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.

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!

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.

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.

Thursdaily Update

Also starring Bat-Nipples.

Hey all, sorry about not publishing an update yesterday, time just seemed to slip away from me. In truth I was just too engrossed in DC Universe Online and only played a couple of hours of Daggerdale. The upside is Gotham is safe once again from the evil exploits of Bane and Scarecrow. Batwoman was quite happy, I never knew she was a red head! I guess my only Batwoman experience is that of Alicia Silverstone in the thoroughly average movie Batman & Robin. Now that I think of it she may have actually been Batgirl... I digress.

TheDonMega is now level 11 and has taken down his fair share of villains, learnt a new ice power that encases him in ice and heals a lot of health quite rapidly and finally learnt how to fly faster. Getting around the world with only the base level flight was quickly becoming tiresome. I will say that I am enjoying the change of setting a lot, as all of the MMOs I've played in the past have all been in a fantasy-ish setting. This is the first time I've played in a PvP server, which has made it a lot more fun. Minding your own business trying to complete a mission only to have some villain drop in unannounced to battle you has kept things interesting, turning the rote MMO fetch quest into something unexpected.

TheDonMega

Me and my buddy (Badgeros), who convinced me to play a bit with him, have been flying around together for the most part and we've had a lot more success than failure when it's come to villains dropping in unannounced. One of the best times I've had so far is when 3 villains tried to jump us as we were searching for some fetch-quest MacGuffin. Badgeros took the brunt of the onslaught and concentrated on the highest level attacker while I danced around dodging a lot of damage while trying to deal my own. He managed to take out his main assailant but his health had dwindled too much and as he got caught in another attack he collapsed, leaving me and 2 damaged but still dangerous attackers. After a flurry of ice and bullets it turned into a duel between me and the remaining perpetrator, and after a tense couple of minutes I had him on the ropes. As he went to take of TheDonMega gave chase, wanting to avenge the fallen Badgeros. As I chased the villain around the corner of yet another skyscraper I froze. There I was facing 12 odd villains forming a group for a raid, before I could even turn around TheDonMega was sent crashing into the pavement. Flying through a city, popping caps in fools with guns, experiencing PvP and a different genre to MMO my way through might just hold my attention for a while.

Enough PC talk, this blog has Xbox right up there in the title. Since I last updated everyone I have finally leveled everyone of my Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale characters to level 10, which took a lot longer than expected due to me losing my concentration and dying every second run through of the last boss. Only just moments before starting this entry I finally struggled my way through beating the last boss in Coop with myself. Having to babysit a level 1 character through the last boss while simultaneously trying to deal as much damage as possible to get it over as quickly as possible is something that took more tries than I'd like to admit. A hint for those going for it, don't think that if he goes down and you get to the boss in time before he bleeds out that you are safe. I found out the hard way that his timer is still ticking down during the last long diatribe he has to get out of his system before finally croaking it.

Spoilers: The last boss is a dragon. Now you don't have to play Daggerdale, you're welcome.

One more achievement to go, and that's grinding my way to having 100 000 gold. I should be done by the end of today and will therefore be posting a review of Daggerdale next time I blog. I'm not sure if I'll be writing an entry over Easter, so I'll take this time to wish everyone a happy Easter. Try not to engorge yourselves too much on chocolate and whatever else you'll be eating during the festivities.

Tuesdaily Update

Hack and/or Slash

So we finally get to a more typical update post. Shorter and to the point, though in the past any blog I've started by saying that has been anything but. I'll try to buck the trend, but first I hope everyone's had a fine day full of gaming and/or achieving. All of my gaming time has been spent with Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale lately. I'm closing in on finishing the game a forth and final time, however I will still need to put in some time afterwards.

One of the achievements requires you to get all characters up to level 10, which will be a bit of a grind seeing as you finish the story at around level 8, even if you complete all the side quests. This is the first action RPG where I have actually enjoyed playing a spell caster. Usually I find playing one tedious, my Dwarven Cleric and Halfling Wizard have both been the most fun to play. Historically I've been more of a warrior type, but I have to say the Human Fighter just didn't grab me at all.

I'm about 3/4s the way through with my Elven Rogue, which is the last of the characters you can play as, and about to jump back in kill off a whole bunch more goblins and hopefully finish the game. Other than getting all characters to level 10 the rest of the achievements are easy.

Daggerdale is very similar to the original Diablo in that it all takes place in the one dungeon. You work your way through the floors completing quests until you reach the bottom/end and face off against your nemesis. I won't go into too much detail on the game as that's not what these updates are for, I expect to finish it soon however and will write up a review.

Today was a Good Day in Metropolis

That's all that has been happening on the Xbox 360 front. On the PC, however, I have been playing some DC Universe Online at the behest of a friend. This is the first MMO I've delved into since World of Warcraft, which I lost 3 months to years ago. I usually peter out on MMO's fairly quickly, though I will say DC Universe is now free and has a cool character creation tool that has allowed me to squash injustice as Ice Cube with both my gats and ice powers. You might find me flying around the PvP US Server. My hero's name is TheDonMega, drop me a line if you play.