Thursdaily Update

Not a fan of the small legs with the big feet

This week saw the end of my XBLA tear, after wrapping up Doritos Crash Course 2 on Monday I decided that it's time to move back to some retail titles. I've spent over three months pretty much purely working through my XBLA games backlog and I managed to complete a whole heap of titles, some I thought I would never complete. The huge XBLA titles list I had to scroll through to find a game on my Xbox 360 Harddrive has shrunk to a fairly manageable level and while I still have a decent amount of XBLA titles to play through I've also got a big amount of discs stacked up waiting to be played. Titles that I'm actually very excited to get to, the rest of the Assassin's Creed series and LA Noire to name a few.

However the last quarter of a year slaving away on XBLA titles and the almost a month that was dedicated to Bionic Commando: Rearmed has me thinking that I'll start this journey by going through and beating a couple of what looks to be the easiest and quickest retail games I own. I'm not a big Gamerscore guy, but my Gamerscore growth has really slowed down with these XBLA titles so let's see if I can't boost it a bit quickly before getting stuck into some more lengthy grinds. This started with a recent acquisition of mine; TMNT.

I had all these and more. I think I was probably close to
owning them all. Even as a child I was into completing/collecting
everything in a set.

I saw TMNT for sale for $7 in the store last Monday and I could feel the TMNT fan in me from years back wanting to check it out. Then I felt the Gamerscore whore in me shout out for what I knew to be easy points and it was too much to resist. As I mentioned above I'm not much of a Gamerscore guy, my point total comes from playing the games I really want to play and trying to complete them, not grinding through games I don't have a legitimate interest in just for the points. This was the case with TMNT, and I enjoyed spending yesterday bulldozing my way through the game. It's nothing new or fancy, just a plain brawler that has the TMNT trappings, but that was good enough for me. I Still remember being 7 and playing with a vast TMNT collection of toys I had amassed, good times.

After wrapping up the last couple of achievements in TMNT earlier today I decided to turn to another game, this one had been in my collection for a while now, years maybe. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust hasn't made a great impression so far, it's super plain and the objectives so far have been enough to nearly put me to sleep. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is another game I picked up really cheap for the sole reason of me being fascinated with the Exploitation genre. I find great amusement in this genre, with it's camp and supposed titillation. I doubt even 12 year old boys wouldn't find this stuff enticing, but yet it still gets made and it still sells well enough to warrant more. I decided a while ago that I would try to play any and all games I feel fall in this genre. Leisure Suit Larry is the next step of this undertaking.

So far it's been a bit of a bore, with bad jokes and bad missions involving nothing except moving to the next marker on your mini-map. I've probably played less than an hour total but hope to put some time in over the next few days and wrap it up quickly. That about wraps up everything that's been happening on my side of the Xbox but let's talk quickly about the major gaming event that's about to kick off.

I know it wasn't the most popular game, but I could go for
another Brutal Legend and I'm not even a rock guy

E3 is starting real soon, tonight if you count Konami's press conference, and I'll be watching and soaking as much of it in as I possibly can. I plan to watch most, if not all, press conferences live and a lot of next weeks blogs will be filled with any thoughts that pop up in relation to that. There will still be the game talk but to be honest I'm not sure how much time will be used where. I'm really excited to see Microsoft's conference to see if they can make good on their promises to wow the gamers back into their favor. If some of the games that have been leaked are there it could be amazing. Tomorrow I think I'll post one more Xbox One centered post with predictions and my views on how things will actually work as opposed to the internet currently thinks they do and then come conference time it will be fun to see if I'm right or wrong. That's all for now, next update will be an E3 one! See you then.

Xbox One: Installs and Always Online

With E3 only a week away I thought it pertinent to talk some more about the Xbox One. I've already talked in depth about the reveal itself and what I thought Microsoft is actually trying to accomplish with the strategy it seems to be using so far. Since the reveal there has been uproar, confusion and now the internet has returned to a relative calm again, but I'm sure the waters will become turbulent again in just a few days. Before that happens I think I'll recap some information and my thoughts on the issues that got everyone riled up in the first place.

No need to worry about scratched discs anymore

Firstly lets start on a positive, or at least I see it that way; mandatory game installs. If you didn't know Xbox One will force you to install any game you want to play. Personally I already install whatever game I want to play to my HDD, this results in quicker loads and better texture streaming just for exercising a couple of minutes of patience once. If this process is now guaranteed and all users will be forced into this practice then developers can take advantage of this and improve the graphical fidelity of their games by coding them with this increased data transfer speed in mind. In what I thought to be a surprising move Microsoft will also use this install  to make your games playable without the need for you to have your disc in drive. Now it's not a big thing to get up off your ass and switch a game disc, but things for the end user have now been simplified again. This results in a new problem however, one publishers have been struggling with for years on the PC - authentication. Now obviously they don't want someone to buy the game, install it and then just pass the disc around to their friends - giving everyone access to a game one person bought. This leads us to one of the things the internet seems to be really down on - always online.

Use that Ethernet port, or the inbuilt wireless, just get it connected. It's not really that big of a deal.

Much ado was made about the Xbox One's supposed need to be always online. To me this is a non issue, my Xbox 360 is always online, as would most serious gamers I would think. I think this is just the way of the future, more and more devices will be always online, not less, and when a huge part of a devices feature set is online then it more than makes sense to try and incentivise this. Your PC is always online, your phone is always online, your laptop and iPad; they all offer services that require a connection. The internet is slowly becoming new technologies life stream. The Xbox One will offer a huge amount of online functionality, not the least of which is multiplayer gaming but add to this the new achievement systems (more on that in another blog entry), augmented TV, internet browsing, background updating and (if the hype is to be believed) cloud computing then online is pretty much mandatory anyway.

What about the user? As always the internet is prone to assumptions and great exaggeration while seemingly refusing to use any critical thinking. Something an exec says gets taken verbatim and applied as a blanket statement over everything. That brings me to what seems to be the widely accepted fact that you'll need to be online at least once every 24 hours otherwise your Xbox One might as well be a big black brick. This comes from a comment that was made in regards to how the Xbox One verifies ownership of games. To make sure you and you're friend aren't both playing the same game, your Xbox One needs to report to a server. Say you don't have internet for whatever reason, or you're away from internet access and you just want to play some single player you're stuffed right? Well I don't know what's officially been said but there seems to be an easy answer here; if you aren't able to be authenticated online you must have the disc in your drive to be able to play it. Easy right? That's the way your Xbox works right now, and this is the exact way DRM is managed on the Xbox 360 right now. That's right, your Xbox 360 has DRM and the way it's managed is widely accepted and is fairly reasonable.

When you download something on the Xbox 360, you get a license for the console you downloaded it on, and the profile you downloaded it with. This lets any user play the game on the original console, and it lets you go to a friends house and play the game there if you bring your profile. If you're being nefarious about it you could have a friend come over, buy a game with their account on your console giving you access when they leave, and then they go home and redownload it on their own console and their profile license would let them play it aswell. Lets think about how this would work with the Xbox One. You install the game onto your console, if it's online you can play without a disc, this is your profile license. It gets authenticated online and you're good to go. If you aren't online you must have the disc in, this would physically authenticate that you own a copy of the game this would be the console license. As you can see this is very similar to the way your Xbox 360 works now. This could also lead to a situation where two people or profiles could use one copy of a game to both have the ability to play it and I think that's where the problems arise. Microsoft obviously doesn't want this to become the norm, with two people basically buying half the games and sharing. They want them both to buy all the games, this is why they are sticking with their story so far and claiming online authentication is mandatory.

There will obviously be a way to play games while the system is offline, you'd be crazy to think otherwise. Microsoft doesn't want to alienate their customers and run the risk of losing sales. They are working on a way to reveal this while hiding the fact two people can share a game, with the caveat of one person having to be offline. By convincing everyone that they have to be online they lower the chances of people being able to share a game like this, they will then reveal a way that people can play offline and spin it in a way that won't immediately make people think they can share a copy of a game. Of course this is my theory, and I have no concrete evidence yet, but I'm putting it in writing now to be either proved wrong, or to point back at it in the future with a bit I told you so.

Again E3 is just around the corner and there are a few more Xbox One speculations I'd like to address and speculate on myself so expect Xbox One ramblings over the coming couple of weeks. That's it for this post, let me know what you think and leave a comment below. See you guys later.

Tuesdaily Update

OK?

It's been a while since I did a Tuesdaily Update but here it is. We had WA Day yesterday here in Western Australia, so I took the day off from my super stressful job writing this blog. I have it hard over here, I know. I spent that time and most of the weekend busting through a couple of games and have some new completions to show for it. It's refreshing to have not just one but two completions to talk about as it's been nothing but writing about progress in Bionic Commando: Rearmed for so long.

The first completion which took nearly all weekend was Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 which is a complete cake walk compared to the original. I've had some people tell me that it wasn't as good as the original but I found it just as good, maybe even better. Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 had more levels and gameplay features to play around with with less than half of the frustration found in the original. I'm not sure if that's at least in part because I knew what to expect in terms of gameplay and strategies or just that the level of difficulty was lower. I don't mind hard games, I like a challenge as much as the next guy, but I just found Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 much more enjoyable.

Usually I'm a big proponent of any and all facial hair but the
Mo on ol' Spence just ain't sitting right with me

On Friday I noted that I was about halfway through the first play-through (which was on Normal). I ended up finishing that run then going back through all the levels again grabbing all the lives, power ups and secrets to put me in the best possible position to beat the game on Hard. Once that was done Saturday saw me run through all the levels again without jumping which unlocks the "Billy Hoyle" achievement. I then started my fourth run-through of the game in co-operative with myself. It was a bit unwieldy, with me not being able to see where I was going sometimes but come early Sunday I was done. Diving straight into Hard mode on my fifth play-through I was done in no time. Hard mode didn't put up a fight, with me finishing levels in the quickest times I had done them yet. So after five play-throughs spaced across a few days Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2 has been completed and is not something to be feared like you should the original Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

I could go some Doritos right about now!

Monday was a new day and as I scrolled through my XBLA collection looking in equal parts amazement and pride as how I've been working my way through and completing a lot of them I decided to get stuck into Doritos Crash Course 2. I really liked the original Crash Course so I was excited to see what this one could offer and I'm pleased to say it improves in some ways while still offering a fun and challenging game to play through. I ended up playing it all Monday, practically completing it in one or two sittings. The only thing I had left to do when I finally went to bed in the early hours of this morning was to grind out some more bonus objectives. This is easily done on the third level in the jungle and after spending another 45 minutes with it this morning I've managed to close the lid on another game, that is until the DLC gets released.

That's all that's happened so far today, right now I'm staring down the next game to add to my growing pile of conquests, but you'll have to check back Thursday for more on that. In all honesty I've been a bit lazy lately in just about all areas of my life, including this blog, so I'm trying to pull myself out of that and hopefully there'll be some more posts popping up but that's all for this one. Leave a comment if you've got something you'd like to say and I'll see you laters.

Fridaily Update

Celebrations were had,
Super Hard mode was beaten

A while ago I thought this day would never come but today I can finally say I'm finished with Bionic Commando: Rearmed. Thursday night saw the realization of weeks of effort, all for 5 measly Gamerscore. If I were doing this for the points alone I probably would have moved on long ago but I like to think of myself as a completionist and while I'm not sure Bionic Commando: Rearmed was the hardest game I've ever slogged through it would definitely have to be one of the hardest ones in a long, long time.

Yesterday was a weird day, filled with ups and downs, which is why I didn't end up posting anything - I just didn't seem to have it in me. The completion of Bionic Commando: Rearmed Thursday night did cap off a mixed day on a high note and help to put yesterday behind me. This won't be then end of Nathan Spencer as today, after a brief stint revisiting Joe Danger 2: The Movie and completing the Undead Movie Pack DLC, I've started working on Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2. Yes you read that right, more Bionic Commando action than you can shake a stick at. I'm sorry if you've had enough of Bionic Commando but I figured while it was still fresh I might as well put the skills to use and finish the sequel off as well. Before we go deeper into that, lets talk about Joe Danger 2: The Movie.

Fast paced and loads of fun. You should give Joe Danger a try

Joe Danger was a cool little game that can also be very hard, however I found it insanely fun. You play as a cartoon stuntman doing all kinds of daring tricks and stunts while trying to complete the different objectives each level tasks you with. I absolutely loved Joe Danger so when Joe Danger 2: The Movie came out I jumped on it quick. After completing Joe Danger 2, I had deleted it off my hard drive sad that there would be no more Joe Danger for the foreseeable future. I was happily proven wrong when word of DLC for Joe Danger 2 reached me. I bought and played the Undead Move Pack last night and this morning and while happy to revisit Joe Danger I found the DLC to be lacking and very short. After maybe 2 hours I was finished with Joe Danger again. Until next time buddy.

Back sporting a Mo this time

This quick pallet refresher proved to be all I needed to start thinking about tackling Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2. I thought what the hell, let's strike while the iron is hot. I had a quick look at the achievements and after playing the game for a little while I think I was right in my assumption that this incarnation of Bionic Commando will be easier than the last. It's been pretty fun so far, and I think I'm somewhere around halfway through my first play through. There seems to be a lot more levels this time, and the achievements require a lot of playthroughs, but with the quick progress I've been making so far I think this game won't put up half the fight the previous one did. The swinging mechanic is different this time, it behaves the way I thought it should have in the first game. After playing the original for so long however it's weird getting used to the change.

That's it for this week. No PC games, no phone games, just straight Xbox this time. I'll be back sometime next week, Monday is a public holiday so I'm unsure if I'll be writing anything but something will go live Tuesday for sure. See you all then.

Wednesdaily Update

Foil me once, Gottfried, shame on you.
Foil me twice, shame on me.

OK, let's get it out of the way again - Bionic Commando: Rearmed, I played it. I played it and played it and still haven't managed to beat the last level. I am getting very confident that it will happen soon though, as I'm now in a position where I can semi-reliably tell what heights the rockets are coming at now and usually make it into the third or forth sequence of the boss battle. It's agonizingly close and I did manage to beat the boss once, but I ended up dying on my way out of the level and it just happened that it was my last life. You can imagine some choice words were thrown around after that. I've done it before and I can do it again, it's just a matter of time and knowing that has taken some of the frustration out of each failure.

I'm still working my way around the map collecting extra lives before tackling the level. I still reliably make it to the boss with one or less deaths but the whole preparation process takes a while and can take a toll on my frustration levels when having to repeat it over and over. This has led me to continue playing Cook, Serve, Delicious in between attempts and I'm closing in on that second star restaurant rating. I'm interested to see if anything changes in the later game of Cook, Serve, Delicious as at this stage I've pretty much bought all the equipment available to me. Just buying and upgrading different foods might not be enough to keep my attention for too much longer. I have managed to obtain a couple of golden tickets, and so far the game has been obfuscating their use in mystery. I'm interested to see what they end up unlocking.

A walking boat in space

After working through 30 waves of Survival: Settlement last weekend, I got back in contact with my buddy Dillagence and he helped me through 20 waves of Survival: Swamp. We smashed through it in one go, netting me the "Swamp Survivor" achievement. This means one of the easiest multiplayer achievements is the only one I have left, however Iron Brigade seems to be very temperamental with constant disconnections and dropouts plaguing most of the matches I've been in. Sometimes it's me, other times a person I'm playing with but I don't think I've been in a match where 1 person hasn't dropped midway. This makes the last achievement very problematic as it asks you to "Complete a mission with 4 players". The quickest and least problematic way to do this is to play a boss level which can be beaten with 4 players in less than a minute, however no-one wants to play these levels. Dillagence and I were trying to sucker 2 other players into completing a quick match with us but most left the instant they saw it was a boss level and when trying to play a normal level someone always dropped out mid game. It was quite frustrating and I gave up after a while, but I will eventually get back to it and finish Iron Brigade once and for all.

Lastly the reason this blog is so late today is that I was out all day. I had a couple of appointments, and things ran long. I barely have had any time to even browse the internet today so if this entry seems a little rushed it's because it is. I'm trying to finish and post it before midnight, which as of right now is in 15 minutes. This time spent waiting for appointments was of some use though, as I made some stellar progress through pack 2 in iStunt 2. I've only got a few levels to get all the gold stars in now and it'll be smooth sailing from there. That's it for this blog entry, I've got to quickly find some pictures and post this now. Please leave a comment, anything you'd like to see on my blog, what you like best about it, constructive criticism or just that you flat out hated it. Hope everyone's had a good day and I'll see you all again Friday.

Xbox One Reveal Thoughts

We're going to do something a little different that the normal review today. The Xbox One was announced last week and I refrained from making any real comments about it because there was a lot of conflicting reports on a whole range of issues. I wanted to get most of the details ironed out before I would commit a few thoughts to paper just to make sure the opinions I had were based on actuality and not something that wasn't a reality. I've got a lot to say so there will be more Xbox One features leading up to E3.

I'm digging the new gamepad. The new analog sticks
and the D-Pad look like improvements.

The big reveal was much maligned and disparaged by nearly everyone everywhere I went on the internet. I couldn't really understand why. That's a lie, I know why, it's the same why behind nearly every goings on in the world - people are self centered, selfish and arrogant as a whole. I'm not trying to insult what seems like nearly everyone on the internet but if they would take the time to step back and look at the reveal objectively I think it was pretty successful in what they were trying to do. This was a nationally televised conference in the United States and as such Microsoft wanted to reach out to the every man. This was not a reveal for the gamers.

Everyone complaining about the Xbox One is deep into games. They love them, it's a major part of what they do with their free time and they enjoy it. Microsoft knows this audience, they know what matters to them is games but lets face it, games are still looked down upon by most of the mainstream. Games are seen as a waste of time, and gamers are still maligned as geeks, nerds and social incompetents. Microsoft has since come out with the lofty sales goal of 1 billion console sales, which gamers have reacted to with bemusement, seeing it as proof Microsoft have gone batty and they would have, if they were targeting gamers. A quick look for Xbox 360 sales figures found that 77 million were sold worldwide, well short of the billion mark. Looking at their 1 billion aspiration and the previous super popular console sales number, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft might be losing their mind, but then remember the Xbox One reveal.

What's more mainstream than TV?

That's right, they weren't targeting gamers. They know most gamers will buy an Xbox One or an Playstation 4, and that's a battle they probably think they can win at a later date, say E3. This reveal they were targeting the mainstream. This is the first time anyone has seen the console, and they are televising it nationally. If they come out and reveal the console as just that, a console, the mainstream market will nod, put it in their collectively looked down upon console box and won't give it another thought. If they come out and reveal the console for something the mainstream market can use and position it as such, with games being a bonus feature, then all of a sudden they're a lot closer to that 1 billion sales mark.

Bundling a motion controller device with the new Xbox One
may be a play to recapture more of the Wii buyers.

Do I think Microsoft will hit their 1 billion sales mark? No, probably not, but they're fighting in a much larger area now. Collectively the sales for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii console total under 300 million (with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 both selling around 77 million each while the Wii reached 100 million). Now some people bought multiple consoles, and the Wii sales were mostly to people who don't buy consoles and the Wii ran away with it. I think Microsoft saw this and thought "Wii killed it by selling to the mainstream, and it was a dedicated games console. Imagine what we could do if we convinced the mainstream that this box enriches something nearly 100% of people do - watch TV, playing games is a bonus".

Now I hope I don't have to point out to people that companies are in business for one thing, and one thing only, money. Microsoft positioning the console this way does something they want - it gets their foot in the door for mass market adoption. This isn't guaranteed obviously and as such they need to be able to rely on their already established market to catch them if they fall. It's because of this that I find it funny people have been saying Microsoft has forgotten about the gamer. They need us, we're their safety net! They haven't forgotten about us - they're banking on us saving their ass if they fail. Obviously Microsoft has been putting the effort in to make a games console for us. They've been securing exclusives and trying to give us the best gaming experiences they can deliver. This just wasn't the time for them to show it to us, Microsoft knew this and tried to temper expectations. Microsoft came out and said before the reveal that it wasn't going to show games or talk to much about anything gamers would find particularly exciting and they're saving E3 for that.

E3 will govern if I return to the Playstation brand for the first
time since the original Playstation or if I forge ahead with
the Xbox path I've blazed the last 8 years.

Will this gamble pay off? Only time will tell, Microsoft obviously thinks they have a really strong E3 line up and maybe they do. Personally the Xbox One reveal was exactly that, they revealed a box, it's called the Xbox One. The other stuff they talked about did nothing for me. I learned a little bit about the console and learned a lot about how they are trying to sell this console to people that aren't me. E3 is coming and coming soon, and E3 is my time. E3 is when I make my decision on what this console holds for me. They will show games, people will be talking about games, and developers for the first time will be able to talk about working on the next generation of games a little more openly. E3 is games and games are what I enjoy, the Xbox One will play games, in fact, contrary to popular internet opinion, it's main focus is games. How they advertise the Xbox One to non gamers is just that, advertisement. Advertisement's job is to bend the truth and sell things to people that they wouldn't otherwise buy, and it's the mass market Microsoft is really trying to hoodwink here. The Xbox One is a games system and I can't wait for E3 to roll around so I can make a more informed decision on which game system is really for me.

Mondaily Update

I admit there was some yelling, both in celebration and
frustration this weekend. Success is near, I can feel it!

It's another Monday and I finally have hit a decent milestone in Bionic Commando: Rearmed! Finally something I can point to and show some progress. Yesterday saw me finally managing to barely finish off the Challenge Rooms and boy was it a close finish. My heart was thumping when I crossed the finish line with less than a second on the clock. This brings me to a total of 195/200 achievement points obtained in Bionic Commando and I'm still working on the last level on Super Hard difficulty, but I have hope that it will be mine soonish too.

After trying that last level for a solid 5 days or more I've come to the point where I can reliably finish the level with 1 or no deaths. I've also discovered a tactic which sees you go back and revisit all the non combat levels in the game which house an extra life to let you face the boss with 15 or so lives to spare.Those 15 lives are then promptly thrashed by the boss but I've been making progress and I'm at the point where I know I will eventually be able to beat him, it's just a question of how long until it happens. Collecting those lives takes a while, which can be frustrating and then dying over and over adds a lot more frustration so I can only have a good two or three runs before I'm not at my best which this over this past week has seen me turn to Cook, Serve, Delicious on my PC.

Press the right buttons and do it fast, other orders are queuing up!

I've talked a bit about Cook, Serve, Delicious before but if I were to describe its gameplay to someone I'd have to say you get an order, then try and fulfill it as accurately and quickly as possible. You do this in the form of a button pressing mini game and try to fill every customers order and not let them wait to long and eventually leave. It's really quick with a round lasting 10 minutes or so which is perfect for breaking up my Bionic Commando: Rearmed induced frustrations. There's a layer of restaurant management and menu planning on top of this in the downtime between rounds. It's a simple game but it's serving me well and can become a little addicting.

Over the weekend I also returned to Dust: An Elysian Tail, which is another game I had finished a while before starting this blog that I noticed I didn't get all the Avatar Awards available. After looking up the award I had missed I discovered it had actually glitched on me and is one of the first ones you normally get. I started a new game on the easiest difficulty and ran through the game as fast as I could and ended up unlocking it in an hour or so. After deleting it from my hard drive again I took another look through my avatar awards and noticed a couple more games were missing a few so I've redownloaded them and will return to them eventually too.

Late Saturday night a good friend on Xbox Live told me that there was a Iron Brigade session scheduled later that night for the hardest achievement in the game. Settlement Savior requires you to "Complete wave 30 on Survival: Settlement". Dillagence and I have taken a couple of shots at this before in other sessions and it's very hard if you're approaching it wrongly. This session started at 1:30 am Sunday morning and was scheduled for 2 hours, needless to say it wasn't that easy and we played long into the early morning. For the first couple of hours everything was going smoothly and we played and failed a good number of games but then disconnections started plaguing our matches. One particularly good game saw me and the session host disconnect deep into the match leaving Dillagence and another session goer to fend for themselves and eventually earn the achievement. By this time the session was already long past finishing and being so early in the morning I wasn't sure if there would be a will to continue but Dillagence stuck in there and we tried once more which when smoothly for me and saw me obtain this achievement too. The session host was having connection issues but started playing with some other people and managed to unlock it himself as well so apart from going to sleep at 6am everything turned out great and I was happy I had another achievement I wasn't sure if I'd get under my belt.

It was cool to return to Iron Brigade again. I really enjoyed my time playing it.

This leaves 2 more multiplayer achievements to go in Iron Brigade but I think those will fall pretty easily if I put a little time in. Speaking of a little time I completed a couple more levels in iStunt 2, getting me past the half way mark in Stadium Stunts pack and closer to my second world with all the starts collected. Upon completing the second world with all stars it will be all downhill as there are no other achievements requiring 100% completion. I feel good about this weekends progress, and while it hasn't resulted in huge Gamerscore gains it has seen some progression in some of the more difficult completions I've been working on lately. 

Fridaily Update

I'm going to stop putting Bionic
Commando pictures in here soon.
I'm sure you're as sick of seeing
them as I am.

Friday always turns up so expectantly. Maybe I'm losing track of time because I've been stuck playing Bionic Commando: Rearmed for so long. Once again there has been some progress but no big milestones in relation to collecting the last two achievements I need to complete the game. I've managed to struggle through and eventually destroy another 2 levels in a row in the mission mode. This brings me to the last level and boy is it a beast! I've tried around 50 times so far and haven't gotten through the first part of the level.

Eventually I got frustrated and turned to the Challenge Rooms and made some good progress there too. I've now finished every Challenge Room except the last two. Hopefully I'll get them soon so I'll finally have something to show for this massive time commitment. I'm feeling especially rushed at the moment because of the announcement and relatively near release of the Xbox One. I still have a huge stack of games I haven't even touched and a bunch of boosting to do just to complete what I've already bought. I don't even want to think about the heap of games I still want to buy and play!

With Bionic Commando: Rearmed being so frustrating I've spent some more time on my PC playing intermittent bouts of Cook, Serve, Delicious. I've been coming up in Cook, Serve, Delicious' world with my restaurant receiving it's first make over and star. Personally I feel like my restaurant deserves much higher than 1 star status with flawless or near flawless service every day.

I'm working towards 2 star status

That's everything to have happened this week. I wish I'd achieved more. Once I finish Bionic Commando: Rearmed I have big plans, involving rapid fire completions and a renewed focus on boosting but I'm also deciding if I should just start Bionic Commando 2 straight afterwards as there must be some skill transfer and in the long run it'll probably be better to see if I can't just smash the sequel too. I've heard it's easier aswell, which is nice. Leave a comment if you'd like and have a good weekend everyone!

X-Men XBLA Review

I have some vague memories of playing X-Men in the arcades years ago. There were not many arcades around, and I barely ever went but I remember being invited to a friends birthday party at one and among the many games we played I'm pretty sure X-Men was one of them. At the time there seemed nothing to the game except to mash the buttons, and playing it again now it seems like I wasn't that far off all those years ago.

Overview

X-Men was originally a 4 or 6 player Beat 'em Up arcade game. You could play as either Colossus, Cyclops, Dazzler, Nightcrawler, Storm or Wolverine as you work your way through a number of Marvel super villains, foiling their dastardly plans until you reach Magneto and put an end to all this tom foolery for good. Each character can beat the many enemies into submission with a range of hand to hand attacks and a unique and powerful special move.

Rational
I'm a decent fan of Marvel's characters and Beat 'em Ups, with TMNT 1989 and Streets of Rage being my favourites, but X-Men just didn't do anything for me. X-Men just seemed like there was no apparent strategy or techniques for working your way through the game. Games were designed to suck quarters out of you back then but this is ridiculous. In TMNT 1989 (another Beat 'em Up available on XBLA) you can learn the levels and develop tactics for the wide range of enemies you'd encounter and even eventually maybe beat the game on one quarter. No such luck here, the sheer amount of enemies they throw at you in a single encounter makes dodging and moving around without getting hit nearly impossible.

This lack of strategy just turns the game into a shallow button masher, and without the impetus to do good (because your dollar isn't on the line anymore) you just button bash and continue your way through the game. When played this way X-Men is quite boring and short. All the challenge is pretty much removed by respawning then using all your supers and doing as much damage as possible before dying and repeating the process. It's when you look back on a game like this that you can really see how cheap the design really was.

Summary
X-Men only offers something to those that hold some sort of nostalgia for it. The game by itself is plain, offers little variety or strategy and is over in less than an hour. The only other way X-Men might interest you is if you are a major Marvel fan looking to mindlessly press a couple of buttons for a while. There's no story or gameplay hook to keep you coming back for more. X-Men's one redeeming feature may be that it has an easy 200 points if you have a friend with the game, so if you're way into achievements you might give it a look.

Wednesdaily Update

Urgh, just go away Rad

Man Bionic Commando must be the most talked about game on this blog. Yes I'm still playing it. Yes I've made some more progress. Yes, it's still hard. Bionic Commando: Rearmed is almost infuriatingly hard, I can only play it in 30 minute chunks before I'm swearing and punching things. This has stifled my progress a lot as I can't just sit there and play for hours, but the end is slowly getting closer. I managed to pass another level today and I do feel things are getting easier, but not by much. There are 3 more levels to go and once again I'm here hoping to finish it very soon.

Xbox One, the future is coming real soon!

This hope is expedited because of last nights Xbox One reveal. The next generation now has a name and it's deadline is looming over me. I turn around and take a peak at my stack of unplayed games then think about the many other games I haven't even bought yet that I want to play and I don't know if I'll be anywhere near finished by the time Xbox One comes about. I'm not sure if I'll grab the Xbox One on launch, as I still will have a whole bunch of games to play, but then again I think I'm in this situation because I waited about 2 years before I got my Xbox 360 and I tried to catch up on that 2 year period, which never happened. To this day I think I am about 2 years behind on all the games I want to play. It's this thought that makes me not want to repeat this process again, but what about all the games I haven't played yet. Having two systems on the go just means needing even more time to devote to gaming. It's a tough spot to be in, but most first world problems are lol.

Used games always seemed like a rip off to me anyway.
Shops offer you less than you'd get if you sold them direct
on eBay then turn around and sell them for 5 dollars
cheaper than the new copy.

I've seen a lot of negativity over the Xbox One on the internet but I'm still pretty optimistic. The presentation didn't really offer much to the hardcore gamer in me but then again it wasn't aimed at me. The presentation was televised nationally in America, and catered towards mums and old people to let them know the reason they should buy an Xbox. Of course it still does games, it will do them better than the Xbox 360 but with all the hate I've been seeing online people don't seem to realise this. I've seen people saying consoles are over, mostly in relation to the way Xbox One will handle used and traded games. You can't trade in or buy used games on the PC anyway, they've had single use serial codes for years. The TV stuff is an addition, the internet and Skype functionality is an addition. I think come E3 there will be a whole heap of gaming news and everyone will be flocking back into the fold.

Xbox One drama aside, I've been spending some more time on my PC lately due to Bionic Commando: Rearmed infuriating me so much. I finished Evoland, which was an awesome game and you should really check it out. I'm not sure if I'll review it as it's not an Xbox related game, but if I ever find myself with nothing to talk about I might. Say something in the comments if you'd really like to hear something about it. I moved onto another PC game called Cook, Serve, Delicious which is a great game to play between spurts of Bionic Commando: Rearmed to compose myself. Cook, Serve, Delicious is an restaurant sim/action management game. You manage your restaurant, choose what food to serve and what to use your hard earned money on at the end of each day but you spend the bulk of your time serving orders to your customers in the form of many different fast paced minigames. It's pretty much a restaurant themed Warioware with a higher level macro sim game being played over the top in the down time between serving. It's a lot of fun and you should check it out. Cook, Serve, Delicious is perfectly paced to be played in 10 minute sittings, like breaking up your frustration playing Bionic Commando: Rearmed for example.

These last couple of blog entries have gone up pretty late, I apologise for that and I'm going to try and get back to my normal posting times. Especially now with my new found enthusiasm to push through and complete as many games as I can before the Xbox One comes out. I'll hopefully be online and gaming a lot more. Leave a comment, and I'll see you all Friday.

Alien Hominid HD XBLA Review

Today's review is Alien Hominid HD. This game was released waaaay back in the early days of the Xbox 360 launch, which is about when I first bought it. I had heard good things and decided to take the plunge only to find myself way out of my depth. Alien Hominid HD seemed hard and unforgiving in a way that I wasn't ready to deal with at that point in my Xbox 360 life. Upon returning to it almost 4 years later I found that I was mostly mistaken and managed to get through all of Alien Hominid HD in a few days. With the exception of a couple of frustrating achievements I found Alien Hominid HD to be very enjoyable.

Overview
Alien Hominid HD started out life as a flash game on Newgrounds. Alien Hominid  was a cartoon fun, fast take on the classic run and gun action games like Contra. Behemoth decided to port the original game to the XBLA making it the high definition Alien Hominid we now have available. You play as an alien initially shot down by the United States to find yourself in a world of problems as you battle your way through FBI agents to regain your ship and try to escape this hell hole called Earth. Things are obviously not as easy as all that and you find yourself facing off against stronger and stronger foes in your quest for freedom.

Alien Hominid HD also includes a bunch of minigames, for you to try your luck at. Some are completely different than anything you'll experience in the main Alien Hominid game. One of these games is Super Soviet Missile Master, which has it's own achievement related challenge. This tasks you with flying a missile towards the US dodging obstacles in between and is reminiscent of an old Atari 2600 game.

Rational

Alien Hominid HD offers non-stop action

When you first start Alien Hominid you are thrust into the game with most of the options hidden away from you. This is the main reason I fled from Alien Hominid HD those many years ago. When you start a new game there are no difficulty options to pick, you just go. This confusion led to frustration and eventual surrender. The difficulty options are available to you in the options menu, make sure you take a trip there before picking new game. I would recommend running through on easy, as even easy posed some difficulties for me, though I really am not trying to present myself as an expert on this type of game because I'm not. Easy is enjoyable and offers just enough resistance to you as you get used to how the game controls and what it is asking from you.

There's a co-op option and many different mini games

Once I'd completed Easy I felt like I had a decent handle on the gameplay mechanics and I did a little better on the harder difficulties, but even then I was dying a lot and I didn't find Alien Hominid much fun anymore. If my first experience with Alien Hominid HD would have been the experience I had those many years later I wouldn't have avoided playing the game for so long. It's hard for me to be too negative on Alien Hominid as it was released so many years ago, but you can tell. The way the game moves and how the graphics look, they aren't near as sharp as those we've experienced in the years since Alien Hominid HD's release. Even the later releases by Behemoth blow Alien Hominid away.

The last gripe I had with Alien Hominid HD is that I felt the game never really told me how I should play it, or introduce any tactics to me. I wasn't making much progress until I found some guides that gave me a much clearer idea of the gameplay flow. Again this is another sign of Alien Hominids age, which is funny as I've played quite a few re-releases of older games and it seemed like most of those explained their gameplay just fine.

Head biting 50 enemies without touching the ground was one of the most infuriating achievements I've gone for

Summary
Overall Alien Hominid HD is a demanding game that people will get some fun out of if they have the dedication to learn how they should best play it. Running and blasting can be fun for a while, but when you really learn how everything is meant to work you make much faster progress and the whole game becomes more enjoyable. I can't say I recommend going back and picking this game up if you missed it when it was released, but it is worth taking another look at if you moved on prematurely like I did.

Mondaily Update

This weekend was a bit all over the place in terms of gaming. I didn't put the solid hours into Bionic Commando: Rearmed that I had planned so, while progress was made, I didn't get as far as I would have liked. I feel like I did make it past the tipping point as I completed another 3 stages in fairly rapid succession but I'm now stuck on one stage. I don't think it will be a problem for that long it's just that I didn't get to dedicate a huge chuck of time to finding strategies and working through it logically. I'm still hopeful that I will get through the rest of this game quickly, with only the last level being the only major hurdle in my way still. We'll see how that goes when I get to it.


I continued BloodForge boosting off and on over the last couple of days, dedicating a chunk of Sunday to finishing it up. Big thanks to Beast Incarnate for sticking with me through all my internet problems. I'm not sure if it was just the game or my internet or something else but searching for challenge updates seemed to take longer and longer and by the end of our boost it was trying to pull data from the servers for over 5 minutes before it would get anything. This must have fucked something up somewhere as the challenges started to become glitchy, with killing the last enemy in a wave not triggering the start of the next one multiple times. I ended up replaying waves multiple times while I'm sure Beast was sitting there wondering if I even knew how to play the game because of how long it was taking.

Sepia toned violence

Eventually it was obvious something had messed up somewhere between the servers and I with my screen becoming flooded with dummy challenges, all from Beast - even though BloodForge only lets you have one active challenge between any two people at a time. I had to click on each one, sit through 5 minutes of it contacting the server only to find myself dumped back at the main menu because that challenge obviously didn't really exist. It was beginning to get frustrating but I knew I only need one or two more to complete BloodForge so after some determination the last achievement was mine.

After finishing BloodForge I found myself in the Avatar Awards section of the dashboard. I'm not really sure what made me go peeping around in there but I discovered I hadn't unlocked all the awards in a couple of XBLA games I had recently finished. I saw that there was an award I missed in Crazy Taxi, which required me to play the game for 10 hours. Not being the biggest Crazy Taxi fan I decided to just grind it out by letting it idle in 10 minute Arcade mode. I knew this would take a while with minimum input from me, seeing as I unlocked the award for playing the game for 5 hours shortly before being finished with the game, so I went looking for something I could do to occupy my time.

Evoland evolves and adds new gameplay and graphics as the RPG progresses

This led to me looking at and enjoying Evoland. My computer is right next to my Xbox so I could reach over every 10 minutes to restart Crazy Taxi while I was playing. Evoland is a PC game that chronicles the progression of the RPG genre. As you get chests you gain abilities and new gameplay options, updated graphics, RPG tropes and more. It's a fun run through of RPG's as they evolved and as someone who has seen them as they did it was cool to experience it all in one game. It's fairly short and I'm just about finished with it but it was a great distraction while grinding Crazy Taxi and a great game to just play and experience yourself.

That's it for this weekend. I managed to squeeze in a couple more levels of iStunt 2. Slowly progressing there as well. I guess the theme for this weekend was slow progress but progress is indeed progress. Thank's for reading, leave a comment if you'd like and I'll be back Wednesday.