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

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.

Wednesdaily Update

Firstly I'd like to apologise for for not getting the review for Deep Black: Episode 1 up in time yesterday. It seemed like I turned away for a minute and all of a sudden it was midnight. If you're interested in knowing more about Deep Black: Episode 1 you can check it out here. Since Monday not too much has been going on with my Xbox, I'm not exactly sure what happens with my time but it all seems to vanish without anything productive to show for it.

New missions, enemies and weapons. All you could want but it's damn hard!

Monday I filled you guys in on my progress in Iron Brigade, since then little has happened. I managed to finish the main game in pretty much one sitting, but have been banging my head at this DLC for days. The difficulty has definitely been ramped up, enemies take a bunch more damage and come at you from more varied entry points. Guns I had been dominating with in the normal game feel super weak now and it took me hours to get past the first level.

Vlad is back, this time in bear form!

I've managed to work my way to the third Rise of the Martian Bear battle now, but have been stuck here for days. I managed to get most of the way through the last wave once, so I'm hoping I'll finish it soon, but if there are more, harder levels on the way I'm not sure what to do. That's all I can talk about right now, as I said earlier this week hasn't been too productive. I'll have another review up tomorrow (I promise this time) and hopefully come Friday I'll have a bunch more exciting things to talk about. Leave a comment and see you later.

Mondaily Update

Hey all, today just seems to have gotten away from me. It's 10:30 pm as I write this and it seems like I haven't been able to find any time to play and Xbox or write this post since I woke up. This will have to be a quick one as I would like to squeeze in some Xbox and whatever else I find interesting on the web tonight.

Some of the challenges are quite Crazy! Ha!

Friday I talked about having just started Crazy Taxi and how quick and easy most of the achievements were. Well I managed to finish off the remaining 3 achievements after writing that entry with the help of some good Youtube videos. Someone a lot better then I swanned through the challenges like they were nothing, but after watching them I ended up beating them aswell, although with quite a bit more effort and profanities. Crazy Taxi was an enjoyable ride and a quick, although not exactly easy, 200 points. Look for a review sometime in the future.

After Crazy Taxi I found myself looking at True Achievements, an awesome site by the way, give it a look here, and noticed a friend asking if anyone wanted to do any Co-op in Iron Brigade. I had been wanting to start the game but had been putting it off due to the co-operative achievements so this seemed like the perfect chance to give it a whirl. I've played a whole bunch of it and it's really enjoyable and quite the challenge. I did a whole lot of co-opin and a lot by myself. Right now I'm working my way through the DLC, Rise of the Martian Bear, which takes the Mobile Trench Division straight to Mars.

Iron Brigade is fun and funny!

Apart from that I squeezed in a couple more iStunt 2 levels in some down time I had, and watched a couple of movies over the weekend. The first being Iron Man 3, which was quite good. I really enjoyed the first Iron Man but the second was very average I thought, so I didn't know what to expect. They really turned it back around with this movie, but not being much of a comic book fan I dunno what they would think about how the Mandarin was portrayed. I won't say much else, as it is still new and don't want to spoil anything. I know this is not a movie blog, but I also ended up watching Paranormal Activity 4, which was quite disappointing. Even not being the biggest fan of the series, this one seemed lazy and added nothing new or exciting. The Xbox 360 and Kinect do make an appearance. Did you know the Kinect can track ghosts?

That's all for today, time to squeeze in some gaming. Leave a comment and come back tomorrow for the long awaited review of Deep Black. I got a few reviews on the back burner now, so there will definitely be new content for a while. See you then.