How Do You Spell Awesome?

With an M and an E.

I beat it. I beat Mile High Club on veteran. I feel great. I am great. I am the man.

Sure I'm not the only one who's ever done it, but if you want a challenge in gaming this is it man. This is the one. And I did it in about 40 min today. I spent probably around 3 hours on it yesterday with no luck. That's always the way it is though isn't it? You have to step back from a problem, come back at it refreshed the next day, with newly grown brain cells specifically designed for the task. Neuropathways mapped out for your eventual success.

This feels like the kind of rush I used to get after a really great race. It feels like setting a new PR in the 800m. It makes me want to go for a run.

So now I have my first 100% complete game.



Technically Borderlands was my first with 1000 GS and 100% of the main game's cheevos (Fallout 3 was my first with 1000). But Xbox doesn't recognize 1000 as 100% if there is any DCL achievements (weather you have the DLC or not!), so it doesn't show up. So I will have to buy two more expansions for Borderlands if I want an official 100%. Which of course is bullshit. Same thing with Fallout 3, but I'm not going to bother playing through with a third character just to get the neutral-alignment achievements anyway so oh-well.

I'm going for a run.



Also, Happy Birthday to my love!

Buck Futter

I have been playing this level for about 2 hours. Or more. Time sort of slips away with this kind of thing. I know that when I started it was light out, but no longer. Fuck this level. Fuck This level too. I'v been trying to beat that one for a while now. Some say it's the hardest COD level ever. But maybe they don't know about Mile High Club because they havn't beaten the game? The video I put in the last post makes it look easy, but I guarantee you the person who made that spent a significant segment of their life force to create that. Not life TIME, life FORCE.

I've come soooo close to beating this level. I know it's possible and that only makes it worse . I'm going to have to quit for the night. I want to soldier on (like I did through War Room) but I've been playing this shit for about 5 hours strait now and I can feel my brain swelling. This is the kind of psychological "treatments" they give prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Just one goddamn achievement to go...


OH and did I mention the worst part? MY OWN FUCKING TEAMMATES KEEP SHOOTING ME IN THE BACK!!! LIKE 50% OF THE GODDAMN TIME! I walk down the first hallway and there is no one to shoot me from the front, it HAS to be them. AAARRRGGG!!!

Fuck.

FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK.



Fuck.

The Prestige

Last week I finally reached Prestige in MW2. It felt good to finally get there. My rise through the ranks since then seems to be going much faster than it did the first time. I'd like to think I'm better at the game than I was 11 months ago, but I'm pretty sure the enlisted levels require a lot less XP. We'll see haw fast I can get to Prestige 2.

My wife asked me if I wanted a game for Christmas and I told her I wanted CoD Black Ops. I don't usually think of myself as a primarily FPS player by it's the only new game I'm genuinely excited about. Fallout New Vegas should be a great game, but I still have 2 expansions for Fallout 3 to get through so I won't be playing F:NV anytime soon. I'm going to try really hard not to buy any new games for the rest of the year, partially to save money but mostly because I have a ton of great games I haven't given enough attention to.

Next up: Even more Borderlands. I'm lvl 38 and just started playthrough two. The new DLC bumps the level cap to 70... time to roll up my sleeves.

If Missiles Opened Doors

What I'm thinking about now:

Going out and buying all three Etrian Odyssey games... and a DS to play them on. Why? Who the fuck knows. I barely knew they existed until an hour ago when I read this. That led to a visit to the games' websites. Which led to me wanting them. I don't necessarily like this kind of long winded, sadistically difficult JRPG, but I like the idea of them. I want to like them. I may have spoken before about my attraction to Atlus games. The two most recent for me were Disgaea and Odin Sphere. They are two phenomenal games but they are deep-fat-fried in the 'ol grind aesthetic and Odin Sphere has that punishing difficulty that is so typical of Atlus. The bottom line is, I just don't have enough days in my life to dedicate to these pursuits. Perhaps if I were sickly and could not leave my bed.


I finished Shadow Complex yesterday in what I think was a five hour stretch. Lack of sleep had me in a fog so memory of the event is blurry, but I have the achievements so I know it happened. If I were to review this game I would use a single word: Metroid. Or if I used two words: Super Metroid. You can tell these guys have played that game before and you can tell it's been on their minds quite a bit since. There are sections of the map that are almost direct translations. As a fan of SM myself Shadow Complex grew on me more every time I was reminded of it. If we had never made 3D games, if sidescrollers were still king and continued to progress graphically this kind of thing would have sold millions. A part of me wants to live in that world.

Lord of the Rings Online is now free to play and that has spurred me to play it just as it did a year ago. There is still money involved to be sure, but it's involved via micro transactions. This idea I really like. While I haven't spent any money on the game yet, I feel I'm much more likely to spend a few dollars for some extra content than I am on a subscription fee. It just never made sense to me to pay over and over again for the same game. When you don't know how much you are going to be able to play in a given time period, you don't really have a clear idea of what you are paying for. But if some super-special armor costs one dollar American then I know exactly what getting and what it's costing me. I really hope this business model works out for Turbine and other developers because it sure works out for the consumer. I also want to point out how cool it is to play in Middle Earth. LOTRO as a game hasn't shown me any real stand-out moments yet, but the ability to explore all the locations from the books is very cool. Game enthusiasts are always talking about immersion. LOTRO doesn't make me float out of my chair or anything, but it makes it easier to imagine myself a traveler in Tolkien's world.

Friend Request Pending

Two years ago when I first got my 360 I set to the task of populating my friends list. Two of my friends, being in the military were not able to immediately accept. The worst was my friend Dan who only now has gotten around to getting back online. It's weird not having him at the top of my friends list with "pending" next to his name.

Four of us had been talking for two weeks about a game night. We had to badger Dan into renewing his gold membership. As usual there was a lot of email chatter about what we would end up playing. At some point someone mentioned Doom II on XBLA and somehow that's the idea that got latched onto. So when Dan did get around to renewing, he downloaded Doom II as well. It turned out to be the only game the four of us had in common. So there we were, four dudes on different corners of the Earth, connected trough miles of high-speed fiber optics and networking equipment, with thousands of dollars in state of the art entertainment systems, running a game that was made over a decade ago.

It was fun.

How the Hell is it September Already?

In my last post I wrote how I was listening to two great progressive rock albums by Steely Dan and Supertramp. Continuing in that tradition I’m now listening to Closer to the Edge by Yes. Wikipedia says that this album is considered by many to be the high point of the prog movement. It certainly is out there. The title track is 18 minutes long, and has recordings of birds. It’s not as lame as it sounds though. Maybe by the end of this post I’ll be able to give you a full impression.

Soooooo, lets see, what’s happened since August 19th? Shit. Let me distil this into micro sound bytes:

Devil May Cry, Sins of a Solar Empire, FIFA ’08, Gears of War, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Ghost in the Shell.

Mmmm, that was fun.

The big surprise of the last few weeks has been my quality assurance class. I thought it was going to be pretty easy, and I suppose it is, but our homework has consisted of finding bugs in games. These are existing games, not games in development. This is actually really hard. For the first assignment I was able to find five bugs in Fallout 3. I didn’t find them after the fact, I knew about them before hand. Some of them I had experienced only a couple of times and only knew about only because I had logged well over 200 hours in the game. The second assignment tasked us with finding 10 glitches in a different game. I managed to find only three in Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Regardless of what grade I get at least I was reminded of what a fun game it is. I think I’ll try to beat it this weekend.

The real cool surprise is that my teacher may be getting us “field trips” to play test real games at local game companies. Some of these will be companies you would have heard of, and games you are anxiously waiting to play. When I heard this news I kept it cool of course but inside I squealed like a girl. An excited young girl.

So here we are at the end of the post and I haven’t finished the album because my wife started watching Lost. I didn’t want to interfere with her experience, so I’ll let you know how it is next time.