Tag Archives: Shopping

It’s 2010!

I haven’t updated in a while but I’m still playing through The Ballad of Gay Tony on my 360 and plan on another Oblivion session real soon.

Christmas and New Years have come and gone (happy holidays!) and, naturally, I’ve acquired some new stuff. First and foremost my I got me a generous gift certificate which I more or less had to spend on video games. I’ve already used it to grab Assassin’s Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 for the 360. Assassin’s Creed 2 is probably the one game I’m most anticipating playing right now and I can’t wait to hop into Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. I was planning on grabbing Borderlands as well as I thought it would be fun to play co-op but they were sold out of it everywhere I went for some peculiar reason. I’ll either try to be patient or grab Arkham Asylum instead. I win either way, right?

I also had a friend gift me Trine on Steam, a game that I’ve had my eye on for quite some time now. I was hoping it would eventually make it to Xbox Live Arcade but since that doesn’t look like that is going to happen I’m stoked to play it.

I received a points card for Xbox Live which I’ve used to buy two games that were on sale at the time – The Secret of Money Island: Special Edition and Shadow Complex. Both excellent games and since I plan on reviewing Monkey Island soon owning the SE will be quite useful as well as entertaining. I’ve still got some points left to spend but I’m not sure what I’ll spend them on yet. There are tons of Arcade games I want to play but relatively very few that I’ve actually purchased.

Speaking of Xbox Live Arcade titles I’m finally at the point where I’m seriously considering upgrading my 360’s hard drive. At this stage my Premium’s drive is totally undersized for the large collection of Rock Band tracks I have combined with some of the bigger Arcade games and expansion packs and patches I have. It is getting to the point where I almost don’t have a choice in the matter – having to delete content every time I want to download something new is a chore and in some cases entirely unreasonable. My only hang up is that as a long time PC guy the price of the 60 or 120 gigabyte drives strikes me as totally ludicrous.

“Sailing the starry seas.”

Finally, on an entirely unrelated note I am amazingly hyped for yet another MMORPG: Star Trek Online. Ugh, I’m so sure this game is going to bomb (at least to some degree, although with World of Warcraft out there that is true for every MMO) but the previews and beta leaks look great so I just had to drop the dime on the preorder.

I’ve always been a little bit of a Trekkie thanks mostly to my brother, who is a much bigger one than I and raised me on all of the movies and series up through Voyager. I’m currently experiencing a major reinvigoration of my Star Trek fanaticism not unlike what so many others I know went through as a result of the 2009 reboot movie. I’m pining to see the old movies again and I’d even love to re-watch The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager despite that being a lot more cost prohibitive to do.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the idea of a Star Trek MMO was a brilliant one and even when the game was having massive troubles under a different developer and the naysayers were out in full force I was quietly looking forward to seeing how the game turned out. The idea of being able to create and customize my captain, my crew, and my ship and go exploring where no man has gone before is quite appealing. At the very least you’ll see me write a lot more about it here in the next month or so when I make it into the “open” beta (what’s up with all of these closed open betas lately, anyway?) and finally the retail launch.

Fall Release Schedule Blues

Ughh… It’s that time of the year again. Way too many good games coming out at one time – I still haven’t recovered from this time last year! *eyes unplayed copies of Gears of War 2, Fable 2, and Dead Space on his shelf* In no particular order we have: Brutal Legend, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Borderlands, Torchlight, GTA: The Ballad of Gay Tony, etc. never mind the recently released games that I haven’t bought yet such as Batman: Arcum Asylum and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Ugh… So little time (and money) but so many awesome games.

Funnily enough of all of these games one of the ones I want to play the most is the newly release Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition (on PC of course.) I’ll be buying that one soon but I’d still like to finish up Garn’s Oblivion adventures before jumping into it.

Happy Holidays

It has been a long time since I’ve posted an update and indeed it has been a busy month for me without as much time for gaming as I had hoped.

First things first I have continued to play a great deal of Warhammer Online – Not only did I get my main character to 40 but my guild has recently had a bit of a revival with the release of patch 1.1 and the two new classes and our “leveling pact” in which a great many of us rolled alts and vowed to try to keep them at the same levels and play together as much as possible. I’m been playing a Dwarf Rune Priest which is unusual for me as I never play healers but I’ve got to say that I’m enjoying it. More details that in a later post, hopefully!

“Cry Havoc bravely running the hell away from a dragon.”

Still, the last couple of weeks have been somewhat of a dry spell for me in WAR to the point where I’m afraid I may be approaching a classic Self Similar MMO burnout. I seem to always tire of an MMO, no matter how much I like it, for various reasons sooner or later – with WAR it has mostly to do with the lack of time I have to play games lately. I often feel like I’d much rather be playing through games in my massive Xbox 360 backlog, investing more time in some more of my favorite PC games, and revisiting some of my favorite retro titles than wasting so much time playing a single time sink of a game. Still, I was so hyped to get to level 40 so I could experience end game PVP that I’d feel silly not participating in it a lot more than I have so far, and I was still having a lot of fun with my alts, so who knows? I don’t really have any real good reason for wanting to quit but I feel like I’ve fallen off the treadmill somehow regardless. Yes, I think burnout is the best way to describe it.

“I’d hate to run into this guy in a dark, chaos infested monastery. Oh, wait…”

Speaking of my backlog it grew quite a bit bigger since last time I posted. Taking advantage of various “Black Friday” sales I nabbed a whole lot of new games. First I nabbed Frontlines: Fuel of War for the 360 for under 10 bucks new. I admit it wasn’t anywhere close to the top of my wish list but I thought what the heck, it looked nifty. I also grabbed a copy of Burnout: Paradise new for nice and cheap which has been rising up my wish list with every new patch Criterion brings out.

I also took advantage of Gamestop’s buy 2 get 1 free sale on used games and grabbed: Project Sylpheed – having been raised on Wing Commander and X-wing coupled with my love for Macross I’ve had my eye on this one for a long time but was holding out to get it for cheap. Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 – I’m a huge fan of tactical FPS games as I’m sure I’ve mentioned many times now and the first Vegas was decent enough to warrant my interest in the sequel. Battlefield: Bad Company – I’ve been a fan of the Battlefield games since Battlefield: 1942 and while I’ve more or less stayed away from the console titles the new emphasis on the single player campaign in this one and the positive reviews caught my attention. Plus this one seems like a concentrated effort to make an actual console game, where as the older titles, albeit quite different, seemed more like quick and ugly conversions Battlefield 2 for the PC. Overlord looked like a lot of fun to me since it was first released and I wanted something a bit different. Ninja Gaiden 2 – I absolutely loved the first Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox. I just hope I can stand the punishment this go around. Finally the first Saints Row game. I’ve talked about my interest in Saints Row 2 recently and decided I’d like to play the first one before picking up the second since the stories do indeed share continuity. All for the 360.

Also despite having no idea when I’ll get around to playing it but knowing without a doubt that I wanted it I nabbed Fallout 3 new for the PC for really cheap as well.

Posing at rank 34.”

With all of these purchases my Xbox 360 backlog in particular has ballooned insanely. Feeling like I really shouldn’t buy any more new games until I complete most of these new ones I decided to make a concentrated effort over my Christmas vacation to beat the game that has been more or less tuck in my 360 for months, Warhammer: Battle March, and I’m happy to say I succeeded! The last of the campaigns, the one added in the actual Battle March expansion on the PC featuring the Orc and Dark Elf armies, was consistently more difficult and frustrating than anything in the other two – if I had started with it I may have very well shelved the game long ago. Still, achievements unlocked and all of that good stuff. I’ll probably revisit Battle March in multi-player with my brother eventually but for now, taking the good with the bad, I’m quite glad to see it go.

“Explodicating a chaos spawn.”

As expected I got my new DS for Christmas and so far I’m really enjoying it. I’ve been sampling a lot of different games but so far the ones I’m enjoying the most are Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer – a brutal but relatively accessible Roguelike, Tetris DS which is… Well, Tetris? Club House Games which I’ve been a fan of for a long time now, and the first Phoenix Wright which has my adventure gamer senses tingling. So many more DS games to play, so little time, but so far it feels like it was indeed a solid gift.