Friday, December 30, 2011

Don't Want to Be in an Arkham City Elevator

Just watching a few minutes of WWE. Not on purpose. Just waiting for the season finale of Sanctuary. Just so happend to watch the wrestlers fight in an elevator. Did that earlier today in Arkham City. It's not the easiest thing, since the camera was so tight it was hard to see when I was about to get hit. But I sure didn't get my ass handed to me. They were unconscious soon enough. Would never want to be in that situation in real life, though. Alrighty, missing the show.

Forza 4 Car Editor

I thought I had spent a lot of time creating characters in RPGs over the years, but nothing compares to Forza Motorsport 4's editor. My brother has hardly played the game. He's basically been playing with car colors for three days. I'm sure I'll do the same when I'm finished with Arkham City. If I would just stop button mashing!



I don't actually play a lot of RPGs, at least not anymore, since there's so little time now. Damn job! Can't I just be 15 again? But I will be getting The Elderscrolls V: Skyrim...eventually. There's no doubt about that. Haven't finished Fallout 3 yet (yeah, you read me right), because it is on one of my brother's XBoxes, so I just played other games and I would always forget to bring a memory card to his house. My Mass Effect save is still stuck there, because I know if I try to move it to my current 360 it will fuck up (from experience, Microsoft's "customer service" is a massive clusterfuck that will run braindead circles around you until you no longer know how to tie your own shoes...or anyone else's), and I'll have to either play it again or play Mass Effect 2 without any of the choices I made in the first. I saved the krogan. I want him to come with me to the sequel.

The finale is supposed to be released in March 2012, not long from now, so I better take a stab at it again. I originally signed into my profile and tried copying both games to my memory card, but only Fallout worked. Maybe if I move instead of copying? Haven't done this in two years; I'm never there. I also heard that maybe the cloud storage would work by moving to the cloud from bro's box and then saving to mine. Need a Gold membership, though. Can't afford it, never needed it. Gotta do a trial and then cancel. Blech. Bullshit.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Awe Struck /* Dead Space 2 */

My favorite cut scene in any game is at the end of Dead Space 2 when the Marker is activated. It's chilling and disturbing. It sticks in your mind for days. You watch it over and over. At first you say, "Shit...that's fucking awesome!" Then you sit there staring at your television, transfixed by the light and wind and flames. The sounds of horns, angelic voices, and the cycling of a colossal artifact is unholy and mesmerizing. If the situation was real and I had made it that far, which is extremely doubtful, I'm not sure I wouldn't have just given up then and there, too stunned to continue on.

This video must be played loud on good speakers to get the full effect. Even better, you should play the game yourself if you haven't yet, since it is great, no one sticks around to watch the Marker for long enough, and this is a major spoiler.


They really did an incredible job creating a creepy atmosphere of sounds. Here's a glimpse of the sound design process with Audio Director Andrew Boyd and Composer Jason Graves.


So, I wrote this in July, a while after finishing the game. Then I got distracted, never edited the rough draft, and forgot to press the "publish" button.

Monday, October 3, 2011

The Sometimes-Late-to-the-Party Gamer // Tools of Destruction

Today (or tomorrow), I am finally finishing Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction after about a month...and 3-plus years I guess, since it's certainly not new, which is the reason for the title of this post.

Anyway, on the off chance that you're also playing an old R&C right now, I was a victim of the holo-plan glitch on Ardolis. The thing is, I didn't know about this glitch and was going a little bit nutty until I looked it up. I was way beyond the point where I could have reloaded a save before the glitch happened. It was the end of the game before I noticed a holo-plan piece was missing, and there was no way I was going to start all over again. There are only a few games I've ever had the time or inclination to replay, such as Dead Space, Gears of War, and Halo. I loved Tools of Destruction, but Gears 3 came out a couple weeks ago and I'm really anxious to get to it. I would have already, but when I start a new game before I'm finished with an old one I almost never go back. There's always something else to distract.

Oh, back to the reason I started this post. The consensus seems to be that the only two ways to overcome this glitch are to reload a previous save, start over, or to finish and start a new challenge mode. Today I just decided to try again, for possibly the sixth and seventh time, even though I knew my efforts would be futile. At first, I smashed the boxes as usual and nothing happened. Then just before I gave up I tried once more, carefully breaking boxes one at a time, and suddenly the holo-plan was there! I have no idea if it mattered, but I killed myself to get to the last checkpoint instead of finishing the level or reloading. Strange thing, though: I remember getting the holo-plan here on my first trip to Ardolis, but then it wasn't counted, which I did not notice until it was too late. I haven't read if it happened that way to anyone else.

A Crack in My Brain

So I finally got to play Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time. I've had it for at least six months (and it came out almost four years ago!), but I've had God of War III, Dead Space 2, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and many others to get through. I've been playing for a week now and of course I love it. I've always greatly enjoyed Ratchet & Clank. But I just couldn't find a gold bolt on Outpost L51: Sargasso, so I looked it up. If you know the game then you might have just gone, "Huh? I don't remember Sargasso in Crack in Time." Well, you would be right. Turns out what was actually in the box was Tools of Destruction. Doesn't really matter to me because I wanted that one too, but I can't believe I didn't notice a different title than the one I thought I was playing every time I loaded it for an entire week. D'oh! There's another argument for buying new over used/trade...or checking inside the box when it arrives, not months later.

Um...meant to publish this a few weeks ago. The next post is about finishing the game. Oops.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Jeremy Clarkson and The Warthog

I've always wanted a Warthog. Wish I could build one. I also still dream about my owm Voltron. Oh, the things I would do if I had Bruce Wayne's money...or Bill Gates', since he's real. Of course it will never be possible, but at least I can listen to the Hog's specs in the voice of Top Gear's hilarious Jeremy Clarkson.

Maybe one day I'll be inclined to put my Bumper Hogs videos up on YouTube. I would have to find music that fits, since my brother and I didn't think to also record our hilarious (at least we thought so) comments at the time, and then do a lot of editing. Sounds like too much work. It was incredibly fun playing The Silent Cartographer on co-op just to take the two Hogs and smash them into each other over and over, trying to find how high we could get. And I'll tell ya, it was pretty damn high.

Thanks go to Anglophenia for finding this one.

Friday, August 12, 2011

The Assassin is On Leave

Yay, I'm finally getting back to Portal 2! I was a few hours into it when it was pointed out to me that I was neglecting the already half finished Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. I finished ACB two or three weeks ago, but I felt the obsessive need to get 100%. Takes a long time when you get to play maybe seven hours a week.

So, I got all golds in the virtual training, which I ignored the entire time; beat up the pathetic mercenaries in the barracks, twice, because I forgot the achievement was for max bet; won 10,000 florins in Hazard in one try; finally threw an axe from 10 meters; found a place to kill guards who are actually guarding something (at the Colosseum) in order to finish the Courtesan challenges; beat up the 5 thirsty harlequins (accidentally killed the last one and had to wait maybe 20 minutes for it to show up again even after reloading!); survived da Vinci's tank without getting hit; finally completed that one mission that just kept pissing me off because it was killing guards, waiting for Bartolomeo and the mercenaries to catch up, killing more guards, waiting, killing and getting caught, starting over again, and again, getting to the end and immediately losing a health square because the smoke bomb didn't work, go through again, losing a health square because my timing was off sightly, going through again, finally remembering to use my assassins, dying anyway because they ran right at me before the assassins could be useful, starting over again, and finally winning because arrow storm got them first; and a few other missions I didn't get 100% sync on before, such as a Romulus Lair where Ezio just wouldn't jump straight on five occasions.

And I missed two hidden flags, just two. They were both during a chase, of course. If you're also going nuts because of that, there's a great guide at GamesRadar. I remember in the first Assassin's Creed, I missed some flags and had to print out a map and check them off one by one. Took a damn long while, and then I missed one and had to do it again. Turns out I thought I already had that one, but must have died before picking it up. Also, the first of the Lairs of Romulus is actually not hidden. It's in Sequence 2, Memory 7. Before I knew where it was I looked at the names of all the memories trying to figure out which one it could be, and I still somehow didn't see it. Turns out I already had all the flags from there anyway.

Well, the game is over, and I'm not sad at all. It was great, but I played the crap out of it. Now bring on Assassin's Creed: Revelations Ubisoft. In the meantime, I'll be over in 1940s L.A. with my portal gun. Wait, that's not quite right.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Zachary Levi's Big Game Idea

Zachary Levi proposed an interesting idea a couple days ago. Wanting to create an interactive TV show-video game hybrid is pretty damn ambitious. I can't wait to see if he can get it done without embarassment. He's a gamer, and a Gearhead, so there's legitimacy to it. It's not just a celebrity trying to get attention in a popular or emerging medium that they seem to have no business being in. Get the whole story at Digital Trends.

This vid is of Levi, Joshua Gomez, and Adam Baldwin enjoying themselves while playing Lego Rock Band at Comic-Con a couple years ago.

//Wow, it's been half a year since my last post. It seems I've been dedicating all of my limited free time to my other blogs.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Particles by Ragdollsoft

I've been a member of Kongregate since 2007, but I haven't been a good one since the last time I visited was probably a year ago.  Suddenly this morning I had a craving for Particles.  It was the first game I loved there and it's still my favorite, partly because of Dimrain47's "Twilight Techno."  Definitely a test of reflexes and concentration.  If someone starts talking to you, you're gonna blow it.

You've probably noticed this isn't for a console.  To clear up any confusion, I do most of my playing on consoles, such as Xbox 360 and PS3.  Always have, always will.  But I also enjoy the occasional online game and, more rarely, a computer game.  Just don't have the money to get a nice shiny new Alienware or Falcon NW that can run anything newer than The Sims 2

Friday, January 14, 2011

You Can't Say That On TV

X-Play has been one of my favorite shows for quite a long time now. And here's a reason to love it more. They actually left in the words "You are fucked" in a video review they played on TV, then covered it up a second later. Whether intentional or not, it was great, and I had to rewind it to make sure I didn't imagine it.