Thursday, March 20, 2008
First online race win!
I decided to get some Burnout Paradise in last night, and I am so glad that I did. I risked the freezing 360 for some on-line races after grabbing a few Time Road Rules. I have the usual crap, host leaves, can't connect to everyone, then I get into a game with a bunch of players. We start up a race on the curvy mountain roads, and right off the bat I miss a chance to Takedown one racer. I try for a jump, and miss that. Now, back in 4th place I start driving better; and it is showing. I pass the cluster of three cars and take first, and see that the finish line is less than a half a mile away. The minimap shows all three arrows right behind me, so I chance a look in the rear-view mirror, see that they are RIGHT behind me... and promptly crash. The Amazing Race effect took hold, though and all three cars were so closely following the guy in first place that they all hit the rock too! I was using a Stunt car, so I could use my Boost right out of the gate, and was able to clinch the win pretty easily after that part. Such a nice feeling. Of course the 360 froze before the next race could start, but it was fun while it lasted. Where is the new 360!?
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Binge
Well, despite having "finished" Halo 3, and still having both Psychonauts and Bioshock looming large on the stack, I've been mostly engrossed in Burnout Paradise and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I suppose I would feel worse about it if I wasn't having so much fun. McGuire assigned himself unlock duty, apparently, since he pretty much scored almost all of the unlockable characters in Brawl by going through the Subspace Emissary mode. I've been jumping in to co-op mode with him when I get the chance, but between his greater stock of free time and my gaming ADD, he's a lot farther in the game than I am. It's quite fun either way, so I don't mind.
I got even more Halo 3 time in this past week, first when getting some Skulls with Lars' friend Steve, then again later with Jen and Lars along. Jen is still missing a couple of chapters on the Legendary difficulty, but she soloed the missing missions on Heroic, so she is well on her way. It's pretty funny, the first night all four of us played she was by far the weakest link, but after just one night on Legendary, she is back to the ass-kicking gamer that I am more familiar with. The less WoW the better.
Burnout Paradise: what can I say? I get so much enjoyment out of this game it is just sick. I've been gaining cars as fast as I can manage, and right now I am on a quest to finish EVERY burning route for each of my cars. I started this self-made quest before I had my B License, and it's been going great. A few of these routes are really, really hard, but I've had a few that I finished with 30 seconds to spare, too. I still can't get anything going on-line, the system freezes too fast to accomplish much. Such is life. On the "good" news front, I got Microsoft to agree that my system is defective, and I already have a coffin on the way. I will miss the 360, it's become quite the fixture in my gaming life already, but it will be so nice to have a working one, and be able to really play Burnout with other humans.
I got even more Halo 3 time in this past week, first when getting some Skulls with Lars' friend Steve, then again later with Jen and Lars along. Jen is still missing a couple of chapters on the Legendary difficulty, but she soloed the missing missions on Heroic, so she is well on her way. It's pretty funny, the first night all four of us played she was by far the weakest link, but after just one night on Legendary, she is back to the ass-kicking gamer that I am more familiar with. The less WoW the better.
Burnout Paradise: what can I say? I get so much enjoyment out of this game it is just sick. I've been gaining cars as fast as I can manage, and right now I am on a quest to finish EVERY burning route for each of my cars. I started this self-made quest before I had my B License, and it's been going great. A few of these routes are really, really hard, but I've had a few that I finished with 30 seconds to spare, too. I still can't get anything going on-line, the system freezes too fast to accomplish much. Such is life. On the "good" news front, I got Microsoft to agree that my system is defective, and I already have a coffin on the way. I will miss the 360, it's become quite the fixture in my gaming life already, but it will be so nice to have a working one, and be able to really play Burnout with other humans.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Mega Gaming Weekend
This past week I wound up knocking Halo 3 off of my stack. It wasn't really intentional, but the pieces just fell into place and I knocked it off with three friends on the hardest difficulty. We grabbed 8/13 Skulls in our journeys, they add a nice level of challenge, so I can see myself going back for the other 5 later. Halo 3 is one of those games that I'm not really done with, I just finished the campaign, so I don't have to worry about spoilers or missing out on part of the story. I do still want to get back to it with McGuire, he and I did the first 5 levels already and it was fun playing with him, as always.
Sunday was the big "Super Smash Brothers Brawl" release day, I've been looking forward to playing that game for ages. I had decided to pick up Burnout Paradise while I was there (hooray for performance sharing bonuses!), so I came home from Best Buy on Sunday with two shiny new games; neither one of them a stack candidate. With Super Smash Brothers Melee, I played the crap out of it, until I had unlocked every character, every stage and everything else unlockable, then I considered it "done". It still got plenty of love, the good 4 player mode caused it to be brought out quite often, I can't see Brawl being all that different in that regard. First things first: I must get R.O.B. as a playable character.
Ironically, I think I spent slightly more time with Burnout than Smash Brothers Sunday. It makes the 360 freeze up, as I expected, but I get a chance to usually finish at least one event per freeze. It's just a matter of time before the 360 RRODs.
Sunday was the big "Super Smash Brothers Brawl" release day, I've been looking forward to playing that game for ages. I had decided to pick up Burnout Paradise while I was there (hooray for performance sharing bonuses!), so I came home from Best Buy on Sunday with two shiny new games; neither one of them a stack candidate. With Super Smash Brothers Melee, I played the crap out of it, until I had unlocked every character, every stage and everything else unlockable, then I considered it "done". It still got plenty of love, the good 4 player mode caused it to be brought out quite often, I can't see Brawl being all that different in that regard. First things first: I must get R.O.B. as a playable character.
Ironically, I think I spent slightly more time with Burnout than Smash Brothers Sunday. It makes the 360 freeze up, as I expected, but I get a chance to usually finish at least one event per freeze. It's just a matter of time before the 360 RRODs.
Monday, March 3, 2008
GameStack.pop()
Finally!
I beat Metroid Prime 2 yesterday. It's pretty funny, how much I came around on the stuff that I don't generally like when finishing this game. I guess it's been a while, so I should start with the key hunt. Just like Metroid Prime, at the end you have to track down a set of items to gain access to the final area. In the first game, I think it was 8 artifacts, 3 of which I had stumbled upon in my travels. The last five I had to figure out the location of by reading the scan log book and guessing where the clue referenced. A key word was bolded in each section, so it didn't take that long, but it was a chore. When I got the key hunt task in Echoes, I was really dreading it. I had found 4 of the 9 needed keys ahead of time, and had scanned all of the keybearers at one point, so I knew it was a matter of going to the locations that I had been to in the past, and getting a key from the Dark planet. What I didn't realize until much, much later was that the logbook was arranged in such a way to make the key hunt almost trivially easy. Once I figured out that it was broken down by area, and still numbered when you got to the actual Key Entry in the log, it was really fast to get the last of the keys. Kudos to the developers for making the worst part of the end-game of Prime into something that really works in Prime 2, even if a stubborn fool like me took a while to see it.
Thankfully, the section after the key entry is simple: save station, wall jump, boss fight(s). Like, seemingly, every other game these days, this was a multi-stage boss fight, with the requisite Metroid countdown after the first boss. In this game, the 'final' boss battle was the Emperor Ing, with 5 scannable sections, and a 4 part battle. It basically took me one life to get the hang of the first mode, and another to get the hang of the second. The third stage was really easy, but it took me 4 tries to get past the final part. Once you get past all of that, the countdown begins. It's a short trip out of the area, so 8 minutes is a really long time, until you get intercepted by Dark Samus' final 2 modes. The first mode went by pretty easily. The second mode was tough. After dealing with Archer turning off the game (making me re-do Emperor Ing) and just plain losing twice, I got the hang of it, and beat the game. 80% Completion, 23 hours. It was quite satisfying, and now I'm on to play Psychonauts.
I beat Metroid Prime 2 yesterday. It's pretty funny, how much I came around on the stuff that I don't generally like when finishing this game. I guess it's been a while, so I should start with the key hunt. Just like Metroid Prime, at the end you have to track down a set of items to gain access to the final area. In the first game, I think it was 8 artifacts, 3 of which I had stumbled upon in my travels. The last five I had to figure out the location of by reading the scan log book and guessing where the clue referenced. A key word was bolded in each section, so it didn't take that long, but it was a chore. When I got the key hunt task in Echoes, I was really dreading it. I had found 4 of the 9 needed keys ahead of time, and had scanned all of the keybearers at one point, so I knew it was a matter of going to the locations that I had been to in the past, and getting a key from the Dark planet. What I didn't realize until much, much later was that the logbook was arranged in such a way to make the key hunt almost trivially easy. Once I figured out that it was broken down by area, and still numbered when you got to the actual Key Entry in the log, it was really fast to get the last of the keys. Kudos to the developers for making the worst part of the end-game of Prime into something that really works in Prime 2, even if a stubborn fool like me took a while to see it.
Thankfully, the section after the key entry is simple: save station, wall jump, boss fight(s). Like, seemingly, every other game these days, this was a multi-stage boss fight, with the requisite Metroid countdown after the first boss. In this game, the 'final' boss battle was the Emperor Ing, with 5 scannable sections, and a 4 part battle. It basically took me one life to get the hang of the first mode, and another to get the hang of the second. The third stage was really easy, but it took me 4 tries to get past the final part. Once you get past all of that, the countdown begins. It's a short trip out of the area, so 8 minutes is a really long time, until you get intercepted by Dark Samus' final 2 modes. The first mode went by pretty easily. The second mode was tough. After dealing with Archer turning off the game (making me re-do Emperor Ing) and just plain losing twice, I got the hang of it, and beat the game. 80% Completion, 23 hours. It was quite satisfying, and now I'm on to play Psychonauts.
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