Fridaily Update

Welcome to another Fridaily Update, this week has been a bit slower than normal due to me still struggling away on Bionic Commando: Rearmed. I did make some more progress, working my way through 4 different stages so far and getting closer to the point where I felt the game got a bit easier last time. Let's hope that's still the case for Super Hard as these levels can be really trying! I managed to get the Helmet upgrade, which gives me an extra hit to work with but the enemies don't take any prisoners and 1 more hit helps but isn't the game changer I'm looking for. I really hope I manage to complete this run sometime this weekend as I can't help but feel that this is starting to drag, taking time away from me playing other games.

Speaking of other games I've managed to convince my good friend Beast to start playing BloodForge so we can both knock out the achievements tied to the challenge arenas of the game. I think BloodForge is an average game, with some great style and violence to it, but their challenge system is actually really neat. I'm sure some other games are doing the same thing, I just can't think of any right now. BloodForge's challenge arenas are basically wave survival with different and more numerous enemies swarming you as the waves progress. In between each wave you have the ability to choose a modifier which will give you more or less points as you progress. Once you die you can send a challenge to a friend who, if they accept, will have to try and beat your score or survive longer than you did with the modifiers you picked. If they win the challenge can then be bounced back to you and you'll have to try to beat the new high score. When somebody fails, it's game over and you can issue a new challenge if you'd like. It's a cool system that doesn't require you to be online at the same time.

BloodForge's style is great!

We've been sending challenges back and forth to work towards our multiplayer achievements and as soon as I have mine I will have BloodForge completed and will start working on another review. Apart from BloodForge the only other game I've made some more progress in is Angry Birds, finally managing to 3 star all the levels Episode 2 had to offer. If I'm honest it wasn't really me who completed Episode 2. I only had one level that I could not 3 star, even though I must have tried over 100 times. I was at my parents place Wednesday night and my brother was there, who is a much better Angry Birds player than me, and he said he'd give it a go. After ten minutes I heard that familiar 'bloop' that we all love so much and as soon as I finish Bionic Commando: Rearmed I will start work on finishing the rest of Angry Birds. I just need to worry about 3 starring all the levels in Episode 3, which luckily is the last episode to have any star related achievements, as the rest are all grinding related and can be done on any level.

I got a reply from Xbox Support about my Serious Sam: TSE inquiry which, as I expected, resulted in nothing. I'll post it soon, with some thoughts, on a different entry as this one is getting long. I reviewed Zeit² yesterday, you can read it here. That's everything that's happened in these last few days, leave a comment and I hope everyone has a good weekend!

Wednesdaily Update

My face probably looked something like
the crazy face in the top left as I lost all self
control and start yelling like a two year old
because this game is damn hard!

Welcome back to another Wednesday. This week hasn't been very productive on pretty much every front I've got going right now but it's not for lack of trying! We'll start with Bionic Commando: Rearmed, which I'm starting to believe will become a mainstay of this blog for a long, long time. I made some progress Monday night in the challenge rooms, collecting a couple more completions and now I'm left with a handful that I just can not finish. I've spent hours trying different rooms and frustration was starting to reach boiling point. I decided to take a break from that to return to my Super Hard campaign run through.

After bashing my head against Super Hard for a day I finally managed to beat one level... one! Slow progress is still progress and I'm still determined to complete this run through as I know if I just beat a few more levels the extra items will start making life easier. I'm hoping the experience will be somewhat like my hard difficulty run through with the first 3 or 4 levels being hard as nails, like struggling to reach the top of a hill, but then the last two thirds of the game ended up being all downhill.

Apart from Bionic Commando: Rearmed, there hasn't been much else happening. I ended up contacting Microsoft Support about the Serious Sam: TSE issue I have been having. After some internet sleuthing I actually found out that it wasn't just me and the issue is Australia wide. There has been some apparent movement on this issue and I think one of two things will happen;

1. We finally get access to Serious Sam: TSE here in Australia or, 
2. The completely removal of all mention of Serious Sam: TSE from the marketplace in Australia.

Serious Sam Double D XXL is different
in that it is a 2D Side-Scrolling Shooter.

To be honest I'm expecting the second outcome, but fingers crossed for the first. I mentioned before that I may post the chat log and I remembered to save it for you guys so I will be posting that later today if you guys want to read through the over 2 hours I had to spend chatting politely to the support crew. I really do think they try their best, but sometimes they don't seem all that knowledgeable. In the end I'm happy with the time spent and my experience because, if nothing else, I'll hopefully get some amount of closure on this Serious Sam problem. Oh I also ended up buying Serious Sam Double D XXL, which was part of the Serious Sam themed Deal of the Week last week. This now leaves Serious Sam: TSE as the only Serious Sam available on the Xbox that I don't own.

Apart from that the only other little bits of news come from the Windows Phone. Monster Burner, a game I only mentioned in passing in a previous Update, has now been repriced from free to being a dollar to download. If you missed out then I'm sorry, but you'll now have to pay money to experience Monster Burner. I haven't played it yet so I can't say if it's a big loss. The other Windows Phone news is that during my escapades with Xbox Support they wanted me to take some pictures of the dashboard, which I did with my phone and this required me to connect it to my PC to copy the pictures and upload them.

Upon connecting my phone I discovered there was an update for it, which I promptly denied as I'm not taking any chances with Angry Birds messing up. Especially now I've spent a bit of time trying to complete it. This means I'm going to have to start work on Angry Birds again to complete it before I'm able to download this update. I've mentioned before that Angry Birds has been removed from the marketplace and replaced with a version that no longer supports achievements, it's because of this that I'm not risking the update as it could put an end to the ability for me to complete the game.

In site news I've added a navigation bar at the top which lets you sort the blog roll from everything to just reviews. If there are any other separations you would like easy access too just say so in the comments! That's everything so far this week, leave a comment about whatever and I'll be back Friday to ramble on some more.

Fridaily Update

Friday's here! This means the weekend and more gaming! Since Wednesday there has been some decent gaming as well. I haven't gotten back to Angry Birds yet, I'm still taking some time away from that one. I'll return to it soon, maybe sometime this weekend or next week as I still want to get it finished before any potential problems arise from it's delisting. For now I'm enjoying my time away from the frustration of chasing those stars.

Not as hard as I once thought!

I've spent most of my time since Wednesday playing Alien Hominid HD, which I have now finished. The majority of the achievements are actually pretty easy once you know what you're doing. I don't know why I got so discouraged all those years ago looking back on it now. The game doesn't require all that much from you and is rather forgiving with it's lives and continues when you aren't playing on hard. I think it was the fact that I looked through the achievements and saw the one called Perfect Fight which wants you to "Defeat the Final Boss without using a continue" which I assumed meant that you had to play the whole game and beat him without continuing, which was quite demoralizing seeing as I was continuing on the first level. Turns out this is not the case, and loading up the final level and beating him that way is enough to unlock the achievement.

Those Soviets just wouldn't stand still, all I wanted to do
was rip their heads off!

The walkthrough helped me immensely, and I followed it completely. There are still a few hard achievements and some luck/patience based ones, which I'm not that gifted in. WMD tasks you to "Reach 5000 Km in Super Soviet Missile Master" which is a mini-game in Alien Hominid and required hours of attempts only to be denied more than 5 times with over 4900 Km. Eventually I managed to grab that achievement and nearly hit 6000 Km, it's funny how things work like that sometimes. That left me with the last achievement I needed, Head Chomper which wants you to "Head bite 50 enemies without touching the ground or firing." This is another achievement that just requires hours of patience and practice and luck. After trying for hours I was about to give up on it and started doing something else but I decided to come back to it and just relax and take it really slow while I was watching some Youtube videos and ended up unlocking it when I wasn't even really paying attention.

More running and gunning!

I'm really pleased I've put a lid on Alien Hominid and sealed up that 4 year quest. Emboldened by this victory I noticed Bionic Commando: Rearmed sitting around in my games list and I decided to tackle that. This is another game from my past and, according to the time-stamp on my then singular Bionic Commando: Rearmed achievement which reads 4th of January 2009, has been sitting around for longer than Alien Hominid HD on my hard-drive. I'm not so sure if I'll manage to complete this as it seems a lot harder than Alien Hominid HD, but I definitely want to complete some more achievements and at least beat the game once on a lower difficulty or something. So far I've managed to pop another two achievements and am working on a third. There's a long road ahead with this game so expect to see some more of it around here.

Apart from that there has been some more movement in the Windows Phone front, with the release of Monster Burner this week which is available for free. As someone that can never pass up the allure of free Gamerscore I downloaded this right away but haven't fired it up yet. I'm not playing any more Windows Phone games until Angry Birds and iStunt 2 are in the bag I've told myself. This goes for the recent purchase of Sally's Salon: Luxury Edition as well, though I'm not really all that interested in playing it. It's the Windows Phone Deal of the Week this week, with it being discounted to a buck, so get on it while you can if you're interested.

Speaking of Deal of the Week, this weeks Xbox DotW is Serious Sam themed, with all the Serious Sam games being discounted. As you might know I recently completed Serious Sam: TFE (Review) and was happy with this opportunity to grab the other Serious Sam episodes only to find the Marketplace being quite glitch when it comes to Serious Sam: TSE. Serious Sam: TSE doesn't show when browsing the Marketplace normally, but when searched for appears without the option to buy the game, only to download the demo. I did so, thinking once I had the game on my hard drive I could unlock it from within the game, pay my MSP and be on my way. This doesn't work either, instead it displays a notice saying that this content isn't available in my region. I don't understand why Serious Sam: TFE and Serious Sam 3 would be fine for my region but Serious Sam: TSE isn't. I'm planning on getting in contact with Microsoft about this soon as I don't want to miss out on this deal, especially because I'm planning on completing the Serious Sam series.

That's been my last two days, looking at this wall of text makes it seem far more eventful than I thought it was. Wednesday I teased some more about the upcoming features of my blog and I was right in holding back on promising anything. I've hit a snag and I'm not in the process of ordering some more stuff to get the stuff I already ordered to work, sigh. Oh well, I'm not going to harp on about this and tease it anymore until I know it's already working so I'll be going dark on this front for a couple of weeks it seems, forget I said anything. Hope everyone has a good time gaming this weekend, leave a comment if you feel inclined to do so, I'd appreciate it, and I'll be back Monday!

Wednesdaily Update

Hey everyone, Wednesday rolls around and some exciting things are going down. Before we get to that first lets cover what I've been up to the last couple days. I'm still chugging along on my quest to try and get Angry Birds done, with it being pulled from the marketplace I'm anxious to complete it, hopefully without any problems. I worked my way through what was left of the second episode, 3 starring everything except for one level which I can't for the life of me manage to hit the score required for the third star. Even if I do everything in the videos that I'm following I always seem to be a few thousand short of where I'm supposed to be.

It's situations like this that really put me off certain games. Games that have a huge luck component just frustrate the hell out of me. You can do everything exactly how you're supposed to and still end up failing and that just isn't a great incentive to play the game. I place my birds exactly as the video and the blocks fall the exact same way every time except sometimes these ones break, other times they don't. Why? The physics engine just messing up I guess. Sometimes a stone block falls from way up and only cracks, sometimes it slides off from a lower platform and it shatters instantly. For these reasons Angry Birds has always been more annoying than entertaining for me. I guess that's just the way the green pig infested tower crumbles.

Physics, why you no consistent?

So I'm one star away from the Episode 2 - Total Destruction achievement. After trying for that star for hours I decided to move on and I've made some headway into the third episode but my previous couple of  hours failures haunted me and I decided that I've had enough of Angry Birds for a while. Thinking that I needed some time away from those annoying birds I was looking around wandering what to tackle next. Slightly lost I was browsing random TrueAchievement pages and saw a link to an Alien Hominid HD Walkthrough on the right hand side of a page.

Alien Hominid is a game that I liked the look of and played for a couple of minutes years ago (on the 3rd of April 2009 by the time-stamp of my first and only achievement in the game before yesterday). It just seemed crazy hard and I had no idea what I was doing or how to tackle the achievements so I gave up on it real quick. Discouraged I never tried to play it again, scrolling past it every time I looked at my games library on my Xbox 360. It's one unlocked achievement taunting me, always reminding me of my pathetic skill in side-scrolling shooters. Well no more! I clicked on that walkthrough and have been following it towards success. I'm two achievements away from completing it, and while they aren't necessarily hard, man are they frustrating. Obviously I hope to wrap Alien Hominid HD up fairly soon and put a lid on this 4 year saga.

That's my last couple of days in gaming. Last Fridaily Update I sort of teased something fairly exciting and today it arrived in the mail. I have been looking at it and messing around a bit but I'm not in the position to start testing it out yet. I still have to set up some stuff and maybe buy some things. I would explain my plans but I first want to get it up and running and see what I can actually accomplish instead of making empty promises. Hopefully by the time Friday comes round I'll be in a better position and be able to share with you guys. That's it for today, yesterday I posted a quasi-review of Red Dead Redemption, stay tuned for a more formal review tomorrow, leave a comment and I hope to see you all again Friday!

Mondaily Update

For the flock!

This weekend was a busy one in gaming and out. I played a bunch on my Windows Phone to get the weekend started. Mostly Angry Birds, for the reasons I stated in the last Fridaily Update. I've managed to get halfway through the second episode while three starring each level. It's been going smoothly enough, seeing as I've been using Youtube videos to guide me through each level and get those coveted stars. As I've mentioned before Angry Birds was never something that I found incredibly entertaining. While it's fun enough to play a level or two, after that I get bored and increasingly annoyed with trying over and over to get a 3 star score. The fact that you don't even have any idea if the way you're approaching the level can result in three stars or not isn't my idea of a good time.

After having enough of Angry Birds I put some time in with iStunt 2 again. These games are quite different yet I get a very similar experience from them both. I think it's because of the achievements I'm aiming for at the moment in both, getting 3 star ratings in the first 3 Angry Birds episodes and collecting all the stars in the first two iStunt 2 packs. Both require multiple trial and error runs before finding out how you're able to achieve all the stars. iStunt 2 is a very different game however, with you tilting your phone left and right to rotate your snowboarder in order to land jumps and other stunts. I'm enjoying iStunt 2 slightly more than Angry Birds, but I'll be very happy when I finally finish both of them.

After spending most of my Saturday gaming on my Windows Phone and it subsequently whinging about having a low battery, I turned to my trusty Xbox 360 once more. After scrolling through my slowly diminishing XBLA games list Zeit² caught my eye. Zeit² has been sitting there quietly at the end of my games list for a while now. I'm not the biggest fan of these types of shooters but it had been discounted to a very reasonable price a while back and I couldn't help myself. I have seen a bunch of friends complete it relatively easily so I decided I'd tackle it myself.

Zeit² throws a hell of a lot your way, and quick too!

Zeit² has a trick up it's sleeve, you can rewind time, and the game requires you to use this and use it often. It took me a little while before I wrapped my head around the tactics  something like this opens up to you but eventually I felt like I had a decent grasp of them. I was wrong, Zeit² keeps adding and adding features right up until the final boss, barely giving you time to come to grips with any of them. Eventually I muddled my way through it, only barely knowing what I was doing at any given time. The achievements and game are easy to get through, but if you want to spend the time I think there is a lot here you could master.

After Zeit², I was contacted about playing some Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone by a couple of friends. As I have been looking for a group to get the Epic Run 4 player achievement for a long while now so I jumped at the chance. Everything went smoothly and about an hour later everyone grabbed their achievement and thanks to King Plug, The Dark Liege and Chilli Thunder I have one more completion! You can expect reviews covering Zeit² and Zombie Apocalypse: NDA in coming weeks.

That's the weekend in gaming, this update is long enough already but I'll continue for just a little longer. Friday night we went to see Oblivion, the new Tom Cruise science fiction epic, and I have to say I quite enjoyed it. The group I saw it with had a different opinion but I thought this was the first time I had seen a real Sci-Fi movie in what seems like forever. Most Sci-Fi these days seems like it's just there as a setting for an action film but this one seemed different. It had some action to be sure but most of it was just good old fashioned, I hesitate to use the word but, slowburn Sci-Fi. Then came Saturday and the girlfriend had signed me up to run the 5 km Stampede fun run event in Perth. I wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea but it was a fun and messy time. After sloshing through mud and maneuvering through obstacles I was dead tired, but wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

Fridaily Update

Hey all, another Friday rolls around and I have spent most of my gaming time with Iron Brigade and it's DLC Rise of the Martian Bear. On Wednesday I told you all of the troubles I had been experiencing with the DLC being a lot harder than the original game; the enemies are a lot tougher and they throw a lot more of them at you. This was the case for the first and third level but the others were almost too easy. The difficulty ended up being all over the place in Rise of the Martian Bear but I'm glad I've finally finished it.

I spent some time playing the game online with a variety of people but it seems the multiplayer isn't very stable. I had no problems playing Red Dead Redemption for hours on end with 16 people in massive free-roams but for some reason getting 4 people together on a aircraft carrier with legs usually results in dropped connections. It's really frustrating as the achievements I have left are all multiplayer ones. I will keep working on it here and there but it's time to start a new game now I have nothing left to do by myself.

I never really got into the whole
Angry Birds phenomena

There's been a couple of developments in the Windows Phone front, with the first being Rorio pulling the Angry Birds game for Windows Phone 7 and re-releasing an updated non-Live enabled version. I started playing the Angry Birds game a while ago and left it half finished, now that it's pulled I've decided I better get back to it and finish it off before something happens. If anything glitches, I won't be able to re-download it and try again, so fingers crossed.

The second thing I've got to say is the new Deal of the Week on the WP is Farm Frenzy 2 for a buck. I buy pretty much anything if it's a dollar and I have a huge stack of WP games waiting for me, all bought for a dollar. I might put in some work and clear a bunch off my phone so there could be some Windows Phone game reviews popping up here some time soon.

That's it for this week, there has been one more exciting development but I'll wait and see how it pans out before talking about it. There could be a bunch more content coming out in the relatively near future, so get hype! Leave a comment below and I'll see everyone Monday.