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. 

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.

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.

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.

Mondaily Update

I've got a
Nokia Lumia 710

This weekend was a busy one, and most of Sunday was taken up with my brothers birthday. I did manage to squeeze in a lot of gaming in the time I had. I even managed to find 30 minutes of time at the birthday celebrations making a little bit of headway in iStunt 2 on my Windows Phone. I'm not too fond of the game, seeing as I'm already over the main gameplay gimmick before I've even completed the first world. This is compounded by the two achievements for collecting all the stars in 1 and 2 worlds, but I'm hoping that if I manage to eventually work my way through the first two worlds with all the starts then I can just bomb through the rest of it and be done. That's wishful thinking for the foreseeable future though, as progress is intermittent and slow.

I managed to finish up Renegade Ops not long after writing about it in the last Fridaily Update found here. Alien rank ended up not being too hard with the right level and change in tactics. I had Armand leveled up to max with all my upgrades in the Tactics category maximising my shield usage. Level 3 ended up being the easiest if you manage to hit the shield every time one of the tanks or SAM sites try to shoot you. The mini-bosses throughout the level can be beaten pretty easily just by driving around them in circles while shooting. That puts a lid on Renegade Ops and be sure to check back tomorrow for the review.

Amy is enjoyable for the first three levels, then descends into frustration.

After beating Renegade Ops I decided to give Amy a whirl. I'd heard a lot of bad things about it but found it to be surprisingly OK.... in the first 3 or 4 levels. Amy can be super annoying throughout the game, running off all the time if you forget to tell her to stay put. You'd think a little girl trying to make it through a world with all these infected-zombie things would stay close to the adult trying to help and protect her. The last 2 levels are a nightmare and pushed the boundaries of my patience. In the second last level they decide to go stealth for the first half and if you get seen it's restart at the last checkpoint, which the game isn't so liberal about handing out. Combined with Amy's penchant for running off and you're fast reaching my frustration limits. Amy turned out to be a short romp, which felt unfinished and the story is left without any conclusion. I think they were planning on making another, but with the way this has turned out I doubt they will. I'll have a review on Thursday.

Red Dead Redemption is an amazing game. One of the best I've played on my Xbox 360.

After beating Amy I decided to revisit Red Dead Redemption. I would say that Red Dead Redemption is one of my favourite games, if not the favourite, I've ever played on my 360. I love the western setting, the atmosphere is amazing. The gameplay is tight and varied, I think I must have played close to 100 hours just in single player exploring and hunting. This is one of the only games I've spent time in just enjoying the atmosphere instead of pushing for the next objective. I've done absolutely everything in single player, so this weekend I revisited the multiplayer side.

Can't we all just get along?

Red Dead Redemption multiplayer is a different experience than that of single player, due to the insistence of everybody playing to just randomly kill everyone and everything in free-roam, instead of playing some death match, can be frustrating. Spawning into any multiplayer game only to be gunned down seconds later is frustrating at the best of times, but when it's completely pointless and it seems the only real reason is to troll people it gets plain annoying. Especially because when you die you drop out of any menu you were in, even if you were trying to jump to an actual game mode, to respawn. It makes it a race against the clock, to try and get to where you want to go before someone decides you deserve a bullet. You don't get anything from killing in free roam, why not play Deathmatch? Team Deathmatch? Or any of the other multiple multiplayer modes that reward you with XP and unlockables for doing what you are doing for nothing in Free Roam.

That's what you get for looking in them there menus!

I'm just trying to enter Co-op Mode,
leave me alone!

The last thing I've got to do in Red Dead is complete the Advanced Coop Missions with a Gold Medal
ranking. I could have sworn I'd already done so, but it never unlocked and I wasn't keeping track properly. Maybe an update or patch wiped my progress? Since then I've kept track and every time I've gold medaled a stage I've written it down. I'm down to one last mission, and if it doesn't unlock I'll be furious. This mode is probably my favourite out of all the multiplayer, which sucks because it seems like I'm in the minority. Either most people have moved on from this game or everyone just wants to run around killing for no reason in Free Roam. Most of the times I've tried to play barely anyone is on, and whoever is on always seems to be impatient and bad at the game. A lot of the Coop Missions require 3 or 4 people to stand a good chance of beating it. It can be done with 2 if you're both on point and really work together, but whenever I pair up with someone they don't want to wait around for another person and they don't want to work together so we end up dead within minutes. It's annoying and factor in the fact that people like or dislike certain missions and flat out refuse to play the ones they don't like and I have one mission left which just may be one they refuse to play and it's almost impossible to get the one you want to play. I hope I complete this someday soon, as I love the game, but relying on selfish randoms to get your last mission done is akin to pissing into the wind.

This updates getting rather long, but I've got one more game to touch on. I started playing through Joy Ride Turbo yesterday. It seems rather short and I have already placed 1st in all the races available. All that's left to do is grind for a bunch of coins and collect all the upgrades and trophies scattered across the freeroam/stunt park sections of the game. I'll write a bit more about Joy Ride Turbo next time because this is getting long.

Renegade Ops review coming tomorrow, check back for that. Leave a comment below and I'll see you Wednesday with another update!