ButterflyEdge's Blog - Apr to Jun 12 (21 followers)

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It's odd, for as long as I can remember… I don't remember playing games this little.

Everyone goes through a dry patch I'm sure, but this one is pretty huge. I'm playing just two games at the moment, these being Max Payne 3 and Your Shape 2012 (which I'm playing legitimately, this time ;)) but even so, they're not exactly getting hammered. Last weeks Raptr Summary (which I won't even bother posting a screen of) showed I put a mighty 3 hours into each of those last week… And that's it.

I'm putting a bit of my negativity down to the fact that I've had two games go tits up on me over the past few weeks. The first, was The Walking Dead. Firstly, no game should lack an option to invert controls. I play inverted, always have, though I am the only person of all the close gaming friends I have that do, and I have no idea why that is. But yes, no option on the Walking Dead. Grrr. Then, when I died because I failed a quick time because my controls were backwards (to me!), I discovered that the game hadn't been saving. Three hours wasted. I must be one of the tiny, tiny minority that haven't completed that yet.

Also, me and a few friends all recently bought Iron Brigade. After putting 15 hours into that, I booted it up only to find that I'd lost all my progress so far. I was absolutely livid. I'm sick to the back teeth of forking out on broken, glitchy games.

I thought E3 may have dished out some good stuff, but that was fairly lacking too. For a brief summery of my (few) highlights:

-Dance Central 3! Not even sorry, but that's an insta-purchase. I'm just going to pretend I didn't see the whole usher thing, though. He could have at least danced to the game...

-Pikmin 3. I absolutely love the Pikmin games, and while this is a WIIU title, it is just about the only one I've seen where I think the game pad thing actually has a place. For strategy games like Pikmin, having the world map and options on a separate screen would work brilliantly. I'm far from sold on a WIIU, but it's nice to see a brilliant, not so overdone Nintendo franchise getting some love.

-SmartGlass. For no reason other than I fucking love my Xbox. Anything that integrates with that is pretty much sold to me. It being a multi-platform (Windows/Android/iPxx) addition is impressive, and VERY smart of Microsoft.

-Watch_Dogs. Purely because it was about the only stand out game on show that wasn't completely generic. It was the only think to pique my interest after many hours of 'new' videos of Assassins' Creed, Call of Duty and insertoverfloggedfranchisehere.

-South Park. A thousand times YES to Matt Stone and Trey Parker.



And the lowlights…
-Gears of War Judgement. I love the Gears series, but I'm very apprehensive about this one. I hate that some series' just can't be left alone. That, coupled with new developers making various changes doesn't sit so well with me.

-Not a single mention of The Last Guardian, AGAIN. Two years after it was given a big reveal, it wasn't even mentioned. I'm aware the game has 'gone through some problems', but it's still a shame.

-STILL no TimeSplitters 4. Boo hiss.
-Sport games. Christ. I understand they sell big but they really don't need so much time at something like E3.
-Wonderbook. Just… But… Really?

-Incoming bit about a form of entertainment that isn't games or music…-
What has been filling the gaming gaps over the past few weeks are films and books. I set myself a bit of a goal at the beginning of the year to read more, and I aimed to manage a book a month, which I actually thought was a bit out of my reach after managing a whole two books last year. But, not quite six months into the year I'm on book number twelve. Five of these have been in the past month.These have so far ranged from Robert A Heinlein to Irvine Welsh to Charlaine Harris.

As for films, after a bit of a stint of Cinema trips (three in five weeks, which is a hell of a lot for me. And granted, two of those visits were for Avengers because it's that fucking awesome) it gave me a bit of a kick up the arse to watch more films. There's too many 'great' films that I've never got round to watching, and so again I'm making an effort to sort that out. I joined Letterboxd to help me do that, too. I actually did Film Studies in college, and I forgot how much I both used to watch films, and how much I enjoy doing so.

With BioShock Infinite being delayed, there is nothing but Rock Band Blitz, Dance Central 3 and Borderlands 2 on the radar for me this year. I've got a bit of a wait ahead of me.

I think books and films may be keeping me busy for a little while yet.

Yay, I managed to hit my gamerscore goal! I hit 150k about an hour and a half before the goal was due to time out. I also managed to nail it perfectly!

The final burst in achievements was partly down to Monopoly Streets being pretty rewarding, but mainly down to Band Hero. Ahhh, I love games that you can get away with not actually playing, or playing very little of. I played an hour of guitar, and then sat a mic with a fan and let it play through the entire career on beginner vocals for me. This lead to:



I'm totally OK with that.

I really don't have much that I actually want to play right now. There's nothing major out that interests me until Borderlands in September, so I think I'll just be taking it fairly easy for a while, take a break from the GS cramming :)


Off topic, for my birthday last week I got an unbelieveble collection of presents:



Massive thank you to ShinraAlpha and Strangemiester for these corkers!

Annoyingly, I didn't get a summary email for the week ending the 13th, which is a shame since that was my week off work. I would have liked to have known how many hours I put in! To briefly summarise that week off the top of my head...

I put the majority of my time into Sonic Generations. It's strange, since Sonic was the big one for me when I was little, but I never really had a major urge to play Generations. I gave it a very quick play at the Eurogamer Expo last year, but it still stayed in the fairly 'meh' part of my mind. I can't even begin to imagine how many times I played Sonic the Hedgehog/2/3 before I was even 10. I was absolutely obsessed with the series, but as the years went by that obsession was unsurprisingly turned into bitterness as that franchise was murdered over, and over, and over again.
I stopped even bothering after Sonic Heroes. The franchise stopped existing in my mind from that point, and aside from trying Episode 4 with some hope (which was QUICKLY demolished), I never touched a Sonic game for years.

It was only when my brother offered to lend me his copy to help my gamerscore challenge when I was even reminded it existed. I took it home and while I know it's early days yet, but it's probably been one of the best games I've played this year. The levels (especially the nostalgic 2D Green Hill Zone/Chemical Plant Zone) are mind blowing. So perfectly done in line with the originals. It kept a smile firmly on my face as the familiar themes and stages rolled by and lightning speeds.
I would even go as far as to say that the levels from the diarrhea pockets of the franchise are brilliantly done, although the lack of a Sonic 3 Stage is CRIMINAL.

I rented the NCIS game to boost my gamerscore up a full 1000. Four hours and some diabolical voice acting later I was done. Can't complain at that.


As for this week:



I 100%'d Mass Effect 3 last week. It's the first time I've ever done that with a Mass Effect game. In fact, it's the first time I've even gone back to a Mass Effect game! I absolutely loved it first time round and went straight back into it. I'm absolutely not one to brag - I will gladly say when I struggle with a game but I was surprised at how easy I found the Insanity play through. I never struggled at any particular point, but one. Without major spoilers, the very last enemy in the game (bearing in mind that the game does not actually 'end' anywhere near this point) is not some kind of gigantic enemy or boss of any kind, it's in fact an average, common Reaper enemy. It's incredibly difficult to explain without spoiling some minor details, but in short - this twat had me stuck for half an hour. Upon googling, I wasn't alone. It also lead me to this video which made me giggle (spoilers, obviously):



On Insanity, it's very much an insta-death situation if you suck, which I clearly did at this point.
Either way, some frustrated cries at my TV later, I was finished.

I actually went straight into the first Mass Effect when I was finished. I've decided I am going to play the first two again. For a couple of reasons, firstly (and mostly) my games have been with Ashley bong-eyed Williams, and not Kaiden pretty-face Alenko. The only reason for this is that I was aiming for the Soldier Ally achievement way back when I played the first game and so made the decision to keep her, which I didn't even pop in the end anyway. At this point I didn't even think much of it, but another two games later I really wish I'd kept Kaiden.
Secondly, I want to play as a different class. The multiplayer in ME3 has settled that my favourite class to play is the Sentinel, so this is what I've gone with.
It's... Interesting going back after playing 3, but I'll stick with it.

Fez. Oh my.. Fez. I have only played an hour purely because I was wanting to score, but what I have played is unbelievable.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone so passionate about a game as much as my other half is about Fez. I came in from work last week (this story is absolutely no exaggeration, by the way) to find my other half sat in the living room, surrounded by scribbled notes and drawings littering the floor. 'I've deciphered the language!' he cried as I walked in. '..What?' 'The language! I've worked it out!' he says as he scrambles through around 40 pages of notes to show me his work. 'I spent about 5 hours doing this! But I did it!'.
He says that Fez is now easily the best game he's ever played. Once this challenge is done, I'm pretty sure the first thing I'll be doing is going back to that.


Not long before my 150k challenge is over!

Hmmm, these blog posts are coming later and later each week...



So last week, I earned more achievements than I ever had before, according to 360 Voice. I finally got round to playing Vanquish, and honestly, I wasn't crazy about it to begin with. I found it absolutely brutal. It wasn't until I bumped the difficulty down to easy that I started to enjoy it. What an absolutely mental game!

As for Your Shape... My beanbag did a good job of burning a chunky 7000+ calories across 3 nights. I'd played it with some regularity a few months back, but I find it so painfully boring. I just started playing Dance Central for both the calorie burning and the fun. I was never going to play it again, so I thought I'd abuse it for the gamerscore. My beanbag sat through many, many sessions of Cardio Boxing while I mopped up various games on my phone, which sadly don't show in detail on Raptr.

The gamerscore goal is going OK considering. I've managed to hit (or over-shoot) the daily requirement almost every day, or make up the difference when I haven't. I've pretty much dried up all the gamerscore from my fairly poor collection so I'm now running pretty much only on lovefilm rentals, or games borrowed off friends of mine. Less than two weeks left. I think I can do it...

One this has been firmly cemented this week. BioShock is the best game ever. I finished the German version this week, and playing it straight after reading the book is mind blowing. So, so good!

Other than that, there really isn't much to say about last weeks gaming. Call of Duty 2 and Rock Band 3 are a result of some splitscreen at a get together at a friends place. Most of the time was actually spent playing Wario Ware: Mega Party Games on the GameCube, which has to be one of the most legendary split screen games there is. So, so many laughs out of slighty (!) tipsy people as someone tries to shake a dogs hand while every other person in the rooms screams 'left!'.

Not to jinx it, but my effort to keep up with my GamerScore challenge is actually going OK. Next weeks summary will be interesting, there's been some serious whore-age this week! My time off starts Friday, too, so I imagine that'll increase even more shortly!