• 4Sep 08

  Trouble in Paradise

  After 2.5 weeks spent working and vacationing in Germany and England respectively, I'm back in San Francisco and even further behind with my gaming than I was when I left. The pile of game purchases that I've yet to actually play for any worthwhile amount of time just keeps getting bigger, but that didn't stop me buying both Castle Crashers and Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise this week.

  The former I've only spent a couple of hours with in single-player mode thus far, but I'm liking it a lot. The latter I only picked up from GameStop last night (shortly after the store had closed actually, big thanks to the unusually cool GS employee at my local branch for letting me in), but I managed to get a few hours in before going to bed and again before leaving for work this morning. I'm liking it a lot, and honestly I think just about every other game I'm trying to play right now (with the exception of WoW, and work-related stuff) is gonna be taking a back seat for a while. I'm determined to get a full 1,000 achievement points from the game, but doing so is clearly going to be much harder than it was with the original--I only have 1 of the 50 so far.

  I'll be getting at least 1 more this evening when I get home, for scanning in a card that, as I understand it, will instantly add items to my collection. I've got plenty of cards to choose from; there's one printed in the instruction manual, there's a double-sided one that came with the game, there are a handful that I grabbed at E3, and then there are plenty online. I'll scan the physical cards in to share with you all here sometime soon (there's a gorilla named Rick in the mix, need I say more?), but in the meantime here's one that I found on MSXBOX-World. They're running a competition to find 23 different ones scattered throughout their forums, a neat idea for sure.

  EDIT: Looks like this lost some quality when I uploaded it. I doubt you'll be able to scan it from here, but you'll find the original version if you click on the link above.

  

  • Posted Sep 4, 2008 4:05 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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• 12Aug 08

  Blizzare

  Why do I do it? Every single time I manage to kick the World of Warcraft habit something happens and I get sucked back in - often only days after my cancelled account has expired. Yes, I'm playing WoW again, after what must be at least three or four account cancellations. I'm not even attempting to sink the kind of hours into the game that I used to when I was raiding regularly, but that doesn't mean that I'm any less hooked.

  I realized that when, yesterday, the tickets for BlizzCon went on sale. They're $100 each, which certainly ain't cheap, but I'm determined to go again, and this time my girlfriend (level 70 shadow priest) wants to come too, so I'm really looking forward to it. Only problem is, the area of the BlizzCon website where you're supposed to be able to buy tickets was pretty busted yesterday and, at the time of this writing, has been down for maintenance for, I think, a little over 18 hours. I've gone ahead and booked myself a hotel anyway, since those appeared to selling out fast, but I'm starting to wonder if tickets for any event are really worth this much hassle - I don't even like the look of the exclusive in-game polar bear mount that they're giving away to attendees this year.

  

  World of Warcraft isn't something I've ever been able to enjoy the way that I enjoy most games though. When I'm into it, I'm into it, and even when I'm not playing you can bet that somewhere in the back of my head I'm thinking about a quest, or a raid, or a cool pet for my hunter, or, you know, that Wrath of the Lich King expansion that I'm trying to not to spend too much time with.
  
  I'm also thinking about Blizzard's new Recruit-a-Friend program, which I both love and hate. Interested in checking out WoW? Let me know (I'm serious, you'll see why...), and I'll send you a code that you can redeem for a 10-day free trial. If you decide to keep playing after that, for at least two months, then I get a Zhevra (you'll never guess which real-world animal it looks like) mount for one of my characters. Maybe I'll never use it, but I'm cursed with a condition known as completionitis, the upshot of which is simply that I must have it.

  Also, if we play together there's some weird stuff where we can earn experience at three times the normal rate or something. Honestly, I think that sounds kinda busted - if it's your first time playing why would you want to rush through to the endgame content and not enjoy the journey?

  UPDATE: Awesome. By the time the the Blizzcon site was updated, just a couple of minutes after I posted this blog entry, the tickets were already sold out - apparently the World of Warcraft site got updated to say that they were on sale again about 15 minutes earlier... I'm speechless.

  UPDATE 2: Awesomer. They appear to be back on sale again, but the site isn't letting me log into my Blizzard account. That's the same problem I had yesterday before they took the whole site offline.

  UPDATE 3: Awesomest. Five minutes later. Now they really do appear to be sold out.

  • Posted Aug 12, 2008 1:05 pm PT
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• 27Jun 08

  Deadliest Crash

  I think one of the things I like most about writing reviews for GameSpot is that it forces me to beat games that I otherwise might not make the time for. It's a double-edged sword, though, because some of these games seemingly don't want to be finished. Right now, for example, I'm plowing through Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm on the Xbox 360. I've sunk more hours into it these past few days than I care to remember, but at some point during these past 12 hours I think the game realized what I was up to and set about dashing my hopes of getting through it this side of the weekend.

  Last night, as my third crabbing season came to a close, a console-freezing crash cost me around three hours of progress. Yes, you can manually save the game at any point, but up until then I had no reason to believe that mid-season saves were necessary. Then, this morning, my third season was again cut short by a similar problem. The game didn't freeze this time, rather two of my deckhands got into a comical looping animation while attempting to stack pots on deck. Deckhand A was trying to walk into/through one of the pots he'd just pulled up, and deckhand B was trying to get past him without any luck. Both would occasionally fall over owing to the storm that was raging around them, but still neither could break the cycle and refused to stop trying even when I offered them breaks or asked them to remove ice from the ship. I don't think even Captain Sig has ever had to deal with a season as frustrating as my third--hopefully it'll be third time lucky when I try to complete it again this afternoon.

  Oh, and the last time one of my deckhands fell overboard, his shipmates were too busy sorting through crabs and manning a crane to help him out of the water. RIP Tico.

  Expect a review soon.

  • Posted Jun 27, 2008 11:22 am PT
  • Category: Games
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