it's still snowing

Back in 2006 I registered on the Microsoft site that promised free arcade games if you registered your console. I don't have the actual site anymore otherwise I'd post it, no idea if the offer is still on. At the time the site seemed sort of shady, when I visited it some of the images wouldn't load but it recognized my passport logon so I just figured..what the fuck... and filled out the form. Well it turns out that it came in and I got Frogger and Joust for free:





Anyway, decent games..my generation so I had some good memories of both games, especially Joust.

I can't believe how huge Oblivion is really. I finally finished the main storyline and decided to try and get a few of the guild achievements. It took almost 10 hours to complete the fighters guild quest. At this point I'm at just over 60 hours played, this game is fucking huge. I downloaded the Mehrunes Razor quest (which I believe was free on XBLM for a while) and the equipment I got for doing that quest made the game a lot easier (and more fun) so I'll probably be playing Oblivion for a while yet.

I started playing GRAW1 again with a friend from work. I still need to get the co-op achievements anyway and since Microsoft was giving away GRAW1 in a 360 bundle a lot of my friends have the game. The GRAW2 demos are out and initially I wasn't that impressed but the multiplayer demo looks so nice and since I'm having fun with GRAW1 co-op I may bite and buy GRAW2.

Alien Hominid came out on XBLA today, it's great. It's really hard but technically I find it really impressive. The framerate is really good and looks awesome on my TV, vibrant colors and whatnot. I should probably post pictures of my TV, I found out by accident that it has a "freeze" option so I should be able to take some decent pictures of it.

Months end

I haven't updated in a while.

I've been spending Feb trying to finish up a few games that I never had time to complete. I finally got the CoD3 veteran achievement. Probably the hardest most frustrating achievement I've gotten in any 360 game that I've played. Sadly it wasn't actually a lot of fun to get the achievement because CoD3 veteran is not like CoD2. The germans shoot the MP40 like it's got a laser sight, they're some sort of weird soldiers of the future that can see through trees, buildings and can shoot you from miles away with a fucking pistol. I was going to try and get a few more online achievements in the game but the multiplayer got old really quick, it probably doesn't help that I'm not really that great at the twitch FPS type games. I really REALLY hate the ranked multiplayer achievements as well.

I'm back into playing Oblivion. I gave it up sort of quick because I found it to be a game that really takes some effort to play. You can't play for an hour and accomplish a lot. I turned down the difficulty and the game is more fun again. I can concentrate on pissing around a lot more and playing with the physics which I find infinitely more fun than running in and running away which I was having to do with my current build of my character. I don't know if I'll get ALL of the achievements but the game is fun again so I'll at least finish the main storyline.

I really wanted to buy Crackdown, I was really close to buying it last night at WalMart, it was there with the Halo3 beta key, calling me. But I had to curb my enthusiasm. I had every intention to buy it but after reading the game is sort of short and that none of my real life friends would be buying it (so no co-op) I decided to hold off. The Halo3 beta thing is a non-issue for me either. After beta testing a variety of MMPOGs (Asheron's Call, DAOC, Auto Assault, etc) I realized that I HATE betas, they REALLY ruin the fun of a new game release. I may pick up Crackdown off ebay in a few months but for now I'll just play through some of my older games. It doesn't help that April/May have a TON of game releases (Darkness, Shadowrun, Too human, mass effect, Monster madness, etc). I don't expect all of them will actually make that date but even if 2-3 of them do that means I will have a difficult time finding time/money to play all those games.

Update

Not that much new to add. I decided to skip Lost Planet. The reviews lead me to believe that the story followed your typical Japanese tripe (which is one of the reasons why I hate Japanese games) so I decided to skip the game. The multiplayer demo didn't really interest me either.. it just felt tacked on for some reason.

I did nab the Crackdown demo and enjoyed it. I had to force myself to delete the demo because I want to enjoy the retail game and too much time on the demo may burn me out. I'm a sucker for sandbox games so it's no surprise I liked Crackdown.

While waiting for Crackdown retail (out near the end of Feb) I'm trying to clean up some achievements. I'm trying to get Veteran in CoD3 but god I'm starting to hate the game. The checkpoints are WAY too sparse and in general the game just pisses me off. I enjoyed the single player game on normal mode but veteran is an exercise in frustration. The Nazis use laser sighted weapons, can see you through buildings and brush and never miss. I'm stuck on the "Forest" level campaign, the end where you have to use the mortars. The teammate AI is nearly retarded and don't help so I'm swarmed with endless wave on wave of germans running the hill.

I wanted to like the multiplayer portion of CoD3 (the reason why I bought the game really) but couple buggy game lobby interface with seriously switch-like gameplay and you have something really frustrating. The previews I saw at gametrailers lead me to believe that CoD3 would be a lot more tactical than CoD2 but the class type mechanism doesn't really change the fact that everyone pretty much still plays for themselves (no teamwork) and the shooting is very twitchy. Overall I'm really disappointed in CoD3, maybe with friends it would be great but in ranked matches the game sucks.