The Guns of Anchorage

Don't remember if I mentioned this but I grabbed two of the expansion packs for Fallout 3; Broken Steel and Operation: Anchorage. It appeared as though all the expansions were part of the weekly discount on XBLA at %50 off. Believing the discount to be temporary I readily added 1000 MS points to my account and picked two. I think it may be a permanent thing though because I checked the next week and they were still at the discounted price. I hadn't yet beaten the main game (I still haven't) so I put in a few hours with my main character who I plan to use for Broken Steel. If you are not aware it is a continuation of the main game, letting you play past the ending and raising the level cap to 30. For Operation: Anchorage I chose to use my evil character, and go strait the the expanded content right away. Making it across the map to get there was challenging at level 2, especially since I was used to playing at level 20+. It was actually refreshing to have a lone raider with an assault rifle be a credible threat and gingerly negotiating such an obstacle was actually fun. I'm at a point with my main character where I'm more or less moving down a checklist tying up loose ends before the last mission. It can be tedious.

Anyway the little bit of Anchorage that I've played has been fun. The whole thing is a simulation, a game within a game. The mechanics are stripped down for a faster moving experience which again is refreshing. you don't have to mess around with item management as much because it's a "game" so you refill your ammo and health at stations along your path. There are intel items to find as well, and grabbing all ten before the end of the simulation grants you a special perk.

I'd really like to get all the achievements for this game but that puts me in a position to have to buy The Pitt. They did that thing that they sometimes do to games with DLC. They added the achievements to the game whether you have the content or not. So you could get all 1000 points from the normal game and still have an annoying 250 keeping you from %100 completion. I guess most people don't care but I'd like to see %100 for certain games and now I have to pay extra for it. I don't really want to play The Pitt either, out of all five of the expansions it seems to be the least interesting. I'm much more interested in Mothership Zeta since it's the most different, and Point Lookout looks cool because I grew up in roughly that geographic area so it would be like playing in my post-apocalyptic back yard. Whee.

New Temptations

Downloaded the demos for Lucidity and Shadow Complex, two recently released games for XBLA. I got to play them for all of 5 min before I had to go to work. Oh and also a tower defense game called Defense Grid which I played for about an hour. I've been feeling a new XBLA purchase coming on. The barriers to acquiring downloadable games is frighteningly thin. I can, on my couch, simply keep pressing the A button and I will receive games. I don't have to move my right thumb more than a fraction of an inch, let alone get up and find my credit card. Scary. It's really surprising that I haven't given M$ more money than I have. I like to think it's a testament to my iron will and thrifty nature but that thought seems pretty suspicious. I don't know what else could it be?

I Want the Chipper Chicken

I am very excited that in 9 days I will be able to afford Marvel vs. Capcom 2. It is coming to XBLA and PSN, presumably for less that the $80 it goes for on ebay. It would be really funny though if come the 29th it cost 6400 Microsoft Points.

I rented this game quite a few years ago. It was fun to play against others because of the extreme button-mashiness of it. Fighting games are great when everyone sucks. I spent the one player mode screaming hurtful things that I will probably have to answer for in the after life. The game is hard. Yet I still want to play it again. If nothing else I'd play it just to spend hours getting my ass kicked, grinding out points to spend on unlocking the 300-some characters. I really like unlocking things.

*It's not really 300, it's like 50 something. Still though, FIFTY SOMETHING.