Saturday, July 31, 2010
-Note to self, blog a little more frequently than every two months. I got so much I want to recap that now I am going to have to be ultra concise on the blog, and knowing myself that may prove to be impossible!
-For the first couple weeks of July, my sister Jane and her husband Shawn, and their two kids Adrian & Kadeance were visiting. It was the first time I saw them in nearly two years! We did a ton of activities. We played a lot of board games, with Apples to Apples and Smartass receiving the most play. I watched a NASCAR race with Shawn, and the family got together for a toasty bonfire later that night too. After having a blast playing Risk on Xbox 360 and Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune of PS3, I brought the PS3 over to my mom's to have an all day family videogame marathon. I also had Jeopardy on PS2 that was backwards compatible that was popular that night. But the big hits were Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud and Buzz.
Had a chance to record a podcast with Shawn where we reminisced over our old Madden & NCAA Football rivalries, and Shawn geeked out over NASCAR games, check it out! My dad hosted a 4th of July BBQ and grilled a feast for everyone. Biggest day out of the entire time they were here was when my other sister Ann threw a baby shower for Jane, as she is expecting her third kid. I despise baby showers in general, but my sis threw a fun one with lots of creative games that I and the other few guys in attendance enjoyed playing.
-My truck is trying to tease me into fixing it. The check engine light went off last month, took it in to check it out and it turned out to be a random mechanical hiccup that set it off and cost nothing to fix. Mechanic pointed out how my axle seals are squealing, but those cost a few hundred to fix and at this point I do not mind the squealing and am not going to spend a few hundred here and there on minor repair jobs anymore. I did manage to fix my car lighter on my own accord however! Earlier this year the car lighter stopped giving a charge to things like a GPS car charger and my Zune car kit. Last week I opened the fuse panel and replaced the fuse all on my own by looking at my car owners manual for directions. For me this is a big step forward in do-it-yourself car repair and ranks right up there with replacing my own headlight!
-I am glad I got that car lighter fixed because it was imperative for my GPS charger in my trek down to the Twin Cities for the Drunken Gamers Radio podcast five year anniversary bash! I had to pull some strings to get that day off from work, but it was worth it! It was awesome hanging out with the Drunken Gamers, and catching up with some of the other Robot Panic community regulars like Ryker XL, Apoch, Tiggermango and Torgo and meeting the hosts from the podcast, Gamers with Jobs. There was some great food cooked right over a bonfire, and many drinks to be had. Moe and Torgo kicked my ass royally in fooseball to where I only scored one point in total! And here I thought I could carry my own all these years, well I was pretty wasted to be fair. We finished the night with a huge group podcast where we payed homage to five years of DGR! If you want to hear me drunk off my ass on a podcast, then download away!
-I cannot recall blogging about it in sometime, if ever, but I am finally over halfway through The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I saw it for clearance when our local Waldenbooks went under last year and have been slowly reading it for the past couple of months now. Simmons knows his stuff, and after a good overview of the book I am right now approaching page 500 of 700, where I am at number 29 of 96, which is his rankings and memories of the greatest basketball players of all time. I do not usually blog about a book until I am finished with it, but this one is so long that I felt a progress report was in due order.
-I have seen a ton of movies this summer at the theater and from Netflix, and I will try to be brief. On the Netflix and home movie side of things I will start off by saying that after finally seeing the Super Mario. Bros film, it was everything I thought it would be, and more! Invictus kicked all kinds of ass (and I would not expect anything less from Mr. Eastwood), that it inspired me to buy Rugby 06 on PS2. Finally got around to watching another classic in Glory, which did not disappoint! Slacker is a one of a kind movie experience like no other, I wish another studio would attempt this in a modern setting.
The season of big hit summer movies has been a mixed bag. It started strong with Iron Man 2, but then fizzled with mediocre flicks like Repo Men and Prince of Persia. A-Team was a good popcorn flick and I will never forget the flying tank scene. Take it to the Greek was more of the same awesomeness from the same guys that made another favorite of mine, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The movie season has been kicking into full gear now though past couple weeks with Predators delivering on all fronts, and being a terrific follow-up to the awesome AVP2. Last week I saw Inception and it blew my mind! Christopher Nolan is the shit, this director can do no wrong! Like all his movies, there is so much going on that the film is done before you know. I think is literally the fastest two and a half hour movie I have ever seen!
-Even with watching all those flicks, I am still making time to catch up on TV DVDs. Last week I wrapped up Seinfeld season 8 and Psych season 1. I am also slowly picking and gnawing away at episodes of Man vs. Food season 2. Next I am thinking of picking back up where I left off several episodes into the first season of Veronica Mars, and/or doing an Entourage marathon since season 6 just hit DVD.
-Very quick wrestling thoughts: I finished the Hart Dynasty and it is a great collection of matches from all the Harts with a very nice documentary feature to boot. I am digging the Nexus angle on RAW and am very curious to see who their mastermind is and who the mysterious GM of RAW is. On Smackdown I am glad that Kane is finally champion again, and hope he gets a good run with the gold since he has really stepped it up this year. Season 2 of NXT I am digging, and it is a far smoother production than season 1. I am pretty high on Alex Riley & Kaval (aka Low-Ki/Senshi) and would be happy if either one of them would emerge as the next breakout star.
-On the videogame side of things I recently wrote a very comprehensive look at the first half of the year where I ranked the Top 10 games from the first half of 2010 thus far, and even have a number of honorable mentions too. It is too bad a lot of these games are probably going to be overlooked when it gets time for the end of the year awards. Here are my top ten games of 2010, click here to find out why they made my list and for my thoughts on the year of gaming so far.
10) Split/Second
9) Yakuza 3
8) Super Street Fighter IV
7) Splinter Cell: Conviction
6) Blur
5) BioShock 2
4) Just Cause 2
3) Red Dead Redemption
2) Alan Wake
1) Heavy Rain
-Got three hours to spare? Than I highly suggest you download the latest On Tap, which is a very thorough retrospective on the PS2! That's right, to celebrate its upcoming 10 year anniversary in North America, we discuss the PS2 and its plethora of games for three hours, with special guests Glen & Josh of the Playstation Nation podcast!! What are you waiting for, download away!
-So I recently came to terms with a coworker to purchase his Sega CD and 32X and several of his games for them. I was not actively looking to buy these systems, but he really wants to start paying off his upcoming wedding. I kind of, but never really desired them as there were a couple of games I wanted to play on each system and now I guess I can. Plus after having a good Sega CD experience just a week prior to being offered a buy one I figured it was a good sign to finally pick one up.
The Sega CD experience I am talking about it is finally playing through Prime on Sega CD! I bought it three years ago for $3, as it was the only videogame made based on one of my favorite line of comics, the Ultraverse. Did not plan on getting a Sega CD at the time, but I knew Chris had two of them and I would probably play it on his one day. A year later we attempted to hook up both of his Sega CDs, but both systems did not stand the test of time, so I thought playing Prime was never meant to be. Matt bought a Sega CD last month and knew of my past Prime quabbles and invited me and Prime over. Prime is a straightforward 2D beat-em-up like many other comic book games of the time. After getting vanquished by the boss numerous times, we finally made it to the boss stage with the right amount of lives we thought it would take to best him when......a fucking blackout happened! That did not undermine us though as we picked it back up again the next day and we both added Prime to our games beaten list for the year!
-I have been playing a ton of other games in the last two months so lets try and make this as concise as possible for my gaming updates since the last blog...
-I am making a lot of headway into Retro Game Challenge and am now at the final challenge in Guardia Quest. I am having such a good time with Guardia Quest that it inspired me to pick up Dragon Quest IX on DS. I am a couple hours into DQIX, and just got past the tutorial section of the game. The story is very intriguing and I cannot wait to see what it has in store for me.
-Yesterday I blitzed through the Alan Wake DLC episode, The Signal. It is right around the same length as the six episodes that make up the disc version of Alan Wake. The Signal is well worth playing, as it picks up right at the end of Alan Wake and mixes up some core gameplay elements and has a far more satisfying end boss battle. I cannot wait to see what the second episode has in store.
-Playing a lot of XBLA and PSN games. Zen Pinball has a new Mars table, which I think is one of their best ones yet. Hydro Thunder Hurricane is an awesome follow-up to the arcade original. Risk Factions is a great translation of the board game. Classic Risk is there in all its glory, which I had a ton of fun playing online! I played a bit of Zombie Apocalypse on PSN also with Matt online, which is essentially Smash TV with zombies.
-On PS3 I beat Heavy Rain for a second time, doing exact opposite decisions from the first time around, which resulted in most scenes playing out quite differently than before and access to all new different scenes I missed the first time around. I also threw in Motorstorm Pacific Rift again and am over halfway threw its career mode.
-I have been playing a lot of racing games too recently. I rented Split/Second again and completed its season mode. Also making a bit of progress in my online and offline careers in Blur. Both games are awesome arcade racers, and as you can see in my rankings above I like Blur a little more, mostly due to its great take on a kart racer and bringing a lot more to the table. Speaking of kart racers, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing has been in my 360 a bit recently and I have finally completed all the missions in it. Dr. Robotnick was a pain in the final mission, and it must have taken me what seemed like nearly 50 tries to beat him!
-I brought my Nomad over to Joey's pad to do something we both wanted to do for quite some time, and that was attempt a dual playthrough of one of my favorites in Shadowrun. Unfortunately, we only played for about 20 minutes before Joe got fed up with the admittedly somewhat dated controls and vowed never to play Shadowrun again. For shame too since as he was hitting his breaking point I was just getting nostalgia fever as I was taking in Shadowrun in all its glory again.
-Here is a recap of the aforementioned PS3 family game night - I debated getting Jeopardy on PSN, but remembered I had the PS2 version. PSN version would have been cool, and even though a lot of times I feel like an idiot with the brain buster questions off Jeopardy, it does not feel right to have a Jeopardy game that is multiple choice answers. Jeopardy went well with backwards compatibility, and it was cool for the PS3 to recognize three controllers without digging out a multi-tap, especially since I only have two dual shock PS3 controllers, and had to use the Hori Fight Stick as a third controller.
Wheel of Fortune was a hit, and we did not have any problems with that game, I think it is a fantastic port of the show and looks fine in SD, but would have liked a little Vanna White and Pat Sajack in there. Ditto with Family Feud, we played a ton of that into the wee hours of this morning.
Both PS3 Buzz games were another huge hit, we played a ton of it and I forgot that even though you may be a quiz king, the themed games like Point Stealer and Final Countdown helps gives everyone a chance at winning. My niece and nephew especially got a kick out of watching the contestants get pied. Unfortunately, both Buzz games suffers from text is barely readable in SD curse! The selectable answers look jumbled together, and especially in Quiz World with the goo round where the answers slowly appeared resulted in a lot of eye strain and squinting to make out the answers, but we had so much fun we ended up playing Buzz for a couple hours anyways.
-Our local Hollywood Video just closed, and I took advantage of their clearance sale and picked up TMNT & Terminator Salvation. Those games have a reputation for being easy gamerscore, and sure enough within about 8 or 9 hours, I beat both games for nearly 1800 combined gamerscore. Both games are actually pretty decent, with TMNT having some very nice platforming segments, and Terminator being a halfway decent Gears clone. Speaking of Gears, Gears 2 has been having some crazy online multiplayer bonus XP events. Its latest being an unfathomable 20XP bonus weekend. That happened in the midst of me going down and hanging out with the DGR crew, but I was able to squeeze in a couple hours of play right when the bonus XP weekend started, and in that two hours I raised my level in Gears 2 from 40 to 54.
-Only two more games to jibber-jab about and then I am done. The first is UFC 2010, and while I love the core game and its in-depth career mode, its online is severely busted. On three separate occasions I have attempted a total of roughly 30 fights online, and have been able to only complete three of them. At least when the fights happen there is no lag, but there has been countless drops and server connection errors that it has been a nightmare trying to play online. The other game is a budget game I picked up on a whim called Sniper: Ghost Warrior. The name reminded me of the awesome Sniper Elite I played to death on Xbox/PS2. This one I was a little skeptical on since it came out with little to no hype from a budget publisher I never heard of. While it is rough around the edges in some areas, I am having a far better time than I thought I would with Ghost Warrior.
-OK, OK, I am finally done with this blog. If you have managed to read this entire thing than I salute you!
-For the first couple weeks of July, my sister Jane and her husband Shawn, and their two kids Adrian & Kadeance were visiting. It was the first time I saw them in nearly two years! We did a ton of activities. We played a lot of board games, with Apples to Apples and Smartass receiving the most play. I watched a NASCAR race with Shawn, and the family got together for a toasty bonfire later that night too. After having a blast playing Risk on Xbox 360 and Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune of PS3, I brought the PS3 over to my mom's to have an all day family videogame marathon. I also had Jeopardy on PS2 that was backwards compatible that was popular that night. But the big hits were Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud and Buzz.
Had a chance to record a podcast with Shawn where we reminisced over our old Madden & NCAA Football rivalries, and Shawn geeked out over NASCAR games, check it out! My dad hosted a 4th of July BBQ and grilled a feast for everyone. Biggest day out of the entire time they were here was when my other sister Ann threw a baby shower for Jane, as she is expecting her third kid. I despise baby showers in general, but my sis threw a fun one with lots of creative games that I and the other few guys in attendance enjoyed playing.
-My truck is trying to tease me into fixing it. The check engine light went off last month, took it in to check it out and it turned out to be a random mechanical hiccup that set it off and cost nothing to fix. Mechanic pointed out how my axle seals are squealing, but those cost a few hundred to fix and at this point I do not mind the squealing and am not going to spend a few hundred here and there on minor repair jobs anymore. I did manage to fix my car lighter on my own accord however! Earlier this year the car lighter stopped giving a charge to things like a GPS car charger and my Zune car kit. Last week I opened the fuse panel and replaced the fuse all on my own by looking at my car owners manual for directions. For me this is a big step forward in do-it-yourself car repair and ranks right up there with replacing my own headlight!
-I am glad I got that car lighter fixed because it was imperative for my GPS charger in my trek down to the Twin Cities for the Drunken Gamers Radio podcast five year anniversary bash! I had to pull some strings to get that day off from work, but it was worth it! It was awesome hanging out with the Drunken Gamers, and catching up with some of the other Robot Panic community regulars like Ryker XL, Apoch, Tiggermango and Torgo and meeting the hosts from the podcast, Gamers with Jobs. There was some great food cooked right over a bonfire, and many drinks to be had. Moe and Torgo kicked my ass royally in fooseball to where I only scored one point in total! And here I thought I could carry my own all these years, well I was pretty wasted to be fair. We finished the night with a huge group podcast where we payed homage to five years of DGR! If you want to hear me drunk off my ass on a podcast, then download away!
-I cannot recall blogging about it in sometime, if ever, but I am finally over halfway through The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I saw it for clearance when our local Waldenbooks went under last year and have been slowly reading it for the past couple of months now. Simmons knows his stuff, and after a good overview of the book I am right now approaching page 500 of 700, where I am at number 29 of 96, which is his rankings and memories of the greatest basketball players of all time. I do not usually blog about a book until I am finished with it, but this one is so long that I felt a progress report was in due order.
-I have seen a ton of movies this summer at the theater and from Netflix, and I will try to be brief. On the Netflix and home movie side of things I will start off by saying that after finally seeing the Super Mario. Bros film, it was everything I thought it would be, and more! Invictus kicked all kinds of ass (and I would not expect anything less from Mr. Eastwood), that it inspired me to buy Rugby 06 on PS2. Finally got around to watching another classic in Glory, which did not disappoint! Slacker is a one of a kind movie experience like no other, I wish another studio would attempt this in a modern setting.
The season of big hit summer movies has been a mixed bag. It started strong with Iron Man 2, but then fizzled with mediocre flicks like Repo Men and Prince of Persia. A-Team was a good popcorn flick and I will never forget the flying tank scene. Take it to the Greek was more of the same awesomeness from the same guys that made another favorite of mine, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The movie season has been kicking into full gear now though past couple weeks with Predators delivering on all fronts, and being a terrific follow-up to the awesome AVP2. Last week I saw Inception and it blew my mind! Christopher Nolan is the shit, this director can do no wrong! Like all his movies, there is so much going on that the film is done before you know. I think is literally the fastest two and a half hour movie I have ever seen!
-Even with watching all those flicks, I am still making time to catch up on TV DVDs. Last week I wrapped up Seinfeld season 8 and Psych season 1. I am also slowly picking and gnawing away at episodes of Man vs. Food season 2. Next I am thinking of picking back up where I left off several episodes into the first season of Veronica Mars, and/or doing an Entourage marathon since season 6 just hit DVD.
-Very quick wrestling thoughts: I finished the Hart Dynasty and it is a great collection of matches from all the Harts with a very nice documentary feature to boot. I am digging the Nexus angle on RAW and am very curious to see who their mastermind is and who the mysterious GM of RAW is. On Smackdown I am glad that Kane is finally champion again, and hope he gets a good run with the gold since he has really stepped it up this year. Season 2 of NXT I am digging, and it is a far smoother production than season 1. I am pretty high on Alex Riley & Kaval (aka Low-Ki/Senshi) and would be happy if either one of them would emerge as the next breakout star.
-On the videogame side of things I recently wrote a very comprehensive look at the first half of the year where I ranked the Top 10 games from the first half of 2010 thus far, and even have a number of honorable mentions too. It is too bad a lot of these games are probably going to be overlooked when it gets time for the end of the year awards. Here are my top ten games of 2010, click here to find out why they made my list and for my thoughts on the year of gaming so far.
10) Split/Second
9) Yakuza 3
8) Super Street Fighter IV
7) Splinter Cell: Conviction
6) Blur
5) BioShock 2
4) Just Cause 2
3) Red Dead Redemption
2) Alan Wake
1) Heavy Rain
-Got three hours to spare? Than I highly suggest you download the latest On Tap, which is a very thorough retrospective on the PS2! That's right, to celebrate its upcoming 10 year anniversary in North America, we discuss the PS2 and its plethora of games for three hours, with special guests Glen & Josh of the Playstation Nation podcast!! What are you waiting for, download away!
-So I recently came to terms with a coworker to purchase his Sega CD and 32X and several of his games for them. I was not actively looking to buy these systems, but he really wants to start paying off his upcoming wedding. I kind of, but never really desired them as there were a couple of games I wanted to play on each system and now I guess I can. Plus after having a good Sega CD experience just a week prior to being offered a buy one I figured it was a good sign to finally pick one up.
The Sega CD experience I am talking about it is finally playing through Prime on Sega CD! I bought it three years ago for $3, as it was the only videogame made based on one of my favorite line of comics, the Ultraverse. Did not plan on getting a Sega CD at the time, but I knew Chris had two of them and I would probably play it on his one day. A year later we attempted to hook up both of his Sega CDs, but both systems did not stand the test of time, so I thought playing Prime was never meant to be. Matt bought a Sega CD last month and knew of my past Prime quabbles and invited me and Prime over. Prime is a straightforward 2D beat-em-up like many other comic book games of the time. After getting vanquished by the boss numerous times, we finally made it to the boss stage with the right amount of lives we thought it would take to best him when......a fucking blackout happened! That did not undermine us though as we picked it back up again the next day and we both added Prime to our games beaten list for the year!
-I have been playing a ton of other games in the last two months so lets try and make this as concise as possible for my gaming updates since the last blog...
-I am making a lot of headway into Retro Game Challenge and am now at the final challenge in Guardia Quest. I am having such a good time with Guardia Quest that it inspired me to pick up Dragon Quest IX on DS. I am a couple hours into DQIX, and just got past the tutorial section of the game. The story is very intriguing and I cannot wait to see what it has in store for me.
-Yesterday I blitzed through the Alan Wake DLC episode, The Signal. It is right around the same length as the six episodes that make up the disc version of Alan Wake. The Signal is well worth playing, as it picks up right at the end of Alan Wake and mixes up some core gameplay elements and has a far more satisfying end boss battle. I cannot wait to see what the second episode has in store.
-Playing a lot of XBLA and PSN games. Zen Pinball has a new Mars table, which I think is one of their best ones yet. Hydro Thunder Hurricane is an awesome follow-up to the arcade original. Risk Factions is a great translation of the board game. Classic Risk is there in all its glory, which I had a ton of fun playing online! I played a bit of Zombie Apocalypse on PSN also with Matt online, which is essentially Smash TV with zombies.
-On PS3 I beat Heavy Rain for a second time, doing exact opposite decisions from the first time around, which resulted in most scenes playing out quite differently than before and access to all new different scenes I missed the first time around. I also threw in Motorstorm Pacific Rift again and am over halfway threw its career mode.
-I have been playing a lot of racing games too recently. I rented Split/Second again and completed its season mode. Also making a bit of progress in my online and offline careers in Blur. Both games are awesome arcade racers, and as you can see in my rankings above I like Blur a little more, mostly due to its great take on a kart racer and bringing a lot more to the table. Speaking of kart racers, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing has been in my 360 a bit recently and I have finally completed all the missions in it. Dr. Robotnick was a pain in the final mission, and it must have taken me what seemed like nearly 50 tries to beat him!
-I brought my Nomad over to Joey's pad to do something we both wanted to do for quite some time, and that was attempt a dual playthrough of one of my favorites in Shadowrun. Unfortunately, we only played for about 20 minutes before Joe got fed up with the admittedly somewhat dated controls and vowed never to play Shadowrun again. For shame too since as he was hitting his breaking point I was just getting nostalgia fever as I was taking in Shadowrun in all its glory again.
-Here is a recap of the aforementioned PS3 family game night - I debated getting Jeopardy on PSN, but remembered I had the PS2 version. PSN version would have been cool, and even though a lot of times I feel like an idiot with the brain buster questions off Jeopardy, it does not feel right to have a Jeopardy game that is multiple choice answers. Jeopardy went well with backwards compatibility, and it was cool for the PS3 to recognize three controllers without digging out a multi-tap, especially since I only have two dual shock PS3 controllers, and had to use the Hori Fight Stick as a third controller.
Wheel of Fortune was a hit, and we did not have any problems with that game, I think it is a fantastic port of the show and looks fine in SD, but would have liked a little Vanna White and Pat Sajack in there. Ditto with Family Feud, we played a ton of that into the wee hours of this morning.
Both PS3 Buzz games were another huge hit, we played a ton of it and I forgot that even though you may be a quiz king, the themed games like Point Stealer and Final Countdown helps gives everyone a chance at winning. My niece and nephew especially got a kick out of watching the contestants get pied. Unfortunately, both Buzz games suffers from text is barely readable in SD curse! The selectable answers look jumbled together, and especially in Quiz World with the goo round where the answers slowly appeared resulted in a lot of eye strain and squinting to make out the answers, but we had so much fun we ended up playing Buzz for a couple hours anyways.
-Our local Hollywood Video just closed, and I took advantage of their clearance sale and picked up TMNT & Terminator Salvation. Those games have a reputation for being easy gamerscore, and sure enough within about 8 or 9 hours, I beat both games for nearly 1800 combined gamerscore. Both games are actually pretty decent, with TMNT having some very nice platforming segments, and Terminator being a halfway decent Gears clone. Speaking of Gears, Gears 2 has been having some crazy online multiplayer bonus XP events. Its latest being an unfathomable 20XP bonus weekend. That happened in the midst of me going down and hanging out with the DGR crew, but I was able to squeeze in a couple hours of play right when the bonus XP weekend started, and in that two hours I raised my level in Gears 2 from 40 to 54.
-Only two more games to jibber-jab about and then I am done. The first is UFC 2010, and while I love the core game and its in-depth career mode, its online is severely busted. On three separate occasions I have attempted a total of roughly 30 fights online, and have been able to only complete three of them. At least when the fights happen there is no lag, but there has been countless drops and server connection errors that it has been a nightmare trying to play online. The other game is a budget game I picked up on a whim called Sniper: Ghost Warrior. The name reminded me of the awesome Sniper Elite I played to death on Xbox/PS2. This one I was a little skeptical on since it came out with little to no hype from a budget publisher I never heard of. While it is rough around the edges in some areas, I am having a far better time than I thought I would with Ghost Warrior.
-OK, OK, I am finally done with this blog. If you have managed to read this entire thing than I salute you!
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