as well as spell grinding. See you there!

Coming soon: Soul Calibur IV review, since I reserved the Limited Edition and have a sexy arcade stick coming next week.

Blockin' yo cock like a tank at Tiananmen.

2008-07-24T08:34:00.002-04:00

Oh man. Yesterday, I woke up at 3:30 AM, worked, came home, took a nap, and woke to a thunderstorm and a fried modem. Everything's cool now, though, so your XBLA blurbs are only slightly stale this week.

1942: Joint Strike
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 175gs, 2 online for 25gs)
Cost: 800 MS Points

I have to admit, I played my fair share of 1942 and 1943 in brick-and-mortar arcades as a kid, and the P-38 was my favorite plane for a while thanks to that. Not because of any love of aviation technology or WWII history, mind you, but because that joined tail thing it had going on was funky lookin'. Love it.

While I'm almost ready to be tired of these arcade rehashes popping up on XBLA, Capcom at least does a nice job of doing them well, as opposed to Atari and Namco who, for the most part, seem to just be coughing up ports with a spit polish.

For you young'ns, the whole idea behind the 194X series is that it's a top-down, vertical bullet hell with WWII-inspired planes and settings. I think it was the first one that was supposed to be set at the battle of Midway, though the events portrayed were a little... off. I only played the demo, so I'm not sure where this one is supposed to take place, but I flew over a (sweet-looking) volcano at one point in the first level, so I imagine it's somewhere in the Pacific.

This time around, you have a choice of three planes: the original P-38 Lightning, the DH-98 Mosquito, and the funny looking Japanese J7W1 Shinden. Dude, your wings are backwards, and it's Japanese, so of course I played as the Shinden.

As you fly along blowing things out of the sky, weapon powerups and medals drop for you to collect, the latter being something you need to collect for an achievement. Other achievements are obtained through high scores, playing as all the planes, and playing on the hardest difficulty. The online ones are just for rocking some co-op, which I think is a nice addition.

All in all, it's as solid a successor to its franchise as Commando 3, and I suggest you pick this one up as well, despite the lack of a SFIITHDR (long acronyms much?) beta with this one, so far as I know.

Go! Go! Break Steady
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 125gs, 4 online for 75gs)
Cost: 800 MS Points

Not a sequel to Go! Go! Hypergrind, as much as I would love one. Rather, this one is more a bizarre marriage of elements from Zuma, Gitaroo Man, and Bust-A-Groove.

Yeah, that makes no sense in print, but it actually plays out pretty well. The game could best be described as a rhythm/puzzle game fusion. You're a break dancer, and while your character dances in the background, you get thrown alternating sets of button patterns and curves of "Beatniks," which are little heads of different colors. You have to fire new Beatniks into the mess to make sets of three and clear them, as well as setting up combos, and your results on that front determine what your next dance move (and the button pattern for it) will be. The more complex the move, the more difficult the approach of the button pattern is to follow; sometimes they'll come in a wave pattern, or even a spiral.

While I'm not the biggest fan of the visual style they went with, it's kind of urban and cute enough, so it's not a dealbreaker. There's a lot to keep track of, honestly, but it's just barely below the Too Damn Distracting mark. I suggest it if you're looking for another rhythm game to play, but otherwise you might as well pass.

So the other day, I finally got my hands on an underappreciated gem from the early days of the 360, Condemned. While not nearly as creepy as I had been led to anticipate, it was still a good ride.

Condemned: Criminal Origins
Achievements: 50 (all offline, 970gs)

Yeah, that's right. Only 970gs. No one knows why they didn't cram another 30-pointer in there or distribute those extra 30 amongst some other achievements, but whatever. This game is great.

In Condemned, you're an FBI agent who starts off the game investigating a serial murder case in a town that's apparently going to hell fast, and lucky for you, your career seems headed there just as quickly by the end of the first level. Framed for a crime you're quite certain you didn't commit and the weirdness level climbing rapidly through the roof, you set off to clear your name and, if possible, make the guy who screwed up your life pay.

I remember passing over this because I repeatedly keep making the mistake of thinking survival horror games are going to scare me, but once again, this one did not. It's freaky, sure, and there are some good surprise attack points throughout the game, but for the most part, it's just a solid story that makes it worth playing rather than any spook factor.

Another neat thing is that, besides the mostly melee-oriented combat in a first person world, there's also an element of investigation to things, since you're a detective of sorts and trying to find evidence to clear yourself. It's a nice little distraction from wondering how many hobos you're going to have to bludgeon to death around the next corner, and all the visuals for the investigation tools are neat, if in many cases completely impractical.

My only real complaint is that the game is fairly short, even if you're going in blind. Achievements are mostly of a catch-em-all, with things to collect in each level (dead birds and hunks of metal, oddly enough), with a few more for level completions and weapon usage. As a heads-up, let me recommend you play through the game the first time only hitting people with melee weapons, and switch up as often as you can; you get achievements for a total melee clear up through the second-to-last level, and for hitting enemies with every melee weapon ever. Even firearms count as melee weapons, since you can switch to melee mode with the right bumper and pistol-whip or whack them with the stock, though in both cases the weapons take damage and eventually break. There is an achievement for going and shooting enemies with every firearm as well, but you can just reload the library level and disarm hobos for most of the guns (.45, revolver, pump shotgun, submachine gun), and there's a sawed-off shotgun behind the desk on the second floor. Then you just keep going to the next level, the school and grab the rifle in the "hut" by the playground and finish the level to unlock your points.

Definitely play this, but make sure you rent or borrow it, even if it's cheap by now. The unlockable extras are neat, especially the original demo of the school level that they kept a lot of elements from, but not worth really keeping this around unless you're a collector.

Oh yeah, a heads-up for you contest types. They're running a Play & Win with Gears Of War for GoW2 stuff, including limited edition copies of the game and a custom Gears 360. It's one of those reg online or download-the-gamerpic contests, so it's easy to get in, and then you just have to play once every hour you get a chance to get entries in. That is a potential twenty-four entries a day, if you find a way not to sleep. It's running until July 27th, so hurry up!

Try not to suck any dick on the way to the parking lot!

2008-07-18T20:41:00.002-04:00

Atari manages to mangle yet another license. I almost think Uwe Boll's film based on this property was better than this pile of trash.

Alone In The Dark
Achievements: 49 (all offline, 1000gs)

Fuck this gaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.

Some of you may remember the original Alone In The Dark PC game. It was all right, and did wonders for starting up the 3D survival horror genre. Well, they done gone and screwed it all up.

Pretty much the only thing they got right with this mess was enforcing the rule that if you mess up, you dead. I'd be okay with this if the controls weren't poorly mapped, clunky, and the sort of action and gameplay they were going for still were not properly tuned to the console format at all.

Clunky camera doesn't help, as things try to be a little too cinematic. At certain points, I loved the idea, but mixing gameplay with what was going on was just not well thought out. Spacing things with a bit of in-game cutscening would not have hurt, and would have made me a lot happier with myself.

Speaking of the cinematic element, there's a sort of fast-forward/rewind option in the pause menu, in case you want to go back through scenes or skip ahead. I'm not sure why it's there, honestly. Sure, maybe you want to get past a part you're having a hard time with (which for some people would be the whole damn game), but for what? Skipping nukes your chances at completion achievements for a given chapter unless you go back and play straight through later, so for the story? HA!

The story sucks. You're an amnesiac (oh great) who runs into a priest who knows you, watches a bunch of random innocents die, bumps into a Primary Female Interest and learns some evil power that seems to operate like Tremors blown way out of proportion is looking for a rock the priest is wearing around his neck. That's what I got out of the first two chapters, anyway.

And what happens at the end of chapter two? A horrendously buggy driving sequence, wherein you either get sideswiped by a cop early on and you die, narrowly miss a turn and die, or get right near the end, driving through the front of a mall, having no idea where to go from there, and you die. It's bad enough that on top of this, in the sort of car-tutorial-y parking garage sequence, I had the delight of veering a bit to the left on a jump, clipping into the wall, and being trapped in a swooshy, slo-mo "excitement ooh you're in midair" effect with no way out. It was as if I were Schrödinger's cat, but subjected to terrible programming rather than a radioactive isotope or poison or whatever.

Until Atari deigns to pump out another 3D Godzilla fighter with some online play for the three-snitsky, I don't think we're talking. This is the kind of game I'll come back to when I can get a nice buzz on and I haven't been up since 3:30 in the freaking morning thanks to work.

Oh yeah, finally looked at some of the unveils from E3. Kind of digging how MS stole from Apple again, taking the gallery look from Leopard for their new Dashboard setup, and this ~~Mii60~~ Avatar thing looks neat, too. I totally called the idea of unlocking clothing and what have you via gameplay for them when I first saw them. Should be fun.

Time for a little blackcurrant tea and some .hack//GU to try and soothe the soul before bedtime.

This is not helping my recovery at all.

2008-07-18T18:23:00.002-04:00

Live Arcade pretty much shat the bed this week when it came to new games, and I discuss how bad I am at playing a virtual version of a sport I played poorly when I was eight. XBLA updates first, since they're going to be quick.

Coffeetime Crosswords
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
Cost: 800 MS Points

I'm a word nerd, so I should be all over this, but tell me something. WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD MAKE A CROSSWORD GAME WITHOUT ANY SORT OF KEYBOARD SUPPORT?! This is so not worth 800 points, but I might end up buying it anyway.

Double D Dodgeball
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 115gs, 4 online for 85gs)
Cost: 800 MS Points

Ugly "retro" styled dodgeball game with terrible control scheme. You'd think they'd map shooting to the A button or something, but no. It's on the right trigger. I pretty much had to get raped for a bit before I figured that out. To hell with this, I'll wait for Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball thx.

It might be worth mentioning here that we had a kid we called "Double D" in high school, which was short for "Dickless Doug."

EA Fantasy Football Live Draft Tracker
Achievements: 12 (All online? I dunno. 200gs)
Cost: 400 MS Points

I don't understand Fantasy Football at all. Here's hoping I can find some other people willing to throw away five bucks for what looks like it's a fairly easy 200gs. One day.

And now, sport.

College Hoops: NCAA 2K8
Achievements: 30 (26 offline for 870gs, 4 online for 130gs)

I played basketball as a kid, but didn't really get it beyond "ball goes in hoop, you get points." I don't get plays, I have trouble watching it, and I don't know any of the defensive or dribbling tricks or anything. Of course, I knew I was going to go far with this game.

You can get a handful of achievements just by going in and making your own chant, a crappy play, and doing the easiest training mission, as well as uploading your crappy starting roster. Woop de doo. Other than that, I'm pretty much hopeless. One of the nice things is that you can spam the offline achievements with two controllers and some settings tweaks, but I do not have the patience for that.

Be forewarned that there's one online achievement, for 20gs, that you pretty much can't get now - it was a qualification thing for an online tourney this past February. I thought that sort of thing violated the whole 1000gs out of the box thing, but whatever. Less than an hour in, and I'm shipping it back.

At least it looks fairly neat, and was kind of fun even though I was completely lost. Throwing your player into a random match right when you start up the game? NOT THE BEST IDEA.

GET IN THE CAR

2008-07-12T23:56:00.004-04:00

....

Cabela's Big Game Hunter (2008)
Achievements: 31 (all offline, 1000gs)
...but you could only carry 40 lbs back to the wagon.

Huntin' shit. That's it. I refuse to elaborate.

...okay, you want to know what it's like? Here:

Go to hell.

This is an easy 1000gs, just mind the log crossing bit in the first level. If you screw it up, you have to delete all the saves for whatever gamertag is going for that 5gs pain in the ass and try again. Best to just get everything else, then go back, delete everything, and start a new game to get it over and over until it unlocks.

Here's a walkthrough, don't waste your time otherwise. Took me less than five hours, and even then it was only that long because of the log thing and because cougars are assholes.

Sorry I'm pissy. It's frustrating that this game is a damn handout, but it's frustrating that perfection is such a pain, too. This never happened.

This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass.

2008-07-10T11:01:00.002-04:00

Bit of an impromptu hiatus as of late, as I was watching all of the new Doctor Who season 4 in as much of a marathon as could be mustered, around work and what have you. Great season, all in all, though I think seasons two and three were both stronger. A great way for Russell T. Davies to finish his run on the show, and they did a nice job of tying in the spinoff shows, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures (which I need to catch up with now). Definitely a recommend if you're into campy sci-fi. Sorry for being vague, but I don't want to spoil anything.

I think the first GV movie review will be popping up soon, as well; some OB people recently helped me track down (inadvertently) this old animated film I saw as a kid and have been trying to find for years. Gandahar (or as it was released here in the US, Light Years) is this weird piece by Rene Laloux where robots from the future are invading the planet Gandahar, and this guy and his companion and her dope alien titties are called upon to make it stop. It's been so long that I can't really remember more to synopsize with, so details and spoilage will come once I've watched it.

Anyway, on with the main matter at hand, some game catchup.

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Achievements: 37 (all offline, 1000 gs)
I am a (few) big m(a,e)n yes I am, and I've got a big gun.

Wow. Just... wow. Lives up to the hype. Yet another game where I really don't need to tell you it's awesome, because anyone who's anyone who can even mildly put up with FPS games has been urged into picking this up and been playing it for months.

In short, Infinity Ward's taken the fairly solid Call Of Duty series and finally managed to pull it out of the quagmire known as A Shit-Ton Of WWII Games, taking us to MODERN DAY instead. Despite the time transplant and the completely original scenario in this one, you still play the game from multiple fronts and for multiple nations, all stocked by people just as stereotypically whatever-ish as was common in the previous games. Don't get me wrong, I love that, in a sort of "hoo man, this is over the top," sort of way.

Honestly, I was expecting to just get dropped into the Iraq war, so the original story was a bit of a surprise, but it made sense pretty soon as I realized, "Oh yeah, the war in Iraq had no resolution," and would thus make for a pretty poor game, what with no end.

Achievement spread is typical for the FPS genre. Beat the chapters, beat 'em on hard, do specific events well. What surprised me is that none of them were for online play, despite that aspect being so rich. Ah well, makes getting 1000 a lot easier, so I'm not complaining.

Personally, I blew the whole minimum two hours' play time just trying to ace the "ship simulation" in the first level, out of perfectionism, but you know what? I enjoyed the entire time. A couple of bits where I was yelling at the screen, sure, but no controller throwing. It was still fun every time. That's why I sent it back relatively early; I know I need to buy this game and sit down with it to give it all the respect and time it deserves, which would totally bog down the process here.

Unless there's something horribly wrong with you, like there is with me, you need to own this game. Moving along, now.

Golf: Tee It Up!
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 160gs, 2 online for 40gs)
And you thought today's post title might imply a bowling game.

Activision, I'm not happy with you, given the current state of Guitar Hero. However, this little golf game of yours ain't so bad. With character models reminiscent of games like Hot Shots and a generally cute, fun atmosphere, it's nice to see 3D Ultra Minigolf get a "real" golf counterpart on Live Arcade.

There's not too much in the way of innovation in the world of golf games, to be honest. There are several realistic course runs, with future ones downloadable I imagine, some customizability for your avatar with unlockable outfit accessories, a click-click swing mechanic, and for whatever reason, bunnies. Mmmkay. Play is solid, things look nice, and the music is unobtrusive.

Your achievements are all for successful scoring/doing well on the various courses, save for a couple you get for just playing online, one for playing at all (1,000 swings), and a couple gimmick ones. Easy-ish 1,000, and if you've been waiting for a truer golf game, here you go.

Schizoid
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 165gs, 2 online for 35gs)
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

...I never would've expected to describe something as "Ikaruga meets Burnout."

That says it all, even though it makes no sense at first glance. If you're not familiar with Ikaruga, it's a shmup by Treasure (WOO!) where your ship switches between white and black to deal differently with similarly colored enemies onscreen. Well, in this little game, you're both colors. That is, you're red and blue, at the same time because you (or you and a friend) are two different ships.

The Burnout bit comes in given that you're not shooting anything; rather, you're just flying through enemies the same color as you and avoiding those of the opposite color. Stages are one-screen and strewn with obstacles like walls and whatnot, like many a classic-styled arcade game, which means things can get fairly crowded as the level number gets higher. All in all, the key is that you have to play with someone else to get very far, be it offline or online, or else develop some sort of dissocation between your two hands so your attention span can actually control two ships at once.

Your achievements come mostly from beating X number of levels, clearing certain things without dying, and exploring all the game modes. I always like promotion of all the game modes, as it shows a developer is proud of its work and wants you to try everything.

Worth a buy if you're into true arcade-y stuff or solid co-op gaming.

Next up in the queue are Bully: Scholarship Edition and Cabela's Big Game Hunter '08. I might be able to get to at least one of these, maybe both, by tonight, but probably won't do any writing up until tomorrow. Hopefully this copy of Bully works.

.hack//GU 3 is still amazing, even if story-wise, it's kind of dragging early on. I'm on the cusp of hitting up the PK tournament, but I've already taken champion rank and gotten most of the cards in the Crimson VS side game, if that's any indicator as to how much I've played. A little voice inside my head is whispering "Matsu. Cosplay," over and over since I've been getting in shape as of late, and I may stop ignoring it if he gets a little more interesting as a character. But yeah, this game, man. This game.

Another element of note is that the PS3 finally implemented its ~~ripoff~~ version of Achievements, called Trophies, and they're actually going to apply some to previously-released games. I have this bad feeling I might be extending the GV project to PS3 once I get through the alphabet of 360 games sometime early next year. Uh oh.

I really need to get an icon for that gs thing so I stop typing "gs." It would look so much better.

Don't give a damn 'cause I'm stone dead already.

2008-07-02T13:32:00.002-04:00

Bully: Scholarship Edition and Army Of Two showed up today, but Bully locks up just trying to load after the intro, so Army Of Two it is.

Army Of Two
Achievements: 47 (37 offline for 1045gs, 10 online for 205gs)
Asses to elbows.

Everyone has pretty much already played this who wanted to, so I'll try and keep it brief. You're two private military contractor dudes in masks with guns and the whole game is about teamwork, mostly drawing fire while the other moves in for the kill. You've got an AI partner or can work co-op, and you shoot your way through several military hotbeds in the wake of 9/11.

The first thirty minutes: Not bad, not bad at all. I got through the training mission on the regular difficulty despite not having really FPSed for a while, and everything's fairly fluid, gameplay and control wise. I've heard complaints that the AI occasionally stands there and gets shot up like a 'tard, but I've yet to encounter this problem.

Graphically, it's fairly pretty, and the cutscenes are amazing. The addition of the GPS system overlay is a neat idea, and integrates fairly well into gameplay.

The one thing I don't like so much is that the game relies a lot on replays, especially to make money to unlock new masks and guns (which nab you achievements), which sounds like it could become tedious, even with the two extra levels they added in DLC. It's nice to ensure people will keep playing your game, but I prefer that sort of thing come from quality, rewarding experiences rather than a carrot on a string.

All in all, though, it's a cute little game. I'll have fun with it. Worth a rent, and probably not too hard to grind through all 1250gs if you have the time.

XBLAW 7/2/08

2008-07-02T10:02:00.004-04:00

Hey, brochachos. Big catchup day for XBLA, all demo-based but I'll still be making Buy recommends despite my inability to purchase much right now.

Aces Of The Galaxy
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 190gs, 1 online for 10gs)
The poor man's Starfox.

Rails shooters! Woo! And it's very pretty, even though the visuals remind me a lot of the spacefleet and asteroid belt battles in Lego Star Wars. Very fun.

The only online achievement is playing a co-op match. Sounds easy enough. I'll say buy it, if only because I love blowing shit up.

Buku Sudoku
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 145gs, 3 online for 55gs)
GRIDS.

It's sudoku. That game where you put numbers in little boxes and try not to have the same in any given line or mini-grid. There's shitloads of books on this out there. It's a craze. You should know what this is.

Not a bad little representation of the puzzle, though. The music's a little elevatory, but other than that, it's fun if you're into Sudoku. I'm not sure how online competition works unless it's a speed run thing, but okay. Buy it if you like number puzzles. If not, avoid it entirely.

Elements Of Destruction
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 175gs, 2 online for 25gs)
Blow me like a tornado.

You're a guy who's been turned into a ball of energy that can take the form of different sorts of weather and natural disasters, and your mission is to fuck shit up before people can stop you. Awesome. Pretty simple controls, with different mechanics (stick twirling, button mashing, etc) for different Elements, so you don't get bored just hammering A all the time. Not all that complex, but fun enough. I'd say buy it.

Achievements are mostly story benchmark-based in offline mode, and then the two online ones are one for co-op, one for competitive play. Decent incentive to try everything. I should mention the "Time Bandit" achievement has the most disturbing pic I've seen in a while for one of these things:

Seriously, what the hell is going on here?

Frogger 2
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 150gs, 3 online for 50gs)
Feeling froggy? Wanna jump?

Ugh, I suck at Frogger. Naturally, I suck even more at Froggering while trying to collect ship parts, coins, music notes, balloons, and god only knows what else for some ugly looking alien thing that crashed in my pond.

The music is obnoxiously cutesy and makes me want to punch things, but the graphics are an okay update while keeping to the classic top-down view. Nothing real amazing about the achievements save for some catch-em-all stuff and them wanting you to play online a lot for one of them.

I guess if you're really into hopping, you can put on a custom soundtrack and have at it. Not worth 800 points, by any means.

Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
Wasn't this cool three years ago? Hoo man.

Lemmings with a license. You're the retarded moose and I guess you have to clear the way for the little bastards, or something. I dunno, I just burned them all to death like I thought I was supposed to and failed the trial mission.

Achievements come from doing everything. If you're really still into this crap or want to pay for 200gs, feel free to waste your money.

Roogoo
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 172gs, 2 online for 28gs)
D'awwwwwwww so kyooooooot.

Remember those pegboard toys you had as a kid? Where you would try to hammer the round peg into the square hole? Or am I just too old and kids these days have no idea what that phrase even means anymore?

Well, if you do have some idea what I'm talking about, that's what this game is, except the board is round now. Shapes drop, you rotate the boards as the shape falls through in order to get the shapes to the bottom board. Oh, and you're a teddy bear or something, but you yourself don't seem to come into play much save for standing on the bar that tells you when you fail.

Clearly a kid-oriented game, so I'm not sure why they implemented online multiplayer, but it's cute and some easy gamerscore. I'm not sure why they priced it at 800 points, save for the fact it looks really good.

Sealife Safari
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
It's ~~Pokémon~~ Fishyfish Snap.

Some crusty-looking dude has hired you to take pictures of fish. Which I'm kind of down with, given my National Geographic-loving, I-wanna-be-a-marine-biologist childhood. Seriously, though, it's totally Pokémon Snap underwater, up to and including little things you throw at fish to fuck with them and get different pictures and on-rails movement.

The fish and environments look cool, though. If you liked Snap, or just want a pretty chill game to relax to, you could spend your money on worse.

SOULCALIBUR
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 gs)
WELCOME BACK TO THE STAGE OF HISTORY (BITCH)

If you don't know about Soul Calibur, do yourself a favor right now. Stop reading, go up to the address bar in this window, go to eBay, and find yourself a Dreamcast and this game. I'm serious, and really hope the DC version was the one they ported for this. It's the best damn weapon-based fighting game series of all time, possibly the best 3D fighter series, and this is probably the best game in the series.

Should you not want to do that, just stop reading this blog forever, because I have no reason to talk to you again. BUY BUY BUY.

Ticket To Ride
Achievements: 15 (13 offline for 195gs, 2 online for 55gs)
A long train held up by page on page. A long reign held up by rage.

Based on the boardgame of the same name, this game is in the vein of Catan, in that you're trying to connect stations with continuous train routes and block your opponents from doing the same. Longest Route is totally a reward, which is why I love this crap (LONGEST ROOOOOAD). You're given specific routes to fill, however, and the more of those you fill, the better off you do.

Just a heads-up, the extra 50 gs are from an expansion that isn't available yet (TtR Europe), but I imagine will be out in a month or two. I say buy, but I love this game because it can get kind of cutthroat, even if cheating's pretty much impossible in the XBLA version.

Warlords
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 160gs, 2 online for 40gs)
I don't care if you guys need a Cleric.

Another Atari update with classic/evolved play modes, except this one, I've loved for ages. Finally, no more unlocking it as a secret on one of the Lunar discs on Playstation!

The idea is, you've got a fortress, and your a paddle blocking this ball from breaking things down. You can hold the ball briefly to change the attack angle more accurately, and in the evolved mode, now you can tilt for quicker direction shifts and a better element of surprise. Pretty straightforward, like these tend to be. I really need to stop using that as a descriptor.

Definitely worth 400 points, so unless you prefer your fun super-complex, pick it up posthaste.

Wits & Wagers
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 150gs, 3 online for 50gs)
Your intelligence is stupid.

So it's a quiz show, but your intelligence isn't all that matters. All participants pick an answer to the same question, and you bet on which answer you think is actually correct, so even if you don't know something, you can try to bluff people out or at least try and have a good eye for who knows their stuff. If you've ever played the board game Balderdash, it's reminiscent of that, but not just with words.

Or, if you've played the boardgame Wits & Wagers, it's exactly like that.

There's camera functionality included so you don't have to pick one of the myriad ugly faces for your character they threw in there, but instead of taking a shot of your head, it just takes a shot and throws it on a little TV with arms and legs. Kind of lame, but it could be worse.

Achievements reward you for playing the crap out of this game; you actually get points for answering all 700 questions available in the full title. Whoa. Not bad if you're into trivia, and were looking for something with questions on things other than movies.

Wolf Of The Battlefield: Commando 3
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 194gs, 1 online for 6gs)
Real men shoot from the hip.

Oooooh man. It's a shame most kids who pick this up nowadays are going to think, "Oh, it's like Assault Heroes." SHUT UP. ASSAULT HEROES IS LIKE THIS, PRICK! YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW. Capcom brings back the classic in style, with help from Backbone Entertainment, who've never done me wrong.

Not only is the gameplay just as fun as Commando ever was, but the stylized art is kind of cool, and there are little animations for every single menu. They really went all out with this. Granted, I expect said animations to start annoying the piss out of me eventually when I'm just trying to get things done and get back to playing, but who cares? SHINIES.

Of course, the other big selling point is that buying this apparently gets you in on the Street Fighter II HD Remix beta, which I guess is neat.

Who'm I kidding? HD Remix looks sick as hell. You probably ought to spend points on this.

Aaaand I think that means I'm caught up now. Whew. You might end up with a double post today since I've got stuff on the way from Gamefly again, but hey, nothing wrong with that. Just means I'm keeping up now.

Outside of the realm of the 360, I finally started up .hack//GU volume 3 yesterday, and it is, of course, love yet again. Dunno how long it's going to take me to finish it, since I'm holding off on playing it every day to keep the points whoring going, and I've been running a leveling mission between every story event, but so far things still fail to disappoint.

The funniest thing was walking in to my new @HOME, checking my Ryu Books, and OH LOOK ALL BUT THREE ARE MAXED OUT HERE HAVE SOME EXTRAS AND GO AWAY. My only complaint is that leveling in this one is kind of a bitch, but it got harder between 1 & 2 as well, so I expected it. Here's hoping the movie comes out over here.

Man Of Bravery

2008-06-27T19:24:00.003-04:00

We're finally back in business! Tweaked the play schedule yet again, no more one month exception for RPGs because I just don't have time, and I'm not renting any repeats until I'm through the entire alphabet. Blitz mode is on.

So anyway, here's the one game that was left after I sent a bunch of other stuff back.

Conan
Achievements: 49 (all offline, 1000 gs)

God Of War lite, but with the original, cinematic god of war. I'm down with this.

Thirty minutes in: Yeah, it feels like God Of War to me. I don't necessarily like comparing games simply to other games, but this time, it kind of fits. A hack & slash fest, Conan has similar boobage and crazy combo content, while a bit more toned down on the acrobatic side of things, and to some extent, the graphics.

Still, you're collecting "runes" (instead of orbs) to refill your health and gain experience to buy new moves, there's some weapon changing available to you on the fly, and as you progress through the game, you collect pieces of the armor you lose at the beginning to gain special powers. Nothing like GoW at all, right? Right.

Whatever, it's still pretty good fun, worth a rent, and the achievements are a fairly simple spread. Most of them come from killing in all the interesting ways you can find, including special parry moves, training up all your special moves, and throwing rocks at people or impaling them on spikes.

The best part is, two thirds of the combat achievements, if you still don't have them by that point, can be acquired in the second to last boss battle, since the boss generates an endless stream of wussier enemies for you to massacre. Woot!

I'll admit to FAQing it to make sure I don't miss any of the secret treasure chests or maidens (read: fanservice), but really? They haven't exactly been all that well hidden, and that's already two or three acts in. There's two early on in the exposition section that you need to grab that aren't in the best FAQ out there for the game, but just remember - living statues, head left and right real quick. Easy.

All in all, it's a decent choice if you've already played the entire God Of War series, or don't have access to a PS2 or PSP to do so. Not the best, but I had fun. Rent it, tear things apart.

Rest of my gaming night looks like it's going to be Beautiful Katamari, and some Mario Kart Wii since I still have unlocking to do. Peace out.

Half a year.

2008-06-05T13:31:00.002-04:00

I'm surprised I managed to stick with this, even half-assedly, for six months. Here's some data on what all is going to change around here, with my recent epiphanies.

You may have noticed the change in secondary tagline. That's because it's pretty appropriate for the shift of focus. I am definitely a "working" nerd, as I hold down two or three jobs, depending on how you look at it. Between my full-time job, a side job cooking at a bar, and helping maintain the grounds around here, things get busy. This doesn't even include keeping my own place in decent shape, which really hasn't been happening quite as much lately but I'm working on it.

As for the nerd thing? I want to cover more items, diversify a bit. The Godlike deal may have fallen through, but I've not dropped the idea of a podcast, so it would be nice to have more to talk about than just "Hur hur I got more points this week." The x360a podcast does that already, and it kind of sucks save for the British dude being funny.

So yeah, I'll probably start talking about my other dorky hobbies, like watching anime, reading manga, music geeking, cosplay, and dropping convention reports when I find time to go to them. I'd like to talk about other gaming systems a bit more, too.

The "play every 360 game" project is still on, if in need of a slight reboot and possible scaling back. Right now I've got Conan, Cars: Mater-National, and Chromehounds, and Bioshock's waiting for a finish. Reviews on the first two coming soon, as well as an XBLAW catchup day. Play Rain-Slick Precipice. Do it.

I don't know how on track I might manage to be over the next couple of weeks, since I'm headed out to Vegas next weekend, but we'll try to get back up and running here. Until I have time to post, here's some teasers on forthcoming features.

- Chris Dresses Like A Douche: The Road To AUSA
- For $90, You Too Can Have Nintendo Call You Fat
- BOOTYCON 2008 REPORT (possibly liveblogged if I can leech enough wireless and post from my DS)

It lives, if you can call this living.

2008-05-23T23:10:00.002-04:00

So where the hell have I been? Three words. Well, two words and a letter: Maximum Attack G.

MAG is this deal on Phantasy Star Universe, originally from the old Phantasy Star Online games, where you fight through a set batch of enemies with boosted experience gains and lots of special items to acquire. The nice thing this time around is that they set it on the planet from the old games, so it's a nice retro touch for those of us who've been at this a while.

So anyway, I just spent four weeks trying to get a floaty robot that looks like a retarded butterfly to follow me around and shoot lightning. I'd spend another two weeks if the extension they promised hadn't been delayed a month. I'll explain in a future post.

Meanwhile, I've also been working on tweaking the aims and goals of the site, so there might actually be worthwhile content in the nearish future. More to come as I actually have time to update rather than needing to go to bed two hours ago so I can get up ass early for work in the morning.

XBLAwhawhawhawhawhaw

2008-04-23T08:56:00.002-04:00

Time to play some catch-up, first with last week's Arcade offerings, and then this week's newest.

Battlezone
4/16/08, Atari
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 145gs, 3 online for 55gs)
Cost: 400 MP
I am the tank. Get in the fucking tank and die.

For those unfamiliar with the original, Battlezone is a first-person tank shooter, set on the moon or some such, with essentially endless enemies until you 'splode. While a pretty basic concept, it gets fun very quickly.

This is probably the first updated arcade title I've encountered whose original dual-stick control scheme translates really well to the twin analogs on a 360 controller. Robotron and Smash TV are examples of games that tried, but didn't quite pull it off. Gameplay on the whole hasn't been tweaked much from the original, save for the addition of online deathmatch and CTF modes, but if it ain't broke, et cetera.

As for the update, it was mostly graphical. I like the route they went, which was mostly just upgrading the wireframe look of the original for more detail's sake, and then filling objects with this sort of glowy color look, which maintains a level of minimalism while still looking fairly good in HD. The audio's barely changed, from what I noticed, which is great for nostalgia's sake.

The achievement list is straightforward, as arcade game updates' tend to be. High scores, blowing up X of Y, and doing well in multiplayer are where the bulk of your rewards will come from. Not the easiest 200gs, but at the same time, it doesn't seem mindnumbingly difficult.

All in all, it wouldn't hurt to plonk down 400 MP on one of the best arcade upgrades to date. Go for it.

Rocky and Bullwinkle
4/16/08, Microsoft
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200gs)
Cost: 800 MP
Jay Ward and Wario hooked up and had one ugly, ugly baby.

Conceptually, this game is kind of cute. You play through "episodes," compiled of different short segments like the original TV show, and can go back to replay shuffles of those segments as you unlock more shows.

In reality, however, ugh. The controls are okay for the most part, until you get hit with the camera-controlled games that use the Xbox Live Vision. I'm almost certain the camera controls are even clunkier than in Totemball, XBLA's ancient, first foray into camera-based gaming. The normally controlled games aren't that much less frustrating, and I ended up just quitting halfway through because I didn't want to deal with it.

I give the game some credit for maintaining a decent approximation of the Rocky & Bullwinkle feel and sound, though it looks really weird as crisp as it does in hi def. Where's the film grain? It just doesn't feel quite right if you were a fan of the original show, like I am. I may forgive some of this if they bring up chocolate pan dowdy, but this almost makes that godawful live action movie seem worth watching. Ward Studios really needs to be more careful where they throw this license.

Catch 'em all fest when it comes to achievements. Just do everything until you complete it 100%. You know, if you don't kill yourself first.

If you've got 800 MP to throw down just to grind out some more gamerscore and add a completed game notch to your belt, worse things could happen. No hurries, though, and you might as well delete it as soon as you're done milking it.

Lost Cities
4/23/08, Sierra Online
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 175gs, 2 online for 25gs)
Cost: 800 MP
Didn't I play this in Xenogears? Or at some drunken high school party?

Lost Cities is a card game based on the idea that you're exploring one of five colored sets of "ruins," which are represented by... uninteresting, broken up cards. You draw color-corresponding cards to play and further your exploration of (and thereby profit from) these cities, in the hopes that you make more money in the long run than your opponent.

LC plays well enough for a card game, and basically has a similar feel to other strategy tabletop games on XBLA, like Carcasonne and Catan. There's not much room to complain when all you have are mechanics for drawing and discarding cards.

Unfortunately, it seems like they really phoned in everything besides the ruleset, which I imagine already had a real life counterpart. It's not ugly by any means, but the interface is pretty boring. The guy on the main menu changing expressions with the different choices? Yeah, doesn't help that much. I guess the fact you can play against people with the Vision camera running is supposed to distract you from how dull everything is. One thing that really confuses me is why they reward you with unlockable art. Why couldn't you have just put this in the game, so I'd be visually compelled to play?

Oh, and remember how I said it's like Catan and Carcasonne in its basic feel? The music's similar to their fare as well - low-key and unobtrusive, which makes it just as unmemorable.

Style points and winning are the theme of the achievements, with a couple thrown in there to get you playing online multiplayer. I pray things get more interesting with someone to talk to, as what otherwise is an okay game is just going to drown in the sea of mediocrity.

Another no-rusher, but if you're into quick card games that involve a little strategy, and poker's not up your alley, it could be worth it.

Jumble

2008-04-22T12:12:00.002-04:00

Been slacking again, I know, but at this point it's due to some format overhauls and standardization. I find it hard to call something a pet project without putting some work into it, so I've finally been sitting down and thinking about where to go with things a bit more intensely. I'll have a doubleshot of XBLA stuff tomorrow, possibly in something vaguely resembling new the new format, as well as a bit on Cars: Mater-National.

Make a wish.

2008-04-13T20:03:00.002-04:00

Been busy as usual, but I still found time to pound out achievements and get work done on SSBB.

Just for the record, here's what I have left to do in Brawl, according to the challenge wall:

Baby Peach - Get 500 different trophies
Birdo - Clear All-Star on Hard
Blue Alloy - Beat 100 Man Brawl with all 35 characters
Cardboard Box - Beat Target Smash Level 4 in less than 32 seconds with any character
Crazy Hand - Beat Classic Mode on Intense with any character
Critical Hit - Beat All-Star Mode with Marth
Dark Cannon - Clear Boss Battles on Hard
Dyna Blade - Beat All-Star Mode on Very Hard with any character
Galleom (Tank Form) - Clear Boss Battles on Intense
Green Alloy - Beat 15-Minute Brawl with any character
Grey Fox - Clear Target Smash L5 with all characters
Jyk - Clear boss battles with 20 characters
Mewtwo - Clear All-Star on Intense
Musketeer Daltania - Clear Target Smash L4 with 10 characters.
Outset Link - Beat Target Smash Level 5 with 10 characters
Phyllis (AC:WW) - Clear All-Star on Normal
Porky Statue - Clear Boss Battles on Very Hard
Ray MK III - Beat Target Smash Level 3 in under 20 seconds with any character
Shadow Bugs - Beat Boss Mode on Normal
Striker Mario - Beat Classic on Very Hard
Subspace Gunship - Beat Boss Battles with 10 characters
Tabuu (Wings) - Clear Boss Battles with all characters.

Aside from that, it's just 1% in the Subspace Emissary, as well as a bunch of trophies from the critters there and a handful of randoms, and I will be 100%. Kind of disgusting, really. I have problems.

As for the Xboxen, here's what's been up. Belated XBLA update first.

Ikaruga
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 gs)

For those of you who missed it on the Dreamcast and/or Gamecube, Ikaruga is a great example of why shmups are sometimes called "bullet hell" games. This game will take your virginity, your anal virginity, your dog's anal virginity, and will then go back in time and take your mother's, grandmother's, and greatgrandmother's virginity and possibly end up as your great granddaddy in the process. Ikaruga hurts.

The idea of the game is that your ship can switch polarities between light (white) and dark (black). A given polarity can absorb damage of the same time, and does double damage to the opposite type, so it's mostly a matter of deciding to rape or not be raped.

The correct choice, in almost all cases, is not be raped. Trust me. Also it is very pretty, I recommend a download if you're into shooters.

As for what came in the mail after sending back the last batch...

Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War
Achievements: 18 (all offline, 1000 gs)

I'm not entirely sure what's up as I haven't actually played the campaign mode yet, just created a character, but I think it's a sort of RTS or tactics dealie. I'll come back with a more in-depth review once I actually play it, as I was busy grinding the next game I'm talking about. The backstory they lay down is tied well enough into the actual Hundred Years War, with a dash of "Hi I'm a merc," to avoid having to characterize actual people. Kind of an odd twist for Koei what with the Dynasty whatsitsfutzes but whatever.

Achievements look pretty easy to garner, as it sounds like I've mostly just got a lot of conquering to do. Take forts, get treasure, LOOK FOR BOOKS. Finish game do some extra stuff get two more books all right done.

Clive Barker's Jericho
Achievements: 43 (all offline, 1000 gs)

In a rather underfrightening title for something with Barker's name on it, Jericho is a squad-command FPS where everyone has neato magic powers. As for plot, you're running around this
ancient city through several time periods to stop God's first creation before mankind, the Firstborn, from getting out and wreaking havoc on humanity because it's jealous of what we were given.

While I dig the character designs, the rest of the aesthetic is kind of hokey, especially the cartoony, plastic-looking gore that festoons pretty much everything after the introduction. Also, the squad mechanic was a nice idea, save for that you're only going to use one character through most of the game once you can control her.

I'm serious. It's pretty obvious Black, the sniper dyke, is the only one worth playing once you look at the achievements. All of the killcount achievements, for splodey kills, headpops, and using her magic bullet? All her. All the time. The big guy, Delgado, comes in handy for taking down flying enemies with his dragon jont, but that's about it.

Easy 1000 all the way. Just beat the game on Hard, maybe go back on a few levels in case you died, though you can just reload last checkpoint if you do and still get the no incapacitation achievements. Once you're done, go to the Flesh level in the Sumeria block, pop the corpses once and take out the demon hanging up high above the main target, and then just go to town.

There are codes for the game that make life a lot easier, but the main one you might need if you're just doing this for gamerscore (which you will be, once you get tired of it really quickly) is the infinite ammo code, which is free and available fairly easily. Just google it, there's a bit of rigamarole as the different game discs have different codes that you need a number in one of the menus to unlock. Nothing too heinous, but it's how they locked things so you have to shell out $5.49 to get all of the codes if you really want them. Bite me, Codemasters.

Chromehounds
Achievements: 49 (8 offline for 160 gs, 41 online for 840 gs)

This was an awesome idea for an early-run game to get people more involved on Live and sell more Gold memberships. Somewhat believable mech war with a persistent online world featuring countries you're fighting for, allegiance changes, and heavy emphasis on squad tactics. The offline mode was great, too, with a solid story to explain what was going on and chapters giving you a run through all the different unit types and roles...

...but now, no one plays it, and since most of the achievements are online, you're pretty much SOL save for some of the deployment achievements. Maybe you can track down a group of people who still play, but I get the feeling it's unlikely, so I'm kind of hosed. I plan to see if I can do deploy/self-destruct tactics to eke a few more points out things, but yeah. Wow.

Oh, and another lovely element? The final story chapter is A HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS. I owned the game for a while and remember trying over and over and over, using guides, and getting pretty much nowhere. Not too sure if I'm going to bother going back to it. Ugh.

As a closing note, I've bumped up into the 20k gamerscore tier. Woohoo! I've been bitten by the PSU bug again, too! OH NOES.

Since the rock & roll.

2008-03-27T19:33:00.003-04:00

Yeah, been kind of update-free, I know. Between Brawl being awesome and waiting for new stuff to come from Gamefly, and a dead week on XBLA, there wasn't much to talk about anyway.

Rescinding that thing about playing through campaigns, I should add. A week is enough or I'll never finish the list once through, nevermind return visits.

Here's what came in, as well as fresh XBLA goodies, though.

TiQal
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 gs)

Tetris meets Lumines with BGM and aesthetic from Zuma. Meh.

Bee Movie Game
Achievements: 50 (all offline, 1000 gs)

Derivative minigames compiled to fill gaps between movie-inspired levels. Fun enough but not really engaging, but at least it looks a little better than most of the tie-ins THQ trots out ad nauseum. Easy points.

Blacksite: Area 51
Achievements: 44 (27 offline for 585 gs, 17 online for 415 gs)

Not bad, and not as cheesy as I had expected having played the original. I actually enjoy how they tried to tie things in with real-world events a bit. It's cute. Worth renting, though no one played it online even when it came out, so good luck getting those achievements.

Cabela's Trophy Bucks
Achievements: 31 (all offline, 1000 gs)

Of all the things to come back to after a hiatus, this was not what I wanted. A mildly polished take on the engine from that godawful Alaskan Adventures, this beast at least looks cleaner and did away with most of the excessive customization trappings. RPG elements do not do well in a game geared toward yokels.

Things move quickly in this one, which is good, because I don't have the patience for these stupid things anymore.

Okay, we're back.

2008-03-18T10:34:00.003-04:00

Primary Smash drive is done, and while I still poke at it every day, it's not my drug of choice anymore. So here's last week's XBLA titles, in short.

Bliss Island
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 gs)

I initially played this game while smashed on Saturday night, and thought, "This game is fucking ugly, and really dumb." I woke up, though playing it might have just been a dream, and tried it again. Still fucking ugly, still really dumb. It seems like they were shooting for an appeal factor with young gamers, but young gamers are still going to think it's pretty ugly, if not really dumb.

Looks like an easy 200, though, and it only costs 400 points. Tempting.

Brain Challenge
Achievements: 12 (9 offline for 140 gs, 3 online for 60 gs)

Again, I was smashed when I tried these, but I get the impression this is XBLA's answer to Big Brain Academy and the like. I do appreciate that the achievements seem to reward you for being smarter than your friends, especially the online ones, so I'll probably end up picking this up. Unlike Bliss Island, it was not fucking ugly, either.

LiveBrawlging

2008-03-09T00:20:00.013-05:00

12:02 AM - Game obtained.
12:16 AM - Home
12:20 AM - Wii system update off disc, rolled clocks forward.
1:21 AM - IT IS ON.
1:40 AM - Marth unlocked.
1:55 AM - Luigi unlocked.
2:12 AM - Remembered to get Brawl friend code - 0645-5417-1834
4:51 AM - 32% of Subspace Emissary completed. Damn, this is tedious, should've stuck to vs spamming. Event mode time.
5:36 AM - Gotta go to work. Boo.
3:45 PM - Unlocked Ness.
3:53 PM - Unlocked Snake.
4:12 PM - Unlocked all Stage Builder parts.
4:26 PM - Unlocked Falco.
4:37 PM - Der Komissar geht uhm.
4:52 PM - Lucario GET.
2:50 AM - A whole bunch of other stuff unlocked, Subspace Emissary finished AUGH.
2:54 AM - Wolf obtained.
3:11 AM - Toon Link, woo!
3:27 AM - Jigglypuff is in. All characters unlocked!
6:14 AM - Woke up after nodding off while trying to look through my stickers and trophies. All stages unlocked as well, so I guess it's down to the challenge wall. Brawlg over.

Rapid fire.

2008-03-08T22:05:00.002-05:00

Some quick updates since I've been MIA what with a trip to Vegas and all, and some time off from play to avoid burnout. Figured I'd bang these out quick before Smash Bros Brawl starts tonight and NEVER ENDS.

First things first, I've had a slight change of heart regarding format, and decided any Gamefly'd games will be played through to the culmination of their story mode, even if this surpasses the typical week-long limit. I figure I may actually be missing out in some cases. Exceptions wil be made for quick-points titles that are pretty crappy anyway, like Avatar.

Secondly, reviews are likely to be quick and condensed unless I can think of something to rave about, because there's only so much I can care about a lot of these piles. On with what I've been playing!

Call Of Duty 3
Achievements: 26 (17 offline for 600 gs, 9 online for 400 gs)

Your dudes look a little less like plastic army men than the last one, but things still aren't quite so realistic. The tanks look cooler, though, and I kind of appreciate the attempts to inject a little culture for the different nations.

One of these days, I'd like to see a war sim do away with automatic ammo and easy weapons scrounging, though. I want to rummage through the dead, occasionally get nonfunctioning munitions, and so forth. Sure, it'd be hell of depressing, but that's the point. It's war.

Cars
Achievements: 15 (all offline, 1000 gs)

Based on the Pixar movie I never watched. Seems cute, and I like the idea of splitting it between a limited mode for kids and a full mode for actual gamers, but I don't forsee even that being all the more difficult.

The "tilt" thing for easy cornering seems to leave no reason for powersliding, either, but whatever.

Beowulf
Achievements: 31 (all offline, 1000 gs)

The poor man's God Of War. Your character looks made of plastic, as do most of your Thanes, the control scheme's not the most intuitive, and this rhythm game shit they threw in there to "inspire your troops" is the biggest waste of time I've seen in a while.

Seems like an easy 1,000, though it might require a second playthrough to get a couple of things. Eh.

Rocketmen: Axis Of Evil
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 170 gs, 2 online for 30 gs)

Smash TV in space, with some RPG/upgrade elements to it. Seems pretty fun, can't wait to actually have money to buy the full version.

And that's it. Played a fair amount of Wipeout Pulse on the flights to and from Vegas, so I may give a rundown on that soon. Until then, look forward to my completely narcissistic Brawl unlock log, starting around 12 AM tonight.

Minus World

2008-02-22T09:44:00.002-05:00

In my rush to abbreviate my last post as much as possible, I completely forgot to mention this week's XBLA goods. Well, good, anyway.

n+
Achievements: 12 (8 offline for 130 gs, 4 online for 70 gs)

Given that I've been playing video games since I was four or five, there are times when describing a game in terms of its derivations occurs. While it's not my favorite style of reviewing, it certainly fits this game, because everything that is derivative is well-executed.

n+ pits you as a stick figure ninja up against peculiar environments, explosives, and a lot of turrety things in what could best be described as Super Mario Brothers 3: TECHNO REMIX OONCE OONCE OONCE OONCE. Between the boucy blocks that I couldn't help but picture bearing music notes, the greatly increased jumping power from running inertia, collecting coins left and right, and a dash of wall-jumping from Batman for the NES, this game was like a fusion of some of the best platformers of my youth.

The best part is, I'm not even a big fan of platformers. Paid for it after the first tutorial level, and I'm terribly curious as to what this online Survival Mode happens to be. Get it.

I think I'm lifting the impromptu hiatus I took from the other games I had floating around today, too. Since I'm going to Vegas next weekend, I figure I'll just play what I've got until then and send everything back, save for Bioshock if it doesn't get finished and whatever they send me to replace Avatar.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.

2008-02-20T14:41:00.003-05:00

I don't even care about Avatar, so this review will be quick.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth: The Most Pointlessly Long Title Ever
Achievements: 5 (all offline for 1000 gs)

Game inserted at 2:32 PM.
50 hits registered, all unchievements unlocked for 1000 points at 2:35 PM.

This game is kind of ugly, the voice acting weak, and there are no mouth animations. THQ still sucks.

You can choose Iga or Koga.

2008-02-18T12:04:00.004-05:00

I'm a few days late on this, but Assassin's Creed is here and is trés sweet.

Assassin's Creed
Achievements: 44 (all offline for 1000 gs)

I was mildly worried about this after hearing only tidbits about the puppetteering controls, thinking it was some overblown, confusing system to get specific results out of your action. Glad to see I was pleasantly surprised. I recall a lot of people showing disdain for the sci-fi sidestory running through things, but I'm digging it, and already starting to wonder where they could be going with things.

There's not much to say that hasn't been said by someone else already, so I'll just say play it. Sure, there's a lot of sidequesting and optional stuff, but this is definitely a world worth getting as much experience with as possible.

Since I've been busy and it's just those last two achievements, Bioshock's getting a time rule exemption since I figure I can finish it by Thursday, even though I should technically be dropping it in the mail today. I'd probably be farther along if I were sticking more religiously to the SAVE EVERYWHERE thing. The game still sucks me in the second time around, and I blew a good twenty minutes of progress last time thanks to a stupid death. Rrg.

CoD 2 is also on hold, but because the disc is messed up and keeps locking up my system. Not cool.

Another milestone strikes soon, too. Once Avatar gets here, I will have played all the retail games out to date beginning with the letter A! Finally, something that feels like progress.

Getting carded.

2008-02-14T16:04:00.002-05:00

Hefty update today. Call Of Duty 2 came in yesterday, plus XBLA goodies, plus I picked up Culdcept SAGA because it's a low-rent title and everyone's freaking out about it being hard to get, at least that I know. The copy I got was actually the last one they had at GameStop when I went to pick up Wipeout Pulse, so I guess they may be right about the scarcity.

Call Of Duty 2
Achievements: 13 (all offline, 1000 gs)
Online play: I'm pretty sure anyone who'd be playing this online has and is rocking out in CoD4 by now. Since none of the achievements require you to go online, I'm not going to bother checking.

I'll be honest, I've been a hard person to impress with military games. It's hard to care all that much about WWII now that it's been beaten to death nine ways from Sunday, nevermind how removed most gamers are from the events of the 1940s due to age alone. As impossible as it may sound, you can only kill so many Nazis before it gets boring, and I'm pretty sure I met my quota back in the days of Wolfenstein 3D*.

That being said, two missions in and I already really like this game. Infinity Ward stepped right up to the challenge of building games in hi def, because even for a first-run game on a new console generation, CoD still looks and sounds great. The control layout is stripped down to the bare minimum for a first person shooter, which does a lot for enhancing the feel of being in an actual war.

The achievements are all related to story mode completion, and the game's another potential 1000 in one run fest, if you're feeling daring and leap right into the hardest difficulty setting. Personally, outside of the occasional lucky/drunk murder streak in Halo, I'm terribly average when it comes to FPSes, so I'm running Easy to get a feel for things, then diving right into Fuck City to see what I can get before sending this back.

If you never got around to playing this, it won't harm you to do so. If nothing else, it's a nice reflection of how solid this series really is.

Commanders: Attack Of The Genos
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 195 gs, 1 online for 5 gs)

It's Advance Wars with a few cooler unit designs and much shittier character portraits. Not much else to say about it. I dug it well enough to buy it, but you're probably better off grabbing Days Of Ruin if you've got a DS.

Bitches really need to stop phoning it in on the online front with "win an online match" as their only online achievement. If you're going to implement multiplayer, you might as well give more incentive to play it, especially if your game's mediocre, right?

One other little nitpick I have is that, unlike a lot of games that'll tell you you unlocked something and ask you to get the full version to enable achievements, you have to replay the Tutorial level after buying the full game to get the Tutorial clear achievement despite getting an "unlock full version" prompt. Weak! Sure, it's easy, but it still feels like a waste of time.

Someone please tell me who Sierra Online's been blowing to be the only crew dropping games onto XBLA, too. They're okay games and all, but wtf, there've got to be other devo crews out there dying to get some exposure.

Discs Of Tron
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 155 gs, 2 online for 45 gs)

Classic arcade game = I suck at it, but I suck less at this one than the original Tron game. Simple dealie where you're throwing your disc at Sark and he's throwing his at you and you can bounce it off walls and move around to try and avoid getting hit.

Achievements are mostly for various sorts of style points moves, like winning without moving, winning without deflecting, going x amount of time without doing anything but dodging, and so forth.

Simple fun, but probably more worth it to fans of the arcade version than anyone else. The end.

Culdcept SAGA
Achievements: 50 (38 offline for 785 gs, 12 online for 215 gs)

This is a franchise I've been meaning to get into for a while, since I had friends pushing me to play the PS2 version(s?) back in the day. Now that there's online play and several people I know on Live that have the game, I'm so in.

The quickest way to describe the concept is Magic: The Gathering meets Monopoly. You take tiles of different elements by summoning creatures to them, and if an opponent lands on one of your tiles, they have to pay a toll unless they defeat the creature holding the place for you. Meanwhile you're trying to complete laps of the board and improve your standing to accumulate a given number of points before the opponent to win the match, and of course there are instant spells that can effect your player or the opponent, or bolster your creatures in a fight.

Character designs and graphics are neat, but the character voices and cop-out, mouth-flap speech animations aren't. It's pretty enough in general, and the soundtrack's okay, but I get the feeling I'm going to be hooking up my iPod for some relief from the generic RPG tunes soon enough.

One big caveat, though it could be because I'm new to this, is that long matches are loooong. It took me half an hour just to win on a 20-space square board in the introductory match. Be ready to sit down for a while if you're going to pick this up.

As for the achievement list, it looks like it's about 1/4 story, 1/4 style points for different sorts of match completion (one-color decks, specific related cards all out at once), 1/4 catch 'em all (cards, outfits for your dude, and objectives), and the online stuff (mostly match counts). A nice spread if I do say so myself, with appeal for all sorts of approaches while still sponsoring exploration of the entire game.

Coming soon: Gamefly actually sends me a game I'm looking forward to! Assassin's Creed is supposedly in the mail!

* - Defeating Master-D in Bionic Commando is the exception to the So Many Nazis rule. That never gets old.

BILLY... (Daddy, no!)

2008-02-12T01:04:00.000-05:00

Another blast from the past rolled in today. Not much I can say about it that hasn't been said, though.

BioShock
Achievements: 51 (all offline, 1100 gs)

This game's pretty much just amazing, and everyone should play it. While not quite all it was hyped up to be, it's still a solid experience, and something I recommend everyone play even if not for achievements. In summary, you end up in this underwater city after a plane crash and try to figure out why, with questions of morality and a few games of Pipe Dream along the way. I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilage, if that's even possible at this point.

In all honesty, you can get every achievement in one playthrough, so long as you play on hard and turn off vita-chambers (read: autosave). Just remember that the wrench rules, and you should enhance your abilities to make it rule even more when you can. Save like you would in a PC game, which is to say every five steps, or at least after any event or victory that seems remotely important. And if you want to make life easy, you can crank the brightness so you can see better, but that seriously kills a lot of the experience.

Personally, all I have left to do is to beat it on Hard and without vita-chambers, so I'm boosting the brightness to save me the hassle, but I already beat it once before, so nyah.

I was about to rescind some of the negativity I spewed re: Call Of Juarez in the last post, because the shooting stuff with Reverend Ray is fun, but then there were more platforming issues. Bugger that. Slightly more playable than my first impression but still annoying.

Got a day or two left to decide if I'm keeping Blue Dragon or not, since I've gotten a whole lot of nowhere in this first month but I do so like it. I probably will, given that the Rock Band guitar I was expecting to shell out for got pushed back to April. We'll see.

Poker in the rear.

2008-02-07T22:35:00.000-05:00

I would be a liar if I said this project wasn't starting to get to me. That double hit of fucking Cabela's was a blow, to say the least. But I will soldier on, and I think halting queue additions for a bit might get some better games to show up at my door. I think I have up through the letter E queued up so far, so I'll leave it at that until things clean themselves up a bit.

Anyway, Arcade freshness and another retail game in. Let's get down to business.

Poker Smash
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 185 gs, 1 online for 15 gs)

Shit's fun. Panel-de-Pon-style puzzler where you clear blocks by matching up three of a kind at the basest level, but since the pieces are playing cards, you can make full poker hands and get bigger and higher-scoring clears. Simple concept, solid execution, more fun than you might expect.

The achievement list mostly has to do with getting all the possible hands and different numbers of chains; the only offline thing is winning a match online. Simple enough, I imagine.

My big love in this game is the control scheme. Rather than having it so you swap cards between two positions with a button, you move the cursor with the left stick and the card selected with the right stick. A lot more intuitive, and it speeds up gameplay something fierce. Granted, I'm still confused as to why they disallowed vertical moves, but that does kind of add to the challenge, so I'm down with it all in all.

I bought this right off the bat, and between the fun gameplay, excellent setup (leaderboard ticker right at the bottom when you start whuuuut), and decent soundtrack, you might as well drop 800 points if you're into puzzlers.

Retail-wise, I recieved Call Of Juarez, which was either release-run or close to being just as old. That or I'm confusing it with Gun, since there was a surge of western-themed crap around the time of Oddworld: Stranger and whatnot.

Call Of Juarez
Achievements: 36 (26 for 745 gs, 10 for 255 gs)

You're a gundude looking for gold in the old west or something. I dunno. Seems simple enough. The thing is, none of the achievements sound like things you'd come across through normal gameplay, at least not offline.

Sure, I can see killing five dudes without reloading in multiplayer being entirely plausible, and not getting detected on a stealth mission? Kind of obvious. But shooting off hats in one chapter? Sure, I'll recant if someone says I need to be non-fatal or shoot hats in said chapter when I get to it, but really, that makes no sense. I think achievements are more fun if you have some you can get without checking the list first, because then people who aren't complete whores like me will play the game for the game's sake, before going back for more gamerscore.

I'll be honest, the gameplay's pretty frustrating. The first-person view is all HUD, with very seemingly out-of-scale representations of your weaponry when you're holding something, and just trying to flee town is already proving annoying, trying to swing gaps with just a whip. Thanks, Tron 2.0, for ruining the whole THOU SHALT NOT PUT STUPID PLATFORMING BULLSHIT IN AN FPS thing. Second swing in is already a crap shoot, and I'm wondering if I'll ever get to later chapters at this rate.

The dialogue, admittedly, isn't too bad, and graphically it's fine aside from the half-assed, two-frame ledge-climbing "animation," but you're not even going to hear the former unless you crank the volume, and even then, it's peppered with some unnecessary profanity that kind of kills the mood. If anything, I'd like it better if it were hokier.

Argh. If I can move on with the game, I might actually get some decent gs out of it, but I'm not holding my breath. Not a recommend to even play, to be honest.

ANTHRAX IN THE FACE

2008-02-04T20:59:00.000-05:00

Congratulations, Cabela's Alaskan Adventures - YOU ARE THE FIRST GAME I AM SENDING BACK EARLY IN A FIT OF RAGE. Seriously, this game is godawful. I'm like two feet from the end of a sled race and I break the sled? Even though I've been on the trail the whole time? Eat a fat cock! Go to butt! I do not have time to waste with your fickle triflings.

On the flipside, African Safari or whatever? Not so bad, even though I totally forgot how to change weapons and whatnot for a couple days. I'm down with this. I am good at shooting stupid animals when buying a fucking tent is not an issue.

Gamefly also got Burnout Revenge back today but I dunno what they sent me next. Whatevs. Watch it be another Cabela's.

IT'S COMIN' RIGHT FOR US.

2008-01-30T23:31:00.000-05:00

I guess it wasn't going to be that long before a relatively wtf-inspiring game came along. I swear, anyone checking out my gamercard this next week is going to wonder what the hell is wrong with me. Two games came today, so I'll do the rundown before I get on to XBLA sweetness.

Cabela's African Safari
Achievements: 30 (all offline for 1000 gs)

The fact that all the achievements are offline is of no surprise, given that if you are actually playing a hunting game for your own enjoyment, chances are you have few to no online friends to play with anyway.

That being said, it's not an entirely awful game, and is at the very least evidence that some turds can be polished with a modicum of success. There's a wide selection of unlockable areas and firearms as you progress through the game, and the game rewards and/or penalizes you based on what you're using for any given trophy; using an elephant gun on turtle doves is liable to get you yelled at, for instance. Of course, I imagine the ensuing spray of feathers is hilarious, so I will end up trying this eventually.

Still, it's just a hunting game. It basically comes down to a third person shooter against critters that don't have firearms to fuck up your shit. Things like lions aren't to be trifled with, however, as you learn as early on as the tutorial. Even with "Adrenaline Mode," which is basically just a panic button that slows down time so you can get a clear shot or two on something that's about to take your face off, chances are you're going to be heading back to the lodge to nurse your wounds.

As for the achievements, it seems they focused on unlocks and game mechanics here, as most of the gamerscore you recieve is obtained by playing all the different gametypes and killing things using your alternate fire modes, like the aforementioned adrenaline and "Hunter's Sense," which equates to popping pills before using the sniper rifle in Metal Gear Solid.

All in all, pretty fair and they keep you playing the game for a bit, so good on them.

Cabela's Alaskan Adventures
Achievements: 46 (all offline for 1000 gs)

Oh man. This, on the other hand... it's pretty much a port of the PS2 version of the game, and it's glaringly obvious. I've never even played the PS2 version, but daaaamn for a hi-def system, this shit is just pug-fugly. This would probably be a step up in realism, in all honesty:

Unlike the rains in Africa, this one's first person, giving you a lovely view of your fingerless man-claw grasping your rifley-looking thing most of the time. The HUD is a bit more rudimentary as well, which in some ways is a blessing (Dudes in the savannah get radar? What?), but is still bothersome at times. I still don't know what the green bar stretching across the compass is. I'm very confused.

That, and the game is a great deal more in-depth than its warmer, prettier brother. While there are once again firearms to collect, you also have to buy hunting outfits, and rations, and first aid kits, and license tags, and all sorts of crap. There are stats I presume you can boost, too, and on top of all the shooting there are three different kinds of fishing. Oh, and dogsledding. You think I'm joking?

Despite all this, the achievement list seems to have taken the route of nickel-and-diming you for finding new and tasty ways to piss off PETA. Achievements for every type of game shot or caught comprise a good portion of what you can acquire, with the rest being filled for beating challenges in the different difficulty levels. Shoot a polar bear (which is disgustingly easy)? 10 points! Catch some salmon? 5 points! Whee!

I have no idea how much I'm going to be able to milk either of these for, however, as something I've waited for quite some time now finally dropped in Arcade today. Oh, is it glorious.

Rez HD
Achievements: 12 (all offline, I think, for 200)

I'm not sure if the "local rankings" are online or for beating pre-set high scores yet; if they are, that makes the list 9 offline and 3 online. But whatever, screw the achievements. This game, man. This fucking game.

For those of you who never ran into Rez on the PS2 (or the Dreamcast, for that matter), its greatest notoriety is from it probably being the only console game to have ever come packaged with a vibrator.

Yes, a vibrator. Stop looking at me like that. There's a concept to all this, really.

The idea is, the game is supposed to be a synaesthetic experience. As you play the levels, which are tied in with the throbbing techno background music, your firing on the enemies and collecting items throughout this rails shooter affects the music. As you do better and progress, the feedback provided by the Trance Vibrator becomes more intense, thus immersing you more in the game through force feedback.

It's Tetsuya Mizuguchi. He's weird like that.

Anyway, they yanked the vibrator code from this release, so you can't plug it into the USB ports on your 360, but they may have done one better. You see, you can now vibrate up to three other controllers while you play, thus giving you triple the vibrator action.

Now, before you go shoving a pink wireless down your pants, let me point out that the most incredible experiences I had with the PS2 version involved placing the vibrator right on my spine, between the bottom of my shoulderblades. The pulsing goes up and down the spine and through a good part of the skeleton and... it's indescribable. Also, I should note I was pretty drunk both times I did this. But seriously, try it, it'll keep your controllers a little cleaner if nothing else.

Definitely a buy even at 800 points. I feel sorry for Chessmaster getting released today, too.

Down where it's wetter.

2008-01-26T17:29:00.000-05:00

I would have updated on Wednesday if I'd realized sooner they'd just made Undertow free and not uploaded any new games. Kind of a dick move, if you ask me, especially since they didn't really announce it on the dashboard itself. If it was in that Inside Xbox thing, well, I never read/watch that, so shut up.

I'd been meaning to get it anyway, so I'm kind of glad they picked this as the freebie.

Undertow
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 170 gs, 2 online for 30 gs)

Best way I can describe the game is a swimmy shooty strategy thing going on. Two teams on a given map have to try and take each others' command points and kill their doods as different types of undersea units, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. It's actually a really fun time, as simple as that sounds, and what little I've experienced of the story mode was kind of funny.

A lot of the offline achievements actually tie into the online ones, especially when it comes to the killcount achievements. Your kills are tracked across all modes, whether you win or lose, so getting 50,000 cumulative kills isn't nearly as terrifying as it sounds initially. Another one involves boosting every unit type to its third level, which again adds up between doing so in campaign and online, so it's more a payoff for exploring your options than something you feel compelled to do in one go.

Don't forget it's free, at least through 1/27, so go grab it now.

In a stroke of coincidence, given that I'm in love with its big brother Paradise, the latest game in the mail for me was Burnout Revenge. I rented this before so I've already got a bit of a save file established, but you get a retro review anyhow.

Burnout Revenge
Achievements: 36 (24 offline for 700 gs, 12 online for 300 gs)
Online play: Actually, I saw several friends of mine playing this while I was playing Burnout Paradise on release day, so who knows?

The game itself probably needs little explanation. You drive a car, you drive unsafely and mess up other cars to win events and get better cars. Mess up other cars in creative ways and with specific pieces of landscape and you get recognition for it. Very fun, very profanity-inducing.

I love the achievement list, but I hate the achievement list. Most of the offline ones are for full-perfecting different race levels and categories, which means a lot of work. However, that makes it feel like you actually DID achieve something, and helps you get better at the game. The online achievements are excellent for encouraging a sense of competition and community, but are also bound to hose anyone who's coming in late to the game. This was a release title or close to it, after all.

Still, it's not that hard to perfect-rank events, and I've found it's best to blow through what you can early on, then head back and start boosting your ratings in completed courses as soon as you hit a brick wall. Thusly, you improve and can go back to kick more ass. Everyone's a winner, especially when shit's blowing up.

Take me down to that GNR reference everyone else writing about this game has already made.

2008-01-23T00:56:00.000-05:00

Burnout Paradise is pretty sweet.

Burnout Paradise
Achievements: 50 (35 offline for 715 gs, 15 online for 285 gs)
Online Play: Seems to be pretty healthy, expect it to be robust for a while since it's a fresh game.

I don't know where to start with this game. Take the Burnout series and have it make babies with GTA and you've got Paradise. The learning curve is simple, the exploration is great, and there's just waaaay too much to do.

I played for ninety minutes once I got it home and only cleared 7% of everything. There are places I've revisited four or five times and found new stuff each time. I love this freaking game.

One thing that threw me early on is how to save and back out (because I never read the manual); if you hit RB once after pausing the game, you'll find the save/load option, as well as the place you're supposed to enter promo codes for unlockable cars. GameStop gypped me on the promo card with the code for the Steel Wheels car, but you can find it on the GameFAQs board easily enough. There are at least three codes that work, just make sure you include the spaces and capitalize. The store codes (walmart, gamestop, circuitcity, bestbuy), however, can be lower case and unspaced.

There may be more codes forthcoming, so I'll keep an eye out. Please take note that the PAL version has different codes because Europe has different store chains, so be careful if you go googling yourself.

I love the Vision functionality, and it doesn't bug me that it prompts you for new license photos after each challenge, at least not yet. For those of you without the camera, I think it subs your gamerpic for the photo, as that's what the PS3 version of the demo did for a friend of mine.

Another nice touch was giving the different car classes different applications of boost. Aggro cars get more by smashing stuff up, Speed cars can refill theirs by using a bar up without letting go (called a Burnout, string them together for bonus action), and so forth.

Agh. Agh. I want to fawn over this for hours but I need to work tomorrow, nevermind get in a little more time with the rental games I'm working on. BulletWitch is starting to grow on me, but that could be because I've just been milking the first stage for upgrade points so I can max everything out and cruise this bitch in just a few tries. Not that it's all that hard; I almost laughed aloud on the second stage when the game was telling me the huge Gigas dudes should have a weak point while I was already shooting the painfully obvious pulsating bulge on their chests. Thanks, in-game help!

Bomberman still kind of sucks, though. Bleh. Blue Dragon will probably rule after I stop grinding the Monster Fight x100 achievement.

Odds, ends.

2008-01-21T14:20:00.001-05:00

Internet radio on the PSP? Kind of neat. RSS Channel? Still pretty shitty. I know these are both old news, but I don't actually turn my PSP on much and figured I'd update for Wipeout Pulse coming out next month.

Apparently, you can grind the block breaking and bomb laying achievements offline in Bomberman: Act Zero, as I found last night. Might work for the kills, too, but I usually lose opponents to pressure blocks and I'm not actually that good, so I don't know.

Yeah, mission eight for Blazing Angels 2 is a bitch. I blew up pretty much everything doing damage to the Red Square, so why is it still taking damage?! Stupid game was supposed to go back today, but thanks to dead people, it ships back tomorrow.

Burnout Paradise drops this week and I'm shelling out for it, so expect a rundown on that in a couple of days, tops.

Let's talk about old friends.

2008-01-19T00:15:00.000-05:00

Saw this coming, but the latest two titles in my mailbox are both titles I once owned. While it's nice to have a headstart, I wasn't exactly looking forward to playing either again. But first, time to catch up with XBLA Wednesday.

Boogie Bunnies
Achievements: 12 (11 offline for 170 gs, 1 online for 30 gs)
MS Points cost: 800

It's a polished Snood where you can shoot from the sides as well. And the bunnies (which have replaced the faces, or the bubbles a la Puzzle Bobble/Bust A Move) dance from time to time. Eh. I get sucked up in these sort of games so I bought it, but I wouldn't recommend it off hand. Not much to say here, really.

As for the two mystery games, I get to return to the realms of wonder presented in BulletWitch and Bomberman: Act Zero. Argh. Argh argh argh argh. I'll try to be objective, and brief.

BulletWitch
Achievements: 14 (all offline, 1000 points)

Decent character design completely wasted on an over-the-shoulder shooter that is SLOW AS HELL. Seriously, even jumping forward all the time only speeds things up a little bit. Bitch needs more practical shoes. A lot of neat ideas, and stuff I like such as weapons customization and skill boosting, totally flushed down the toilet. This game hurts.

Achievements are for playing the game through on every difficulty, basically, if you can stand to do so, and maxing out all your weapons and stats. I really don't want to comment much more because it hurts to think about it, but if you must play this, get yourself the Secretary outfit from Marketplace. I think it's free, and it makes the main character even easier on the eyes.

Trauma. Ow. Ow.

Bomberman: Act Zero
Achievements: 50 (I don't feel like breaking these down, but I'm pretty sure some are online-only)

You will never get all 1,000 gs in this game because a) breaking 1,000,000 blocks is impossible unless you lobotomize yourself and have no desire to spend time doing anything but playing this game for a few months and b) anyone who might still play this online has moved on to Bomberman Live! in the Arcade or has killed themselves long before now.

To summarize the game, Hudson felt they should make Bomberman a little more edgy for the 360 crowd, and while not completely hideous on its own, the move pissed off pretty much every Bomberman fan ever. Combine with the crazy achievements (1,000,000 effing blocks, wtf), and you have a pretty good formula for turning away potential players.

Granted, I'll admit to having a bit of a soft spot for the game. I can play a purple Bomberman (or Bomberwoman), which is always a plus in my book, and despite the visual overhaul, it's still just Bomberman, which is not bad. I kind of like the switchable camera angles, too, but on the whole the game was just half baked. Oh well. Maybe I can grind a few more points out of it by next Friday.

By the way, I popped in Guitar Hero II the other day, and recommend anyone else who still has it do the same. So much better than III. SO MUCH BETTER. I missed you, baby. And found a bunch of content I downloaded but never played. Whoops!

One day, I will get better at wrapping these articles. This is not that day. By the way, Undertow will be the free XBLA game they're giving away for all the Live troubles. Which is fantastic, since everyone in their right mind already paid for the thing since it's a pretty sweet game. Luckily, I was poor that week and never got around to it, so free for me! Hooray!

On the other hand, I totally paid for Catan and they dropped that for free not long after, so I guess I just broke even. Dammit.

Luftwaffle.

2008-01-15T01:53:00.000-05:00

In some sort of divine karmic spite, the gods of gaming have decided to thrust upon me Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions Of WWII. Considering how thrilled I still am by the first game, you can tell I went in with lowered expectations.

Blazing Angels: Secret Missions Of WWII
Achievements: 50 (31 offline for 500 gs, 19 online for 500 gs)

Well, we all know how I looooove even splits of online/offline achievements. There's actually a pretty robust selection, from 270 points for a campaign clear to filling in all your little extra jooblies and exploring the game for the other 230. Online takes a similar approach by encouraging you to use multiple planes in different gametypes, and I like that.

As for the game itself... there was this LucasArts game on the PC and (eventually) Xbox that went by the name Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe. In case you don't remember this number, it basically involved flying a bunch of secret (made-up) and not-so-secret (based on real events) missions in all sorts of crazy planes, including a lot of experimental ones that never actually saw combat, if they even saw prototypes or otherwise flyable models.

Blazing Angels 2 is that game, minus the unlockable X-Wing and TIE Fighter, and with moderately better controls.

They cleaned up the control scheme quite a bit from the last one, having the sense to put the secondary fire button on the right bumper (which is right near the RIGHT TRIGGER AKA THE BUTTON THAT SHOOTS THINGS) as opposed to clicking the right stick, and shuffling a couple other things so that in general, the layout makes more sense without abandoning the essentials from the first game.

Things are prettier, of course, but not that much prettier, and the intermediate scenes between missions used to convey the story are pretty lame. As much as they were just scripted game footage in the first one, I kind of prefer it to the smeary comic book style retouched photos they used this time around.

Still, it feels like a more solid play this iteration, and dogfights are already a lot less frustrating. However, word on the street is that mission eight is already nigh-impossible, which is decidedly not a good sign when there are eighteen missions to clear. Or maybe nineteen, as I'm not sure if you get the War Hero achievement for clearing the game at the same time as the achievement for clearing mission eighteen, or if the last mission didn't get a numbered icon like the rest because of said War Hero.

We'll see how pissed off I get at it on Wednesday, since I have all day to foment my rage towards Ubisoft Romania given my day off.

Oh yeah, heads up for Rock Band people - Official Xbox Magazine's February '08 issue hits newsstands today (1/15), and the bonus disc comes with three exclusive tracks. The songs in question are Freezepop's "Sprode" (previously featured in Amplitude on the PS2), Bang Camaro's "Rock Revolution," and Count Zero's "Shake" (my personal favorite of the three). If nothing else, Sprode is a great money whore for you vocalists out there, since Liz Enthusiasm, as much as I love her, is not that hard to top in the singing department.

Sure, it'll set you back ten American dollars, but there's plenty of other content on the disc if you're interested, and it's not the worst bathroom reading I've had even if the magazine felt kind of crowded. To save you some time, the songs are in the Extra Content section, and I'm pretty sure you and your friends can pass the disc around like a common street whore if you all chip in your lunch money to buy it. And don't forget, more tracks on Xbox Live in the morning as well!

I really -am- sick und tired of tommies und yanks.

2008-01-14T02:25:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I was considering adjusting the playtime rules a bit, mostly to accomodate for some of the older games out there that have fewer achievements than you have fingers, because they give you one fat batch of gs for beating the story, and then the rest come from sidequests and replay stuff.

Blazing Angels shot that down very, very solidly. You see, you get to a certain point in the campaign, and you end up working on a mission called Top Secret. Top Secret is the first thing to have made me throw a controller in the span of a year, and the third or fourth thing to make me do it in my entire life.

The mission is as such. First, you have to kill a bunch of German planes and take out a couple of cruisers to make sure your buddy doesn't get sploded, so he can blow the entrance to a fjord. Then you have to fly the fjord.

Imagine, if you will, the Death Star trench run from Star Wars. Stationary guns firing at you, fighters dipping in behind you, or at least, behind your wingman. Now take the trench and twist it around a lot and throw in some blockage here and there, as well as the occasional small opening, not unlike a set of intestines. Congratulations, you have this fucking fjord. You're flying up the asshole of some ice giant and that asshole hates you very, very much.

Checkpoints are way too distantly spaced, the stationary guns might as well not be there for all the effect they have, and there's a fucking time limit so you have to fly obscenely fast and tight past walls that like to reach out and grab you (in other words, mediocre clipping settings). It's bad, I'm pissed, the one-week thing stays in effect.

Don't even get me started on Blitz: The League, either. My previous comments on the graphics? After watching a couple of the cinemas, I retract any positivity. Looks. Like. Ass. Tired of getting raped, I've decided to take a friend's suggestion (to someone else, but it's a good suggestion nonetheless) to go back and play some old (read: Genesis-era) Madden games to get a feel for how football actually works. Right now my understanding of the game is "passing rules, running drools," thanks to Tecmo Super Bowl.

On a nicer note, Blue Dragon. Hoo lawdy, Blue Dragon. I'm going to be honest, I played the demo when it hit Live, and I hated it. Well, it turns out it was just a terrible demo and a poor representation of the game, because Blue Dragon kind of rocks.

Blue Dragon
Achievements: 43 (all offline, duh - 1000 gs)

Seeing as how it's from Mr. Final Fantasy himself, Hironobu Sakaguchi, there are some ways in which you've played this game before. Bunch of rabblerousing youths set out to save their hometown from bad dudes, monsters, and robots. There's a girl tagging along. The music (by Mr. Final Fantasy Tunes, Nobuo Uematsu) is epic where required and fun where required. Been there, done that. But it's done so well that it's worth doing again.

My favorite aspect so far is that it's really brought back the TALK TO EVERYONE commandment of old-school RPGs in full force, even extending it to investigating every prominent inanimate feature on the screen. Why do this? Because in Blue Dragon, looking at random crap, even pebbles or dirt or broken machinery, can give you money, medals, or usable items. If you're like me, the guy who presses "A" against everything ever, this is your karmic reward.

I mentioned before that I was also considering tweaking the rules here for RPGs, since there are a lot of grinding and catch 'em all achievements in most of them. A month of playtime seems a good deal more reasonable than indefinite until finished, so I'm going with that instead. Cool? Cool. Gives one more time to enjoy a more expansive solo experience without having it fill a slot in the queue forever.

As I was saying.

2008-01-10T22:53:00.000-05:00

Bionicle Heroes is 100% done, and it didn't hurt too bad at all. Despite my corrupted save issue, which I found out is not a unique occurance but is pretty rare, I managed to rally and destroy that game.

It turns out the thing I was doing when my save bugged, letting the game run in a certain place with the fire button rubberbanded to pile up kill counts and money, is totally unnecessary. I managed to bag all but one of the kill count achievements and both money collections (2.5 and 5 million studs, respectively) in just two playthroughs. Unlike the Lego Star Wars stud achievements (both II and TSC), the money collecting is cumulative and not counter-based, so you can still upgrade and buy secrets and it won't set you back.

The whole blitz all the levels, then upgrade abilities and clean up maneuver worked nicely, though I did stop to upgrade weapons and armor frequently, as it saves so much trouble and boosts our finish ratings since you won't lose masks as much, if at all.

If there was a tricky part, I'd have to say it was getting a Gold completion rating on the third bonus level, and even then it only took a half dozen tries, tops. 56 kills is an easy mark to reach with Nuparu, the black dude with the grenades, once his weapon's upgraded. Another delay came up when I forgot to get two of the gold canisters I needed from... Avak? The brown boss, down in the dungeon/dynamo/et cetera area; when he went to pull his switches, no enemies felt like coming out. A quick trip to the Dashboard and back into the game fixed that, though, so it seems like a minor bug.

Anyway, two new releases this past Wednesday, so let's get to it. No game availability for now since Live's being schizotypal and I really need to get to bed anyway.

Omega Five
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 gs)

I love shmups. I suck at dodging bullets. You'd think these two would cancel one another out, but no, I am a sucker and threw down money for this little number. Not disappointed at all, even though I haven't found time to even clear the first stage yet.

Achievements are run of the mill for this sort of thing; beat the missions, beat the game without dying with each character, do something (or do nothing) with the different characters' special moves. Simple. If you're good at this sort of thing, you could probably bang them all out in a couple of hours. I might be able to at least get the special move ones and the basic level clears. We'll see.

TRON
Achievements: 12 (10 offline for 185 gs, 2 online for 15 gs)

One of these days, I will sit down and train myself to play these old two-stick arcade ports on a controller. It's just not the same, and while it's more reasonable for, say, Smash TV (I played that back on the SNES anyway), I'm never going to get anywhere in TRON or Robotron if I stay this bad.

That being said, it's a true port. No "evolved" modes or any of that crap, which is pretty refreshing. The only thing that's new would probably be the online multiplayer.

Your two online achievements are one for scoring high in co-op, and one for winning three versus games. The rest is just clearing all the levels, and a few skill-based ones like dodging grid bugs or getting to the MCP in six shots. I can't play that level without muttering, "End of line," whenever I finish/die. Sorry.

Worth it if you like the classics and can deal with them on a controller, since it's only 400 points. I'm going to wait a bit, myself.

I've probably said it before, but where the hell is Rez?

Oh yeah, since I had to pound away at Bionicle due to the save game snafu, I'm giving Blitz and Blazing Angels an extra day or two to make up for time lost playing catchup. On its way is Blue Dragon, which is mostly grind-based achievements, and that has me wondering something: should I suspend the one week rule for RPGs because of the tendency towards grinding? I mean, a lot of them are an easy 1,000, it just takes time to pound away at them. I got a solid finish in Enchanted Arms that way, and that was totally Gamefly'd.

Chances are I'll do it, at least until the unlikely event arises where I'm working on four RPGs at once and things are getting stale here, fast. Are there even four RPGs for the 360?

Briefs.

2008-01-10T15:45:00.001-05:00

Full 1K'd Bionicle Heroes. Omega Five is rad, you should probably buy it. More forthcoming when I have some sleep in me and some time to write.

Murderdeathkill

2008-01-06T11:07:00.000-05:00

Corrupted save in Bionicle? Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? Dammit. I was 38% done, too. At least I have the whole week and most of the achievements already. I wonder if they'll repop if I start a new game. If not, I'll just blow through the story first and then worry about upgrading or whatever.

How a save corrupts from just playing the game is beyond me, though. It wasn't even being accessed at any time. Thanks, Eidos!

Double date.

2008-01-04T20:53:00.000-05:00

So of course, Blitz: The League and Blazing Angels: Squadrons Of WWII were probably sitting in my mailbox while I was making the last post, so you get two today.

Blazing Angels: Squadrons Of WWII
Achievements: 7 (all offline, 1000 gs)
Players Online: I saw one player match with a couple dudes sitting in it around 6:47 PM EST. No Ranked matches.

There's no reason for me to explain WWII to you. In this umpteenth iteration of the event, you're an American pilot helping out Britain, who joins up with some other American pilots because America, fuck yeah. One guy will distract fire from you, one guy helps you repair your plane, and one seems to throw extra attacks around or something. Whoopee.

It's not a bad little dogfighter, though. The bombing indicator took a little making sense of for me, but I appreciate the controls and love that there's a lock-on feature where you can keep your eyes on one opponent and move the plane around rather than trying to guess where the bastards are.

As you can guess from the small number, the achievements are ones you need to work for, with big payouts. One's for finishing the game, two you get for going back in and clearing everything perfectly, and there's some other stuff like getting every plane and rocking arcade mode with all of them once you have them all.

Seems labor intensive, we'll see how this week runs.

Blitz: The League
Achievements: 47 (38 offline for 811 gs, 9 online for 189 gs)
Players Online: None, as of 8:49 PM EST. I think she's dead, Jim. Find someone else to rent it to boost onliners.

Midway, king of arcadey sports games, responded to EA snatching up the NFL license by going a more imaginary route than 2K Games. In Blitz, you field a football team in a more brutal version of the game, where the language is fouler and damage is how things are done.

Am I wrong in thinking this was also released for the original Xbox and PS2? Not that it's ugly, it's just not all that pretty. The little "x-ray" shots of broken bones and torn tendons for injuries seem really campy, but the game itself is pretty average for early 360 games.

Unlike other football games I've had issues with, the controls for this are a lot more stripped-down to allow maximum carnage, and this helps the game move a bit faster as well, which I like.

However, I'm already a little pissed at the AI, just from playing through the tutorial stages. It's not that it's bad, it's just good when I don't need it to be. There are a couple of tasks that require specific results, like beating the crap out of a ball carrier or uber-sacking the QB, and things ended up taking a lot longer because my teammates would sack the QB before he could pass in the case of the former, and get to the QB before me in the latter. Very frustrating, especially when the game's taunting you with the same four voice clips in between every attempt.

Legodent Evil 4

2008-01-02T22:08:00.000-05:00

Lagging behind a bit, I know. Been a little under the weather lately. First, let's recap Xbox Live Wednesday.

Metal Slug 3
Achievements: 12 (all offline, 200 points)

For the handful of you who have no idea what Metal Slug is, it's essentially a spiritual successor to Contra. If you don't know what Contra is, I'm not sure you should be holding a controller. Ever. The Metal Slug series has always involved side-scrolling, mostly on-foot shooter action, and it's tough as balls, but also hilarious and fun, even moreso with a buddy along for the ride.

Engrishy as they may be, the achievements are pretty simple. Not easy, mind you, but simple. Just clear levels with "no miss" (not sure if that means saving all the hostages, not dying, or killing everything or what), a few things that seem story-related, grabbing 3,000,000 points (I have a bad feeling this may only be doable in Hard) and beating a boss as a zombie. Nothing mindbending or easter-eggy, which is good because you're going to need all the focus you can get to stay alive.

I say they're all offline, but there's one I definitely think would be easier with a second player, Live or otherwise; if you have one guy to pick up all the weapon upgrades, getting the No More Weapon achievement (10 gs) is probably cake. If the "no miss" counts for both players if you team up as well, definitely find a buddy to rock this with.

Mail call yesterday brought Bionicle Heroes into the fray, hence the title of today's post. Let me elaborate.

Bionicle Heroes
Achievements: 49 (all offline, 1000 points)

Traveler's Tales decided to milk their Lego license outside the realm of movie take-offs, blending a moderately confusing story-driven toy line (Bionicle - seriously, I just do not get it at all) with the play style of Resident Evil 4 (over the shoulder shooty, but with easier lock-on for the kids), and thus Bionicle Heroes was born.

Story, for what it matters, is that you crashland on some planet being over-run by evil critters, and the civilians think (perhaps correctly) that you're their savior. Commence rocking the planet.

Those of you familiar with the Lego Star Wars games should notice some familiar elements. Once again, you're collecting Lego bits from destroyed items and fallen foes as a form of currency and to charge a bar at the top of the screen. Rather than just being a ranking for when you clear the level, however, this bar needs to be full for you to activate certain constructions in order to progress.

You have six different heads with different weapons and abilities, amongst which you can freely switch during missions, though you only start off with one. Essentially, it boils down to missiles, shotgun, sniper, grenades, flamethrower, and water "flame"thrower or something. Each character is also upgradable in a shop similar to the Cantina bar in the LSW games, which has hints and bonus material for sale along with the ubgrades that have replaced the new character purchase area.

Just finishing all the levels will get you half the achievements (four levels each in six elemental-themed territories, plus final level), and the rest is just killing certain numbers of enemies, collecting a certain amount of cash, and eventually clearing everything 100%.

As with the other TT Lego games, this seems pretty well thought-out. Even the idle animations are funny, like when your character dozes off, unscrews his head to bump it around like a hackey sack or soccer ball, or yanks off his leg to scratch his back. The point of view is still a little jarring and not my favorite aspect, but the decent auto-aim kind of makes up for it, so it's not too bothersome in the end.

Good title for a fairly easy, if somewhat grindy, 1000 points. Hopefully I can actually find time to get them all in a week's time.

Rabbit, rabbit.

2008-01-01T18:51:00.000-05:00

Happy new year, brochitches. I'm ringing mine in with a game that's more or less two years old! Battlestations: Midway showed up on the 31st, and I found a few minutes to at least get started. Also, I remembered another feature for reviews I was going to implement, so it's in.

Battlestations: Midway
Achievements: 22 (16 single player for 740 points, 6 multiplayer for 260 points)

Online Match Availability: Scant, but existent. It only took about thirty seconds each to find a list of six player matches and two ranked matches at 7:20 PM EST. I assume this is something of a prime time for XBLers, at least on the east coast, since it's after dinner and homework might be done by then. A couple of the player matches even happened to be almost full! Looks like there're at least a handful of people still playing the game, even if you can't find someone you know to play.

Oh look, WWII. There's not a glut of these games or anything. In all honesty, though, I do like what Eidos was trying to do here, giving you the chance to control the primary vehicle types in a mainly naval battle. Definitely cool, I love naval tactics.

The execution, however? All of the controls for everything feel weird. They make some sense, but not enough. Whoever chose where to map buttons should be shot, because there is nothing intuitive about the layout, and only so much you can do to fix it in the options.

The graphics are all right, for early run 360 games, but fairly generic. Not wowed, not too disappointed. The soundtrack is appropriately military in nature and fits well enough, I guess.

After playing through the tutorials (free 40 points right there) and the first campaign mission, I can't say it's too terribly engaging a game. There's a bit of bollocks patriotism to it that bugs me, even though the game supposedly rolled out of Eidos' Hungary studio, and it's just not that interesting. The main character, whom I guess is supposed to be you, is just another meathead to me, and the game itself just doesn't scream "Play me!"

Sure, the training sessions showed me all this neat stuff I can do with tactical maps and hands-on control and all this other nonsense, but the first mission, at least, pretty much just yanked me from a PT boat to a dogfight without implementing even the slightest bit of that, save for a weapons change to take out a sub with said boat, so I'm left sitting there saying, "Uh, thanks for the help, then?"

I've got some hope things improve and get more hands-on as the game progresses, but I don't know if it's very well-founded hope at all. That dogfighting I mentioned? IT SUCKS. Coming out of Ace Combat 6 may have spoiled me, sure, but dammit, I died more times crashing into the ocean than I did any other way so far. And I didn't die at all in the PT boat. Argh.

Anyway, I'm still willing put in some effort, since who knows when anything else will get here given the holidays delaying mail again, and a lot of the achievements are fairly straightforward, like campaign completion, challeng completion, completion on certain difficulties, kill counts, and using certain vehicles. I honestly would have liked a little ground pounding just to round things out, but que sera.

Oh yeah, Spongebob is DONE. 200/200, bitches. The most difficult achievement would have to be the "complete quest mode with every character" one, since they don't make it clear that you have to finish every level with every character. There's an achievement for "completing quest mode" that you get after clearing one level, which is where the confusion lies.

My suggestion is just plow through with one character first for all the bronze medals (which you need on your path to the All Gold Medals achievement), then another for silvers, and finally one for golds, so you just have two characters left and no medal worries. Those last two will also help you prep for the time trials, after doing all the quest mode stuff, the only time trial I had any trouble with was Atlantis 3, and even that trouble was just stupid luck or poor judgment on my part. Licked it on the third or fourth try, regardless. And it's off my HD already, to make room for good things.

Good things like the new Rock Band content! Three songs, individually priced this week. They managed to cough up the only Skynyrd song I actually enjoy, a solid Rush tune, and Hard To Handle. MUCHAS GRACIAS. It's still no Jawbreaker, but I'll probably be campaigning for that even after they've moved on to things like Synthpop Band, Hard Listening Band, and Funk Band. The latter, of course, featuring a 72-port USB hub, peripherals for an entire brass section, and the house from PCU as an unlockable gig. Even naked guy shows up! Nice butt!

Hope anyone reading this starts off 2008 well enough, and is ready for when nothing else matters in three weeks, since Burnout Paradise is on the way.

Harshing my mellow.

2007-12-28T23:18:00.000-05:00

The holiday does a nice time of tearing my time to shreds, which is just great when I'm trying to tackle several time-intensive games all at once. Bleh.

In the case of Armored Core 4, it's the depth of customizability and the need to implement that to truly succeed that's killing me. Battlefield 2 gets better every time I play, even when I lose, but getting into a groove took me a while, and the single player campaign doesn't hurt from memorizing spawn points. Amped 3 went back today, but it's also pretty workworthy, given that there are a whole butt-ton of challenges on each of, what, six mountains?

Good times with all, regardless. Apparently, America's Army finally got back and Battlestations: Midway should be in transit, but I don't expect that until Monday.

Should be able to polish off Spongebob tomorrow, sometime before or after dinner with the family. Whee. Goodnight.

Phase 2: ????

2007-12-26T21:26:00.000-05:00

Boxing Day? Screw that. Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday is where it's at!

Slim pickings this week, as besides another Bomb Up Pack for Bomberman Live (which you should have if you don't already), there's just SpongeBob Squarepants: Underpants Slam. In all honesty, this sounds like a softcore porn title with awkward foam rubber costumes involved, but the game actually isn't too bad.

SpongeBob Squarepants: Underpants Slam!
Achievements: 12 (9 offline, 3 multiplayer on- or offline)

Pretty straightforward little game, which makes sense since it's SpongeBob. You pick a character and collect underpants. In quest mode, you have to get 99 to clear a level, with time increases as you collect more or beat more enemies. Time trial, you have a set limit to find all 99, and then there's a couple of multiplayer modes which are basically the same, though one has a Tag function that keeps one person from collecting until they hit someone else.

Almost all of the achievements can be obtained without even thinking, as they're based on stuff you're going to do normally as you play, like using your super move a certain number of times or falling off the stage. It's pretty much a handout for 800 points, but it's cute and if you've got friends or relatives who are into SpongeBob, especially wee ones, it's not a bad thing to have around if they end up visiting.

Super fighting robots.

2007-12-24T21:45:00.000-05:00

Both last night and today, there were some wee Christmas miracles, as I got some fresh ideas for a standardized format and two new games came to my door, respectively. These new ideas shall be pretty obvious as I discuss Armored Core 4 and Battlefield 2, as well as revisiting Amped 3 briefly.

Armored Core 4
Achievements: 39 (all offline)

Ah, Armored Core. It's been so long, since our brief sojourn on the Playstation so many years ago. Yeah, not even a "2" there; it's been a long time since the rock and roll, and popping this in was kind of like revisiting an old lover. A bit bittersweet, and you're honestly probably a bit better for having moved on, but pleasant nonetheless.

It was kind of nice to see the old formula still works as well/ill as it used to, given what little I remember hearing about the change in direction they took with the PSP title a while back. Controls felt a bit stiff but not inappropriately or problematically so; fitting for mecha I consider fairly lumbering compared to the fare in, say, Full Metal Panic or Gunbuster. Gameplay's pretty simple - you blow stuff up, as per missions set out by whoever's hired you as a merc. As you progress, you get access to more weapons and schematics to change/upgrade your NEXT unit (the mech), for more fun, efficient, and/or mission appropriate splodey.

I found it kind of odd that a game released this year still managed to have 100% of its achievements obtainable offline, given that I'm pretty sure I saw an online mode while I was poking around, but hey, I'm not complaining.

Looks like you can bang out an easy 330 just by clearing the campaign the first time through, and the rest come from boosting your overall rating and clearing things again on a harder difficulty, with points coming from individual missions as well as chapters when you go the hard way. 430 points come from completing "data packs," but since I've only wet my toes at this point, I'm not sure if that's along the lines of the mission records in Ace Combat you get for shooting down elite pilots, or if they're simulations like the VR missions in Metal Gear Solid where you have to face specific targets. We'll see.

In all honesty, I estimate nailing at least those 330, but probably little more in the given week, since it's been a while since I AC'd, and I don't recall being particularly excellent in the first place.

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
Achievements: 46 (23 offline, 23 online)

One of the first things that struck me about this game was the even split of achievements. Not only is it an even count of individual little pictures for your profile, but it's actually 500 points apiece for each mode. It really impresses me that they managed to cover both bases equally, as it's a lot fairer to those who can't afford (or trick mommy and daddy into) shelling out for a Gold account, while still giving those who have the cash and time to ~~deal with legions of dimwitted peckerheads~~ enjoy Xbox Live just as much incentive to play.

Some game types, like RPGs, don't really lend themselves to such a treatment, but it's often easy to tell which side of gameplay (if not both) were merely phoned in by a developer just by looking at the achievements.

That being said, the game also looks polished. The menus are stylized but readable, with two small windows right there at the start showing your campaign and online service records, at least in terms of rank and medals representing your achievements. That's another nice touch, having graphics in-game representing what you've done rather than just on your gamercard, but that may just be personal preference on my part. In-game is pretty cool, too, with a reasonable but useful HUD setup and a decent representation of what Kazakhstan looks like, I guess. I wouldn't know, I've never been there.

The whole point of the game is that NATO and the Chicoms are fighting over Kazakhstan for some reason, and since it's fairly current-day, all the weaponry and vehicular selection should seem at least remotely familiar to anyone who watches the news. Because of this, and despite an uncannily high number of bullets you can have in you before you keel over, the game is not particularly easy. Adding to the learning curve is the lack of any sort of tutorial or controller layout screen, at least not that I could find. One doesn't always get the instruction booklet with the game, you know, and it's not necessarily fun to be tapping madly at buttons to figure out what does what when you're under fire from a whole squad of Red Chinamen.

Despite that minor roadblock, and the fact I kind of ate it large in the second mission already, it's a fun game, and it has the best respawn mechanic I've ever seen. So long as you still have troops on the ground, you as the player sort of "possess" another unit rather than reappearing in some random place. On top of this, you can jump from person to person manually in the midst of battle, but they have to be in your line of sight; the symbol over a unit's head designating their roletype will change color when highlighted so you know where you're going.

In all honesty, I'm looking at maybe scraping out some of the regional and force-related campaign achievements and not much else. I've tried to do one in what's supposed to be the easiest level possible for it and can't really pull it off. Chances may improve given time to adjust to the controls and get a groove going, so we'll see.

Amped 3
Achievements: 15 (all offline, though you need a friend)

I'm not going to waste much time re-reviewing this, just commenting in line with the format tweaks. Amped 3 strikes me as kind of typical for an early-run 360 game, in that it's completely single-player save for some multiplayer challenges, with a whole crapload of things to do and unlock in order to keep the player playing until more games came out.

Granted, part of me still lives for that kind of thing, and I'm in love with the game in general, but in all honesty, it could've stood to have online multiplayer. I'm frankly surprised when any sports title is lacking in that department, honestly.

Still, they made 530/1000 points absolute cake to get, available through just clearing the story mode and screwing around a bit on your way through, but judging by the slow climb the second mountain's proving to be, I'm not sure I'll be able to get them all. There's no way I'm golding every challenge in a week, and I don't think I love the game enough to buy it and free up more time with it. Oh well.

I guess that's it for this installment, so here's hoping everyone who celebrates whatever has a good holiday. Don't drink anything I wouldn't, unless you really need it to put up with the family.

Gleaming the snowglobe.

2007-12-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

It's been quiet the past couple of days, I know. I happen to work in a field where these few days before Christmas are pretty much the biggest stab in the ass of the year. That, and I've been making cookies. You can't really fault a man for cookies.

America's Army left yesterday, without being popped back in a single time after that initial, slow torture. Go figure. But now it's Amped 3's time to shine, and it's corny as all get out!

No, really, it's pretty hokey. I'd never played either of the previous Amped games, but this is like 2005's attempt to be 2001 with all sorts of references to stuff from 1985-1993. While this does make it seem like the team had a lot of fun making the game, it gets old really, really fast. The character designs bug me a little, and I'd love to know what's up with that "recorded in a bathroom stall" feel to the voices. America's Army actually had the same problem, now that I think of it.

Gameplay-wise, this title delivers. It's not that much different from what I remember of the SSX series, but it's enough to make me think it's better. Maybe it's a difference in control sensitivity, maybe it's the butters, but I just like this better. The idea of a style bonus for not just waggling the stick around like a crazy person is nice, too.

What I really love about the title is the free-form nature of things. You have specific areas and goals to work on, but you get dropped off by the lift at set starting points near your main objective, and can explore or run some other goals on your way to the primary one. The music is also excellent, as I am all for starting the game to Manfred Mann's "Blinded By The Light." That, and I could have sworn I heard something that sounded a bit like KOMPRESSOR, but he is most certainly not in the artist list. Hmm.

Achievements seem straightforward enough, as they're mostly "play through the game," "do everything in the game," and "keep replaying the game 'til it bleeds," as seems to be especially typical of first-run 360 games.

While waiting for that to come, it was mostly DDR, since you get points just for playing the game normally, every ten songs. Only so long one can milk that, as I've only got four more achievements in that category, so I started poking at the challenge mode. I don't think this is going to be a full complete even though I keep the DDRs, kids - the last few brackets of challenges are insane. I don't think they actually tried playing them, kind of like their graphic design team had no idea SICK TRIBALS were long dead and no one would ever wear boots like that with half the custom male outfits. Ugh.

Sensible World Of Soccer happens to be fixed now, by the way, so I suggest anyone with the slightest appreciation for footie check it out. I'm still on the fence about buying it, but I need to actually try the fixed version before making a final decision.

Hope you chumps have a good holiday, if I somehow manage to not post anything else before then.

The hive mind demands you post drunk.

2007-12-21T00:45:00.000-05:00

So I said, "Okay!" I'm only a little buzzed, really.

Regardless, I figure I should mention I finally picked up Elite Beat Agents for the DS, and the song selection is far less horrible than I originally thought. Really, there were only two songs that bugged me at all, and you've got to admit that Sk8r Boi is at least a little catchy. Really, I pretty much shat myself with happiness when I found Highway Star, on the level with the pug trying to get home. I LOVE that song (thanks, Rock Band!).

I wonder if blogger knows its autosaving tends to bugger formatting something fierce. Ugh.

As for 360 stuff, I actually grabbed the demo version of Sensible World Of Soccer before they pulled it for being too buggy, and it's a fun little game. If they decide to work out that whole thing where it SIGNS YOU RIGHT THE HELL OUT OF LIVE when you start it, I could see it being worth money. Tempest, which also came out this week, doesn't seem to handle properly with the analog stick, so to hell with that. Late in the game or once they put out an Atari Live Arcade compilation, sure, but not now.

I think the biggest surprise was another batch of Beautiful Katamari downloads. I thought they were done with the first handful that came out, but apparently, there was still room on the map for a couple of floating pears. Superior. I hope to have some time to play these tomorrow, when I'm less ready to pass out.

Some new Rock Band tracks dropped as well, always fun. Same play conditions as the aforementioned Katamari levels. I am le tired.

Turns out I was a little off regarding DDR Universe 2's Quest Mode; the character you make seems to be usable as your avatar in regular gameplay, which is almost enough of an incentive to go back and buy all the outfits. Almost. Perhaps sometime when I've got a lot of time to kill and my brain has ceased functioning on an average level.

Amped 3 is on its way, supposedly, as well as a few other games once they realize I sent those back, too. Probably no new game talk until Monday, though, so any rambling here will remain brief through the weekend. Which is good, because work is probably going to suuuuuck.

An all-too-brief flirtation.

2007-12-18T22:29:00.000-05:00

Alas, my week with Ace Combat 6 must draw to a close after tonight. It was a beautiful time, spent aloft in the heavens, with splodey abounding. Chances are I'll actually purchase the game sometime in the near future, as while I suck at dogfighting, I would like some more time to learn not to suck at dogfighting. Fun stuff, this game, and I highly recommend.

Only blew through a few more mission achievements, I think, since the last update. I didn't even finish the campaign entirely, but my apartment doesn't clean itself. I don't clean it, either, but at least some dishes get done sometimes.

Anyway, I guess that leaves me to grind America's Army until something fresh shows up. Nng. Sensible World Of Soccer and Tempest hit Arcade tomorrow, so I'll at least be hitting those demos. Might find time to try the new Rock Band content as well. We'll see.

An aside.

2007-12-17T10:22:00.001-05:00

Sega Superstars Tennis coming out on all three systems? Yessssssssssss, to hell with the Wii version.

Big the Cat makes an appearance, albeit not as playable? YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!! MEAT SAUCE!

The Mighty Bomb Jack Halftime Show

2007-12-15T22:45:00.000-05:00

I never should have expected much from sports games when the pinnacle of my experience with them was Tecmo Super Bowl on the NES. First the world cup, and now All-Pro Football 2K8 hosin' me something fierce. Granted, it does not help one bit that the menu system is awkward and klunky, and this analog stick kicking nonsense doesn't make any sense to me.

For the record, the idea is that instead of fighting for the license to the NFL that EA snatched up, 2K Games managed to get rights to use individual players, and you can pick a bunch of pros from across the ages to build a unique team, with a bunch of generics to fill out the lineup. I love the idea of having Dan Marino, The Fridge, and Johnny Unitas all in the same lineup, but at more than a few pixels tall, it's just not happening.

You can still net 40 measly points right from the get-go. Right when you start up the game the first time, you're forced to create a team, and you get five when you're done. Don't go too crazy with customizing, though; as soon as you're done with setting up, go back into the menus and tweak something like a uniform option and save it - another five! Create a player, that's five again! Then just simulate a season and you'll get twenty-five more gamerscore without ever having to lift a finger.

Apparently, a lot of the other achievements are easy if a) you can deal with the controls and b) you have a second player handy to throw ill-advised passes or move his team out of the way or whatever, but I'm not too familiar with anyone who's local and into sports games, so whatever. Maybe I'll pick it up again in the future.

I will be honest, the customization options alone were so deep that I'm kind of enamored, and I'd hate to leave the Philadelphia Orcas hanging like this. It heads back with 2006 FWC today.

Now, another gem arrived yesterday, and I can't wait to tell you all about it, so you know to avoid it at any cost. You may have heard in passing of a US Army ~~propoganda slutmachine~~ simulation game known as America's Army? Well, there's a 360 iteration now, and it's ugly. This game was released as recently as October of this year, and yet Quake 4, which has been around forever, still makes this game look bad. Another problem I had was that the aiming controls are sticky, and while they're better than GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, it's not by all that much. Button layout's kind of silly, too; they could have used the bumpers for something instead of sticking everything on circular menus that eat precious trying-not-to-get shot time.

Oh, and the allied AI? Dumb as a brick. I failed plenty of missions, since they don't have checkpoints and it's all or nothing, because my "help" was standing behind my sitting "casualty" ass like I was some sort of cover, while nothing was shooting at them, perfectly content not to rub my balls or whatever it is you do when you "medic" someone in-game. I seriously cannot figure out that animation at all. It looks like an awkward goodbye on a first date. Oh, and they love to jump in front of your line of fire, especially nice when you're packing the machine gun and you were wondering how you were going to get rid of 1000 or so perfectly ~~good~~ useless Honor Points in one fell swoop.

Despite all of this, and the fact that the single-player mode is all of nine training sessions and eight stupid, stupid missions, two for each primary weapon, I soldiered through (PUNS!) and managed to clear most of said scant offline stuff in a few hours. It would have been less than a few hours, but the second grenadier mission is probably where I got most of those awkward "Hi, I'm cover now" moments.

Definitely blow through the training first, as you'll get a fistful of skill points for improving your meathead, which is the basis of several achievements. Then just hit up the Wargames missions, and you'll get points for every two you finish. The only one that's really tricky, per se, is the last sniper one, as there's a part where you've got to dash from cover to cover to get into position without being seen by enemy patrols, and you only get help from the rest of your team (they tell you when to move) for the first dash of four or five.

Once I get over my frustration from my first dash with the game, it's easy enough that it's worth milking for the offline stuff. You get gamerscore for clearing pairs of missions without any casualties, and that's easy enough to polish off along with the achievements for just finishing the missions themselves in Novice difficulty. I think a casualty occurs when you leave someone un-mediced for too long, as I mediced all the time and still got the first three (of four) no-casualty achievements. Also, the skill points achievements don't have to be left that way; you can fill a bar and save to unlock the Professional in one skill achievement, and then redistribute and save again to get Skilled in two or what have you. If anything, remember to redistribute just so you don't entirely suck when you're running the missions.

Oh yeah, one final, huge pet peeve about this game: I'm pretty sure your character has asthma. Nothing against people with asthma, BUT YOUR CHARACTER WILL PANT LIKE A DYING ANIMAL IF YOU DO
SO MUCH AS WALK.

I think the only game still hanging around from what was sent is Ace Combat 6, so I will elaborate a bit as to how I'm progressing, since I realize the first few posts here have been terribly underinformative. The simplest achievements here are gotten for clearing the missions. You can do this without really thinking too much in Easy mode, which is the route I took given that I haven't played an Ace Combat since the first or second in the series. You're going to have to play through it on Hard eventually to get all the planes available for purchase, however, so if you want to just dive right in, be my guest.

Speaking of buying planes, you should unlock the A-10 Thunderbolt for purchase around three or four missions in. Hopefully you've saved your money up to this point, because you seriously should buy this plane and its third special weapon, air-to-surface tracking missiles, as soon as they're available. They make ground-pounding missions SOOOOOO much easier, which makes sense given that's what A-10s are made to do, and you'll have several such missions right after you can get it.

The story does not get any less tedious as you go along, so just deal with it. Sorry. Word on the street is you get an F-14D available as soon as you beat the sixth mission, so I'm hunting for some Kenny Loggins right now to get my Danger Zone on.

Go dance with the angels IN THE DANGER ZONE

2007-12-15T01:39:00.000-05:00

Played a little Ace Combat 6, and it rules. Might actually end up buying this and all the extra planes at some point even though I'm not exactly great at flight sims. Everything is beautiful, the controls are easy to pick up, and it's fun even in campaign.

My only complaint would have to be that the story that ties the campaign together goes from depressing to hokey and annoying in the span of three or four cutscenes. Whatever, I like blowin' stuff up in the sky.

All Pro Football 2K8 came yesterday as well, and I'm building a team in that right now. Any game that starts off playing a remix of Tom Sawyer can't be all bad, right? Might be enough fun to prove worthwhile in a week's time. We'll see.

Not much to talk about because I'm really tired right now, work work work.

So it is Wednesday after all.

2007-12-12T22:32:00.000-05:00

Two new XBLA releases, Arkadian Warriors and GripShift. Arkadian Warriors is fun, reminds me of the old Gauntlet revivals but with only three character classes. Think neo-Gauntlet with a dash of Altered Beast and a lot of shopping. Decided to throw down moneys, already have 25 gamerscore from it.

GripShift, on the other hand? Feels like Monkey Ball with cars, and not in a good way. It's the game where you're in a car and you drive off the track and you die. Like Rainbow Road ad infinitum. Once you get to the Intermediate stages, anyway. The handling seemed really sticky and I couldn't tell much difference between on- and off-road driving even though there was supposed to be one. Maybe when I'm drunker and more solvent, I'll add this to the pile.

Ace Combat 6 showed up in the mail today but I kind of have to be at work at 4 in the morning and have other buggering about to do tomorrow so it'll have to wait for playtime once I get off. I have played the demo, so I'm really excited, but seriously, job without sleep really sucks. I'll see you all tomorrow.

XBLA Tuesday...

2007-12-11T22:22:00.001-05:00

...sucked for 12/11. HAY GUYZ WE LOWERED THE PRICE OF BANKSHOT BILLIARDS. Blow me, seriously. I was looking forward to the price drop and all, but I've also grown accustomed to new goodies each week, at least in demo form. I guess they didn't want anything to be eclipsed by the new Halo 3 maps coming out, or more likely, the new Halo 3 maps being eclipsed by something like Rez finally dropping.

Oh wait, shit. It's XBLA Wednesday now? Dammit. I am both more and less irate given this news. Or perhaps very confused. Maybe it's been Wednesday all along and I'm mixing things up.

That being said, I have fond memories of the Bankshot demo from when I first got my 360, and recommend it much more now that it's a more reasonable price. Might pick it up myself before the week is out, still kind of on the fence as to how much a hurry I'm in on this. I waited this long, might as well wait some more.

Fresh content, on the other hand, was not bad at all. New Halo 3 maps, as mentioned, look all right. I did a tour in Forge rather than actually playing any of them, and I really dig the openness and natural cover in Standoff, but I'm also thrilled they used the Earth base from the campaign as a template for Rat's Nest. Foundry looks cute but also looks like a rape tape waiting to happen. We'll see next time I feel like suffering through random idiots or can gather some associates to actually play the game.

Also new was a punk pack for Rock Band, featuring I Fought The Law, Rockaway Beach, and Ever Fallen In Love. I've been waiting for Ever Fallen ever since they announced the first batch of download packs, so I was quite delighted to grab this and slam through the vocals with five stars. I also caught up with some of the other download songs I hadn't actually played yet, at least not on my save, which was nice.

Because of this, my throat is scratchy and I'm not really feeling the need to revisit any of my Arcade games like I normally would this time of week, so I guess I owe myself some DDR or something.

Oh yeah, in other system news, Wii update hit today. System update, they updated the photo channel, and supposedly Pokémon Snap, now on the Virtual Console, can tie in with the photo stuff and let you send pictures you take in-game to people.

That is so stupid, I love it already. I might pick this one up again and give it a go, even though I probably still have the cartridge.

If you're looking to get even more depressed, look at the release list for the rest of the holiday season, for any system. With the exception of NiGHTS: Journey Into Dreams (which should have hit today, I believe), it's a steaming pile. Good for gift-strained wallets, I guess, but I am a miser and would like new reasons to throw away my green besides food and pornography.

It begins!

2007-12-10T21:26:00.000-05:00

So, the first game in the grand requeueing has arrived - 2006 FIFA World Cup! And the verdict is... I don't have the patience for realistic sports simulations. Sure, I like watching soccer, and I like playing soccer, but this weird fusion of both that comes in video game form? The orange I just ate was a bit more exciting. Give me Mario and crew playing soccer any day.

Mind you, it was good for its release time, especially if you have a hard-on for international footballers. The likenesses were definitely a jump from the Xbox days, arenas were very pretty, and I like the announcers more than previous iterations. Lots of unlockables for those of you who'd pile enormous amounts of time into things. There are also two or three more FIFA games out there already, also by EA, so if you like their stuff and already watched the World Cup nearly two years ago, then by all means just pick up FIFA '08.

Eked out the "complete a challenge" achievement, gotten in fifteen minutes or less by going to World Challenges and playing Romanian Lottery. Penalty shots, dumb goalie, mostly luck in picking where to block. I honestly think they phoned in the achievements on this one. It's all play a bunch of matches, play a bunch more matches, beat Germany in a match. No online play stuff or anything. Normally I'd squeal with joy for all offline-unlockable stuff, but I think my head would explode if I tried to grind these.

I also still have Earth Defense Force 2017 floating around from before this project began, and while I've sworn to send it back along with FIFA, I may just cave and buy it. It's a great example of how sometimes, you just need to blow shit (or in this case, extras from the movie THEM!) up. That's all you do, and I'm okay with that.

Another game with a short achievement list, but these I actually feel I'll enjoy doing. Well, maybe not the Easy clear since it's going to be a breeze, but I'm mostly using that as a new weapons testing platform. Collect all 170-odd weapons? OKAY. Might need a buddy for Inferno difficulty, but I think I know someone I can call.

DDR Universe 2 came out last week, and I snatched that up bundle-style so I can do doubles now. We all have some guilty gaming pleasures, and DDR is one of mine.

Plusses? Quest Mode is much less of a filthy whore; I managed to blow through all the song unlocks in one go by not wasting my time buying outfits. Decent song selection, though I am somewhat suspect that the downloadable content was already on the disc and unlockable, seeing as how the download time for all ten songs combined was a fart and a heartbeat. Not cool, Konami. Still, Men Without Hats? What? Okay!

Minuses? SICK TRIBAL AESTHETIC. WHOA. Pretty retarded. Characters slightly uglier than last game, exact same mocap (including that stupid guitar windmill on the male characters). Terrible outfit design, between the regular character skins and the outfits you can buy in Quest Mode. Unlockable songs still only obtainable in Quest Mode.

So in other words, it's DDR, more and uglier. Worth it if you're into it and want some new songs to play, especially online. Achievements basically the same as the first one; unlocking new songs, clearing X number of songs, challenges. I take some DDR snob pride in the fact that I only use the controller for getting Quest Mode out of the way, the rest is all pad. Yes, I am a huuuuge handjob.

On the way should be Ace Combat 6 and at least one other, since I sent back two games at the same time. Until they get here, I will try to figure out where these new monsters I need to kill for achievements in PSU:AotI are. I'm guessing they're in the new Episode 3 quests. Here's hoping said quests don't force me to play with cards*.

* - Actually, I'm one of the sick bastards who enjoyed PSO: Ep III C.A.R.D. Help me.

Pertinent Information

2007-12-09T17:46:00.000-05:00

For the reocord, here's a list of the games I own already, so you have some idea as to what's coming in fresh and what isn't. Please note that I started this disaster with 12,737 Gamerscore. Here's my Gamercard for comparison in the future:

Feel free to add me if you want to help the cause, or if you just want someone new to play with, but please drop a comment here or message me first so I have the slightest idea as to why random people want to friend me.

The lists! They will be updated as my inventory shifts.

Retail Games:
Beautiful Katamari
Big Bumpin'
Crackdown
Dance Dance Revolution Universe
Dance Dance Revolution Universe 2
Dead Or Alive 4
Dead Rising
Eternal Sonata
Gears Of War
Guitar Hero II
Guitar Hero III
Halo 3
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
Lost Planet
Phantasy Star Universe (w/ Ambition Of The Illuminus expansion)
Pocketbike Racer
Rock Band
~~Rape~~ Sneak King
Tetris Evolution
Viva Pinata
WarTech: Senko No Ronde

Xbox Live Arcade:
3D Ultra Minigolf
Aegis Wing
Alien Hominid HD
Assault Heroes
Band Of Bugs
Battlestar Galactica
Bomberman Live
Carcassonne
Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night
Catan
Crystal Quest
Doom
Eets: Chowdown
Every Extend Extra Extreme
EXIT
Feeding Frenzy
Gauntlet
Geometry Wars
Geon
Golden Axe
Hexic HD
Hexic 2
Lumines Live!
Luxor 2
Mad Tracks
Marathon: Durandal
Marble Blast Ultra
Mutant Storm Reloaded
Outpost Kaloki X
Pac-Man: Championship Edition
Pinball FX
Puzzle Fighter HD
Puzzle Quest
Small Arms
Sonic The Hedgehog
Sonic The Hedgehog 2
Space Giraffe
Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting
Street Trace: NYC
Streets Of Rage
Tetris Splash
Texas Hold 'Em
TMNT 1989 Arcade
TotemBall
Uno
Wing Commander Arena
Worms
Yaris

QTWBFAIPSARTC

2007-12-09T16:58:00.000-05:00

Or, Questions That Will Become Frequently Asked If People Actually Start Reading This Crap. Basically, this is where I explain just what's going on here.

Q) What is this Goblin Valley nonsense all about, anyway?
A) One night, sleep deprivation and several drinks came together in the form of a brilliant idea:

"I have an Xbox 360. I am an achievement whore. I have GameFly. Why don't I play EVERY 360 GAME EVER?"

Subsequently, I cleared my queue and lined up the first fifty released games in alphabetical order, went to bed, and woke up the next morning realizing this might not have been the best of ideas after all. I'm a man of my word, however, and I had friends breathing down my back to do a podcast for their internet radio thingy, so thus was the project born.

Q) So you're just playing everything ever? What's the point?
A) The objective, at first, was just to play everything and rack up as high a gamerscore as possible. It was rather quickly realized that such a move would be highly impractical, as there would frequently be logjams where I held onto all four games scraping away for the last few points in each one, leaving new games unsent and therefore making things pretty boring. To alleviate this problem, rules and smaller objectives were formed.

Q) Explain these rules and objectives, if you could.
A) It's simple enough, really.

Any given game can only stay in my house for one week, at least upon initial arrival. This gives me the challenge of seeing how many acheivements I can clear in that timeframe, which allows for both my jobs, sleep, and other life necessities and socializing. Games I already own, or that I purchase at some point in the future, are exempt but cannot take up the bulk of my gaming time if rented games are waiting to be played.
Offline achievements are the primary objective, especially with older games that no one plays online anymore. However, if readers/listeners need help boosting or wish to help me boost online achievements for dated games they have laying around, they are more than welcome to contact me.
Games that have been played for the one week are not allowed to reappear for further play until the entire queue has been gone through, unless they are purchased or recieved as gifts. Gonna milk this one for a while, yessir.

Q) Boost?
A) It's when you basically whore achievements by getting buddies together to do stuff, usually online achievements that require you to play in ranked matches. You'll often see entire games of Halo 3 dedicated to it, since everyone wants that katana.

Q) And how, may I ask, does this make for reasonable podcast material?
A) Basically, the podcast is going to be a rundown of any funny or interesting things that happened in that week's quest for gamerscore, with my brief take on whatever I played, shoutouts to anyone who actively helped out, tips for getting weird or hard achievements, that sort of thing. Also, rundowns of demos of anything I feel like downloading that looks promising.

Q) Is this just going to be retail games, or are you going to play all the Xbox Live Arcade games, too?
A) You better believe XBLA is going to be part of this. I already have a pile of games as it is, and I at least play the demos each week, so expect a blurb here and some discussion in the podcast of what's fresh and what's stale in the Arcade. I'm also considering occasionally reviewing an Xbox Original title here and there, since I already have a lot of the releases on disc and don't need to dole out extra cash for them. >_>

Q) I see a lot of Xbox, Xbox, Xbox. Kind of a narrow focus, don't you think?
A) Yes, most certainly, which is why I'm also making room for other systems. Gamerscore may be the primary goal here, but I still have everything under the sun but a PS3 (yet). I still play 'em all, so every now and then I think I'll have a marathon week, wherein I blow through every game in a series or franchise.

Granted, some of these might turn into multi-week specials, say if I tried to pull off playing every Metroid, or (god forbid) every Final Fantasy. Even just the numbered ones would take quite a bit of time. As with the Xbox stuff, I'd discuss funny encounters, glitches, secrets, and so forth, as well as general nostalgia in some cases.

Non-Xbox stuff is also bound to cut in whenever I find something new and hot that I can't help but gush about. Game news and game movies are also fair game (no pun).

Q) You didn't entirely answer the first question, by the way. What is this Goblin Valley nonsense, in regards to the name?
A) If you've never watched The Wizard, do so, now. It's a terrible movie. I love it so.

If you have watched it, well, I didn't want to be that thousandfold
asshole who quotes the Power Glove line.

Everyone quotes that. Ugh.