phatal1ty's Blog - Apr to Jun 12 (210 followers)

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It feels really odd to start all over again! for the third time :/
Last night I did start one new game... Under Defeat HD (JP Ver)



In case my Rawr scribble above wasn't a very good clue its a top down vertical scrolling Shoot 'em up... much in the style of Raiden Fighters.... the main difference in Under Defeat your a helicopter and in Raiden your a jet,



this is also less brightly coloured and not as much fun as Raiden but it is somewhat easier... the game gives you one "credit" for continues each hour you play and once you've reached 8 hours played you get unlimited credits.

Also more forgiving than Raiden is the achievement list doesn't feature earn a bajillion points without being hit or something like that its basically get though the game in both modes. The second mode being exactly the same with a giant black border making it "arcade" and grabbing a second controller to spam bombs makes the game a total cake walk.

The game likes to hard lock and freeze the console pretty often and all that idling time is lost... Hopefully with a few more hours of turboing I can get unlimited lives in both modes and have a real go at the game... since without that I can only get to level 3 on easy....



I have another theme weekend planned and I will be doing a water weekend so Michael Phelps and some Kinect Rapala will make an appearance and that will round out my two other PUG games for the week which leaves me to focus on getting a completion and my Bonus Objective will be to earn 2000 gamerscore in Kinect games for the week.... totally manageable considering I already busted out 2875gs in kinect games this past week not even breaking a sweat.

Speaking of people who never bust a sweat.... this is my dork ass dog and how he typically sleeps at night in his bean bag at the foot of my bed...



WHAT... A... WEIRDO! most of the time a body part falls off one end or another normally its his head that ends up on the floor while the rest of his body is still in his beanbag. Notice how his tail protects his junk... or rather what he has left of it

I managed to stump myself in a dream last night.... I had a dream about talking to sphinx and he asked me "what animal do I eat that provides a service to mankind" I couldn't think of any... we're not talking body parts like wool or eggs a service is a seeing eye dog or a horse who gets you from A to B... I suppose the answer is a bullock (Ox or Oxen for you non antipodean folk) but in my half sleep state I asked Nick as he Kik'd me awake this morning and he answered with Crayfish... In my sleepy haze I imagined a crayfish stripping plastic off of wires readying them for a electrician Flintstones style... Not quite what he meant... but it was WAY more imaginative than eating bacteria laden insects in the rivers of England

Last night was a good mop up of Velvet Assassin (JP Ver)



For some inexplicable reason I like this game... I typically hate stealth games and for this game you have no choice but to be meticulous and count each and every kill.... its got just enough collectibles to be annoying and the levels are non back-trackable and each experience point has to be accounted for so its no walk in the park... BUT! there is almost 400 points for doing nothing if you plug in a keyboard and use the end level command and you can put on god mode too but its sort of pointless as you need the silent kills anyway..... other note worthy (at least it is if your a bit of a perv) is that her pants are freaking PAINTED on... and the game does its best to remind you that she has a GREAT ASS... I think this is what that honky tonk badonkadonk song was talking about questioning how she got them britches on.... (someone needs a country song break)

Par for my average I managed to fuck up one of the minor collectible items... but thankfully that's not as bad as I'm making it out to be... a quick run of four levels should get me a completion but for now it goes back in the massive line of games where I have collectibles to find for the last one or two achievement short of a completion..... which is where I needed a project to get my motivation going.

Wow... so its been 140 days since I ended Project Unstarted Games... My first chronicle of my crazy back log... so I ended the last project with 65 retail games new to my card on consecutive days earning 15615 gamerscore whittling down the list of 136 games... and in the last 140(ish) days I've managed to collect enough games to have another crack at it all again.... this time starting out with 109 retail games that I have yet to earn a single achievement in.



So PUG 2.0 won't be one new retail game per day and a subsequent blog post... instead it will be 3 new retail games a week and 1 completed game no matter old or new... each week I'll post this sheet on (my) Friday blog post which is a visual tick box



I will also have an additional BONUS OBJECTIVE where blog commenters can throw in suggestion or I'll come up with something creative... like 3 new arcade games.... 150 total achievements.... rise to 72% completion (all dlc included of course) or 500 gamerscore in kinect games, 25 multiplayer achievements, 5 pink achievement tiles etc etc etc....

The purpose of it all.... I won't be purchasing any new games nothing... not even xbla or wp7.... I will be having rentals (I've got a podcast to do after all) occasionally a loaned game sometimes make a way to my disk drive too.

Phew.... now that I've set the challenge its time to get cracking!

Oh and interesting... I noticed that I got past this number last night...



I love it when I hit these on the dot especially when I don't try those perfect 100,000 milestones are sometimes a pain in the ass!

Last night I did a big mop up of Skylanders and leveled up the new addition fully



The Skylands are now safe, and I wanted to do a quick post on the game before it fades away in to the complete games black hole.

Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure is pretty gimmicky looking and most haters see it as just another money sucking enterprise from Activision in their quest to fill your house with plastic junk... hell, I'll be upfront and tell you right now that a set of the collectibles are basically adverts to make you go buy more characters... you know those Sunday morning cartoon ads where you want to jump out of your seat and cry MUMMY I WANT IT!!! without really even understand what "it" is.... yeah I might have got that feeling at some point.... BUT somewhere in there is a great game with awesome engineering the portal, the character design, puzzles and level layouts are all very well put together and make for a polished final product

Its perfect for younger kids as there is co-op (despite being a tethered shared camera experience) and there is so much to discover.... for the record I completed all the achievements with 38% "game progress" I assume that number is based on the doors and collectibles and side missions etc. So there is plenty of replay value beyond the achievements.

This is where I should warn achievement hunters and completion junkies that yes the game is complete able with the three in the starter pack but life is WAYYYYYY easier with Terrafin for the stupid laser achievement and Sonic Boom was the character I beat the final boss in less than 10mins without losing hardly any health at all. So if you do end up feeling the need to pick up a few more those would be my top two picks. But each one is slightly different and its just a matter of finding the fight style you like...

According to Raptr it took me 33hrs but it feels more like 10hrs... and I did fart around a whole bunch leveling up and doing random side quests and I reset a few lvl 10's to re-level them to choose a different fight style.
I would say the majority (700ish points) was story related and I got them within the first 10hrs as after all.... it is a kids game.... that was my mantra last night playing the stupid laser boss fight over and over....

Speaking of doing things over and over... I started http://www.trueachievements.com/DisneyPixar-RUSH-xbox-3....htm which looks to be a proper grind fest... It is pretty cute and works REALLY well!



That is what I look like if I were a Pixar character according to my Kinect... I started with UP as thats my least fav Pixar movie... nothing has made me cry harder... ok maybe this movie.



In response to yesterday's blog.... it occurred to me that more than half the readers have no idea what a Sin Bin is.... Its what people who watch Rugby call a Penalty Box.... I didn't realize it wasn't a common place term.

I'm going to make a list tonight to start PUG Project Unstarted Games 2.0 - fuck completion ratios I love the idea of completing 5 and buying a new game... but I have my gaming budget earmarked for the surface and a new wp7.... I'm not counting games I've preordered (its a very short list) and I will do PUG slightly different this time... with only three games a week not seven, and I aim to complete a game a week even if its not a newly started game... so goals will be set and PUG will begin... again....

I realize that this is a pretty common issue among a lot of us... and its a constant battle to work on the backlog and play anything and everything that comes out or at least the ones that look appealing. I think we're all looking for a that happy medium where getting to actually experience the games we pay good money for and not just sitting on a shelf like expensive rows of geek pride, but not giving up comfort gaming and feeling like there is a obligation to play less than stellar titles.

I'm getting that feeling like the games yet to be started in my bookcase make me a little crazy



After I got this box via courier this morning I sent myself to the new game sin bin....



No more games till I've played a decent chunk of whats in my shelf... and that includes arcade games!

I want to do is a stocktake and maybe another round of Project Unstarted Games... But I dropped my completion percentage 12% last time and I got frustrated with learning new controls every single night so I need to come up with something new...(feel free to tell me your awesome ideas) I'm also a little hesitant to make a list of what I own but have yet to start as I know I'm going to feel even more mental than I do now.

It also feels a little like guess the jelly beans as I don't really have a very clear number of how many games I have yet to start but I know its more than "a few" and closer "to too many".... not as many as some people

um... Skylander fans are prob keen to know which one is in the box I got this morning....



Tada... it's Terrafin... mostly because he is useful for an achievement but also because he is a super cute Shark.... but Terrafin is not a water element O_o?
Land Shark?
Plus he has this sweet looking Pirate Ship!
Hes going to go home with the rest of the skylanders when I've saved the skylands.... Skylanders has been a super fun game and I'll be a little sad when its complete and super excited and pumped up for the next installment! This really is a brilliant game, and I know its entry price is a little steep but its totally worth it!

Speaking of expensive things.... I was pretty set on getting this....



The Wacom Inkling since I can't justify the cost of a new graphics tablet.....
But as I watch the Microsoft announcement for the Surface....



I think that will be my next major purchase... the question is can I go without buying a new game between and when this sexy beast is out to market.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term "Redneck" its used to describe American's who typically live in the country and are supremely patriotic and proud to be on the lower end of most bell curves.


I noticed that in my last shipment from Stoph there is a pretty clear theme and I know doing it 4th of July Weekend might be more fitting but I'm much too impatient to wait that many more weeks to play these gems. Last weekend I learned am not "black" enough to "rap" and this weekend learned I'm not "white" enough to "line dance"

I started off throwing a "Hoedown" on Saturday and getting a good chunk Country Dance All Stars I stark contrast to Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked which I knocked out Friday morning before heading off for work, in less than 3 hours which was nice and easy with decent tracking and simple moves, Country dance on the other hand has what is essentially a foreign set list to me. Some of the moves are a little less than familiar too but more importantly its a grind with a 10hr achievement, and like most dance games this only counts in song time. But the worst part is the tracking is truly atrocious I can see pretty clearly why noone (out of the 23 people who tried this game according to TA) has gotten the 500,000 points per song I struggled with getting 100,000 on a handful while others I got over a million sight reading. Of course I will try my very hardest to complete it but I don't even believe its possible then again I felt the same about Michael Jackson at some point.
I can't recommend this as a dance game but for points its pretty easy.... two aforementioned achievements aside its a easy and straightforward 800 without much skill.... just a high tolerance for Country music... The lyrics of these songs are mind boggling to a "city slicker" like me... I goggled what a Honky Tonk is and reaffirmed how important Ice Cold Beer is to the Redneck religion.

I couldn't take more than 3 hours of this game in one sitting so I took a little down time to get in the spirit of my themed weekend and watched some of Tom Arnold tv show My Big Redneck Vacation and some Redneck Island I don't watch a lot of TV and seldom do I watch reality tv but when I do I only watch the worst it has to offer.

Saving Sunday morning in NASCAR Nation tradition for some NASCAR Unleashed with a decent haul of half over half the points.... Its certainly not realistic to NASCAR but it is rather fun for an arcade wreck-em kart style game. There are a handful of luck based achievements which I don't appreciate for a racing game.

The rest of my Sunday afternoon I spent huntin' waving a bright orange plastic gun around and shootin' critters... at first I was pleased with my ability to headshot so many animals... it wasn't until I got to a tip screen that learned that headshots in hunting was not ideal... I guess I forget these cabela commandments to quickly. But this was the most fun I had all weekend.... the gun works great and the ducking, dodging and creeping part works awesome.... the dreaded Cabela balance log rears its ugly head and makes a mockery of the Kinect functionality thankfully its very limited. I think the huntsmen genre is pretty over saturated but this is really the best it has to offer.
The achievements are straightforward and largely collected over the course of the Story but I was left with a fair bit of grinding which I mopped up before heading off for work this morning. Earning a quick and fun completion in less than 8hrs for shooting poor beautiful animals.

I'm not sure I'm ready to move to the south or even switch my radio stations (not even sure if Auckland has a Country station?!) nor am I better prepared to shotgun a beer.... but I look forwards to my next meal of Fried Chicken and biscuits and gravy.... and there is plenty enough NASCAR and Line dancing left for when I strap on my over sized.... belt buckle

I did want to do a quick PSA if any of ya'll own a shirt that looks like this



not dissing the colour scheme... just talking about the style of the shirt.... you own the mullet of the shirt world... it has a collar... for business... but its also sleeveless for getting your honky tonk hoe down on.... It goes real prurdy with some tight blue jeans and pair of em' cowboy boots.... and nothing covers a mullet as nice as a 10-gallon hat!