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

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Its been a long time (almost year) since I last played a Lego game



The latest installment of the epic Lego franchise is LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes
The original LEGO Batman game being my all time favorite in the series, I was deranged crazy excited I had this on pre-order.... (well there was a mini-fig incentive)

I can't remember the last time I got a toy with a meal... but having those sporadic childlike moments are always fun... On my way home I grabbed a feed of McDonald's and assembled the Lex Luthor with my slightly greasy salty fingers






Does that not scream happy meal??

The game is typical Travelers Tales Lego, its slow and jam packed with collectibles... and the usual modus operandi of letting you see many of the minikits and bricks but you'll have to come back with the very last unlockable character on your 18th playthrough.... okay its not quite that bad but its always so frustrating.... Batman 2 is one of the shorter lego games with most people completing it in 20-25hrs which is short for most open world games and very short for lego games.

The core game play is pretty predictable keeping the two player co-op puzzle solving as the staple and with 10 titles in the series the basic level structure hasn't evolved much at all. Beyond the cosmetic stuff like split screen co-op (instead of shared camera for the older games) and the open hub world being very detailed and much more than just a superficial island, there isn't to much new stuff to write home about but Lego games have become an institution and drastic changes is not what most fans are after anyway. The biggest revamp comes from the addition of voice acting... the dialog is well written, funny and adds a dynamic between the characters that is beyond what mumbles can manage. I found myself giggling at the wink winks they leave in for adults... Robins gay crush on Superman is the funniest interaction between mini-figs ever!

Beside Lego.... I finished up Episode 2: Starved For Help in The Walking Dead with another amazing episode keeping all of us on edge for the next installment!! I was shocked to see so many people complete it in the 8hr gap while I was at work yesterday and I feel at odds with some of my choices after seeing the clear majority split and my choice in the minority... the last episode had left me feeling "oh look thats cute the game is giving me a false sense that my choices make a difference"... well it sure feels real and the twists and continuity is amazing. I guess if I had one complaint it would be that I would rather have 5 completions than be buying DLC each time but I understand why Telltale did it this way rather than the Wallace and Grommit module.



PUG week 1 recap... in three words: Pass! Success! Phew!



the bonus object had me double guessing myself but I did it without much trouble.... this weeks objective will be way more challenging! a suggestion from Cornerscout ...

Nothing quite compares to that satisfying crunch of testicles..... against the top of of my foot.



Yesterday on a kick to give everything a second chance.... Self-Defense Training Camp made sure to remind me anyone who tries to mess with my purse needs no second chances all they need is a kick in the nuts and thumb in the eye.

I want to make perfectly clear here... Self Defense =/= Martial arts.... but you have better than average chances at defending yourself with some martial art discipline... I made the mistake the first time of taking Self Defense seriously.... this is far from a serious attempt at teaching you anything you can use in real life situations. Thankfully I'm just here for the gamerscore the distrust and misandry.

As a kid I was only ever picked on once by an boy who was in the year above me I was about 8 or 9 at the time and I don't really remember much other than one day he ran up behind me and push me from behind making me fall forward and skinning both my knees and the heels of my palms... I managed to walk home and when my dad found out that night he was unexpectedly calm until the following morning... he drove me to school and waited in the car with me till I pointed out the boy at the school gate... He walked up to the kid picked him up by the collar of his shirt and said enough words to make the kid white as a snow... by then the teacher assisting the crossing guard noticed and they exchanged words.... all the while I was in the passenger seat of my dad car wishing the ground would just open me up and swallow me whole.

After that incident my dad signed me up for Tae Kwon-Do... I think this was the marker where I became a tomboy... It never seemed odd to me deciding if I needed to pack ballet shoes and a leotard or mouth and shin guards for after school activities. Being the only girl in the Kwan (something akin to Dojo) I learned I prefer the social company of boys rather than girls.

I never found martial arts as fulfilling as dance or music but there was an animistic satisfaction of giving someone the beat down. Nothing really compares to that moment where your foot makes contact with someones head... which is what playing with the kinect severely lacks... all the contact and physical feedback of sparring is removed and its really like a slow retarded dance not set to music.

Aside from learning basic blocking and leverage techniques the remaining game modes are on par with the other health and fitness games. Reflex mode which has blocks and dodging is almost fun. Cardio mode is about as uninspired bare-bones basic as a 90's home fitness VHS. The balance lessons mode is basic version of Zen workouts from Yourshape and is pretty uninspired too.... the game seems slightly grindy but not nearly as bad as my first impressions 6mths ago but my original complaint being poor tracking was somewhat misinformed..... The game has decent tracking but it doesn't tell you if it ISN'T tracking you so all the while standing in the menus punching 40 different ways and bitching about the impotency of this game I was either too far forward or simply not registering.

Silver lining in a pretty turdtastic cloud the easy flow of points if you can put up with a little monotony and standard pad control for menus. Its forgiving enough that there are only a handful of skill based achievements but if you can't kick above your waist then don't expect a completion.

As for other gaming The Walking Dead came out last night but the achievement not being up on xbox.com make me hold off starting it... when I noticed it fixed as I was waking up this morning I jumped on raring to go... being region locked out of the game... I had to fuss with the console and licensing and all that boring crap for a solid 35mins before getting it to finally work... and half way though the episode my adult responsibilities being tethered to my work desk paused my gaming to be resumed as soon as I can escape the loony bin work and plans for the evening revolve around



SOOOOOooooo EXXXCCCIIITTTITNNGGGGG!!!

btw PUG week two still needs a bonus objective so all suggestions welcome :)

We're all on a journey



While I know I have a fairly steady audience to this blog and I appreciate the following, now more than ever... Its been hard to shuffle all the thoughts I have in a cohesive post.... I know I write this for myself more than anyone and so I feel like being real and honest in part is what makes it interesting.... but I'm always wary of where the line is in my personal life as I know after hitting that publish button I can never have it back it becomes something that is for other people and sure I could label it "shared" but it feels a lot more like "donate" or "give" My excuse as always is growing up as an only child I never really learned how to share very well... but my Chinese heritage teaches that being generous is important.

As blog followers rallied around me yesterday I learned it really is a sharing..... its a give and receive and I appreciated every private message and every blog comment so thank you all for keeping my spirits up in a pretty dark place.

For gaming last night I felt like both kinect games (http://www.trueachievements.com/DisneyPixar-RUSH-xbox-3....htm and Rapala for Kinect) I'm currently juggling are perfect nice mindless grindy games that I can't fuck up even if I tried so I managed to make enough progress to call week one of PUG completed and a success and start brainstorming what week 2 will entail....

Not long ago I declared Self-Defense Training Camp to be the worst thing my disk tray ever spun and short of wiping my arse with the disk before throwing it back in to the sea and setting up a petition to bury all remaining copies along side ET in the desert of games that should never be played, I wanted nothing to do with the game ever again.

In the spirit of second chances I will give Self Defense a fair shake for week 2 of PUG along side Brunswick Bowling which suffered about the same fate to a lesser extent... As I know I have LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes on Friday to cleanse myself with after two tragic games that needed to be aborted before printing.

In an attempt to keep busy yesterday I caught up on a few of the podcasts I subscribe to... one of them being NPR's This American Life



This weeks episode was one focusing on American expats living In China which stirred this sense of adventure within me... I love the idea of immersing myself in (essentially) a foreign culture and learning about my heritage and rediscovering my mother tongue (Mandarin - Han Yu) Orally I speak and understand Chinese proficiently to use in day to day situations. But in text format I'm basically illiterate I know less than 200 characters which wouldn't be enough to get me though a basic story book for children. However I do know enough to get me though a Chinese Menu!... ya know.... the important things in life....

To put it in to perspective an adult would need at least 3000 characters to read a newpaper from front to back for intermediate comprehension and Writers / Doctors / Lawyers would need around 8000 characters to be proficient Chinese has over 10000 modern day use characters but over 20000 total.... Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn....

As a kid my mother reveled in sending me to torturous Sunday morning lessons but as the only kid who already spoke Chinese fluently I was bored out of my brains so no actual learning happened and every semester I would pass with flying colours the oral and audio parts but fail miserably and bring shame upon myself when tasked with the reading and writing portion. It wasn't until I demanded to take music theory which was equally boring and prove much less useful that I was no longer required to attend Sunday Chinese classes. But I'm thinking about giving learning Chinese a second chance.



Kaha a dog who has more than his fair share of second chances got this years new registration tags which are blue... Our council changes the colours each year for easy identification, previously he sported 2010 and 2011 on his collar as the yellow and green was complimentary but now perma-coated in grime it was nice to clip them off and start fresh... not that Kaha cares.... its all gray to him.

I want to start off by saying I don't often do this and I'm sorry for those of you who enjoy my usual upbeat banter



To those friends who have dealt with the brunt of my shittiness over the last week or two.... Thanks for putting up with me..... You know if I'm shitty to you its because I trust you and putting on a happy tard face is something I do so I don't have to be real. That said my usual nature is pretty sunny and I'm a optimist at heart... I learned that being optimistic for extended lengths of time takes a toll especially when nothing changes.

I'll get the gaming out of the way last night I was pretty down... Hell I've been down all week but last night I hit a rock bottom... and I wasn't even sure if I could turn on the xbox... but Nick came to the rescue to pick up the pieces and indulged me a little comfort gaming... Knowing that I can never say no to Tetris: The Grandmaster Ace, Most opponents find me insufferable, I don't mean to brag but tetris is my shit... I literally go rain(wo)man when I see falling blocks... I'm not going to say I'm rusty but I was all kinds of off form last night and Nick managed to get a few wins... a little less than 50% of the time coupled with this game sending lines in a totally unfair way and our inability to decipher the menus I couldn't figure out how to pop even one point for either of us... So about two and a half hours of basically comfort gaming paired with some very frustrating "why can't the menus just be English" and the plethora of secret achievements which don't make for much sense when revealed any how for example:



After calling it quits I struggled to advance a little on my PUG bonus objective... I didn't last long not even a whole fishing tournament... I thought an early start after a sleepless night was the answer... certain that Disney / Pixar could cure me of my funk... but in the end I was relieved when it was time to get ready for work.

----warning boring personal shit ----

This morning I sat staring at my monitor with the quandary of do I blog? when I feel so rotten and try and put a smile on?... or do I get real?... or do I just bullshit for a bit and cut it short???... I didn't even feel up to snuff to draw Rawr today... its kind of a long story but I created her for someone... as an inside joke and she was kind of this character I could hide in... somewhere along the way she became the face of my blog and I found a safe place in the green suit.
Even though I created her and she made up of parts of me... I don't feel like she is mine... I made her to give to someone..... [pause]..... the words that go here next seem to keep getting back spaced and I'm trying to stay composed in my work environment



The phone ring is deafening and clients ushered past my open plan area one after the other seem too all want to make tedious small talk and I do my best to put on that happy tard face just to make it to the afternoon when I can escape to the dentist.... the perfect place to find solace.

I enjoyed my big redneck weekend so much last weekend I thought I'd do another themed weekend...



A few of my best friends make fun of the way I say "water".... The way I say it, looks a little like this: Woor-tar... and the way I hear all the Americans say it is "Waa-dah" and the way Nick (who is British) is Wor-er.... I'm pretty sure its spelled with a T and I'm the only one that says it with a T therefore.... I'm the closest to being correct.

I have a pretty strange accent to be fair... most Kiwi's think I sound American and American's think I sound English and the English think I'm Australian... English isn't even my first language although its become my most comfortable language to communicate with and I dream and think in English... New Zealand tends to be somewhere closer to the Queens English but with Oceanic twang.... and I picked up a splash of American somewhere along the way.

The dash update last week gave me a chance to actually use voice commands and I have to say WOW it actually works pretty well.... even for a weird person like me! Good timing as Michael Phelps had me saying SKIP for every cut scene and BOOST for most of the races... usually I would talk about how easy and fair the game was but how the voice prompts are shit and don't work... well they did! and I was please how responsive it was!

http://www.trueachievements.com/Michael-Phelps-PTL-xbox....htm was the first game I put in over the weekend and I had heard how easy it was but at the same time saw how much trouble a few others had getting to do certain things.
Par for my Kinect space I had no tracking issues although the game was VERY specific about where it wanted me to stand but I prefer that to not knowing... bending over to have a drink or fidgeting during load screens the game would throw up a OMG WE CAN'T SEE YOU!!!! warning. I was a little surprised with the music choice and the repetitive nature of it... I think they have like 2 tracks in the whole game... and both are a few wubs short of dubstep... but sound is imperative in this game so I was glad to see I could turn the music all the way down and just hear the announcer and the beat to which I throw my arms about pretending to swim in the middle of lounge to... Pretty sure on if someone happened to walk in on my Kinecting swimming is higher than dancing on the scale of crazy.... I got though the first handful of races and thought oh this is cake and works fine and I knew I could finish it fairly quickly.... so I sat down to watch 5 episodes of my new fave TV Show



Earlier in the week Stoph and I we're talking about Elijah Wood and then he tipped me off to this show... its AMAZING and I'm IN LOVE with it... but I have to confess... the Aussies do it better (pretty sure its the first time I've ever said that as a Kiwi!), at least I liked the rawness of the Aussie version plus the dog is way more sinister and the whole tone of the show is a little more dark.... I like the main character a little less but I LOVE LOVE LOVE the girlfriend in the Aussie version! I think Kaha can totally relate to Wilfred too as I think he has a very dark sense of humor and isn't a very "smiley durpy cuddly" dog he is very much... "this is my world and your just some human in it...."

The rest of my weekend was a whole lot of fishing starting my third new game this week, Rapala for Kinect I didn't have high hopes for this game and I knew it was a bit silly..... silly doesn't really describe it..... after casting your line out and your line gets a bite.....its the slowest DDR with hands game ever then you choose between more DDR, a few slaps / punches or a posing mini game... between the tediously long levels there are boat races which barley work.



But the game is a super fast and almost fun 730 the rest is a grind from hell... put it this way I caught around 170 fish in the entire "career tournament" and the game wants you to catch 1000 fish for a pitiful 50 gamerscore... I uploaded a handful of secret achievements which were all basic and the last one is straight forward too... it requires you to get up close to your kinect so it takes a picture of your face it sticks it on a boss fish and you have to catch those fishes.... The music in this game has about two tracks too... one is a John Tesh elevator music version of some ACDC song and the other is some raging thrash metal riff....its very startling and worst there is an achievement for turning up the music!

This morning I woke up refreshed and on a roll to clean up both Japanese games that had one missing achievement Under Defeat I wasn't sure I understood the guides floating around for the last achievement, but Nick gave me the low down and it was nice and easy like the rest of the game and Velvet Ass JP was as I had predicted using a USB keyboard, abusing the end level and god mode commands made grabbing the missing collectibles completely pain free... SWAGGERS does an AMAZING job and I couldn't have done it (twice) without him!



Speaking of guides and such... I haven't done a TA review in a really long time, there are plenty of games I would love to give my two cents on. But seeing as the voting system and such is a bit of a popularity contest (or rather a place for people to hate anonymously) Its hard to find motivation to put up content and have someone systematically vote down everything.... I witness it last night as someone managed to vote down just about everything I put up in the last three years of being here... I can't say I'm not pissed but I care a lot less about it now that I don't create any content anymore... Instead I use this platform to get my voice out and my thoughts down and I'm always excited to contribute tiles and secret achievements..... but I think if negative voting (and subsequently the vote percentage badges removed I would be more prolific in creating guides / tips / reviews.
I didn't really want to even talk about this as I know someone somewhere is getting satisfaction in knowing that their anonymous down voting affected me on some level but I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed by TA should the site want to have continued user generated content especially by prolific users who care.
And to the person who down voted my content its really sad to be so spineless that you can't confront me and say you don't like me... to my face.... chances are I don't like you either... You are probably already on the very short list of people I dislike and you clearly have more time than you do common sense.... go suck it... you can't down vote my blog... HA!.. I have more blog followers than you too!