8 posts tagged “xbox 360”

I'm one of those guys who used to play Magic: The Gathering. I got into it briefly in middle school when it was all the rage and then about 3-4 years ago got into it pretty heavily for about a year. I played in tournaments, went to release events...the whole 9 yards. I ended up getting pretty decent at it, but eventually I realized that I was sinking way too much time and money into the hobby and started pulling away from it.

For example, I owned a Library of Alexandria which I bought for around $150. And I had 3 mana drains (english language). Those went for around $50-80 a pop when I bought them. Shortly after that was when I had my "Dear lord, I'm spending 70% of my income on a card game" moment which quickly led me to stop collecting. Last year I sold off a lot of my more expensive cards.

But yesterday I caught wind of a Magic: The Gathering game headed to the xbox live arcade. I liked playing the game...the strategy was really interesting to me. The part I didn't like was how hardcore you had to get into it and how much money you had to spend to get all the cards. While this new system isn't perfect (as in there's some limitations to the cards in the game and the deck customization) I think it'll scratch the itch for a more casual Magic experience. Sounds like they have a nice little platform for future expansion as well. Can't go wrong for $10 anyway.

Going to give it a try this evening to see how it runs.

As I had mentioned yesterday, I was close to finishing Mass Effect. As it turns out, I was really close as I completley finished the game last night.

Wow.

Mass Effect is an action based RPG for the XBox 360, set in a sci-fi space setting. You get command of a space ship and get to fly around, saving the galaxy. It's played in a third person perspective, and it feels very much like a shooter with stats and special skills. Something of a hybrid of the two genres that really works well.

The story is...awesome. It's produced by Bioware, a company that knows how to make a good story so I really shouldn't be surprised. The main campaign set pieces are so amazingly well done and scripted that you never quite know what to expect when you round the next corner. And just when you think they've thrown out something so cool that they can't top it...they do. The entire last section of the game was filled with these sorts of moments, one after the other in one of the most fun to play ending sequences I've had the pleasure of experiencing.

The game is very cinematic too. From the cutscenes to the music, to the slight hint of film grain on the screen...it feels like you're playing an interactive movie. Also little touches like displaying the dialog options a few seconds before the NPC that you're talking to is finished speaking, thereby eliminating any pauses in the conversation while the player chooses an option really help increase the movie-like feel. The voice acting is pretty good too, featuring the like of Seth Green and Marina Sirtis (Troi from Star Trek, The Next Generation)

I do have a couple complaints however. First, the side quests on the unexplored worlds are...boring. They're all pretty much the same with no twists, on generic maps with generic bad guys living on generic planets. And the rover you drive around in...VERY hard to control, and very hard to aim correctly when you're trying to shoot people. I had better luck running over bad guys than I did hitting them with the gun.

However, all that aside, it's a very good game and highly recommended if you missed out on it. I know it's a little old by now, but I'm just catching up here! I can't wait for the sequel to come out.

The New Xbox Experience rocks. Period. Just to recap for those who may not be familiar...microsoft has been working on a huge update to the xbox 360's UI when you're not playing a game. The old one was ok, but it was getting pretty cluttered. So Microsoft designed an update.

It's pretty neat. Very well organized now and a lot quicker to navigate for me. They added something like the Nintendo Wii Mii's in Avatars which I could honestly do without. It feels pretty...gimicky but as long as it's in there I'll use it. The best part of the updates come in when you're looking at the Xbox Live Marketplace (where you can go to buy new games, videos, download game demos, etc). Everything comes up much faster now and they added the ability to jump to a specific title by name instead of having to scroll through the entire list if you wanted to download an item with a name starting with Z.

But the bestest new feature (even beating out the ability to copy game DVDs to the hard drive for faster load times) is the Nexflix Instant Watching support. My netflix account is becoming very, very useful. I use the instant watching feature a ton more now that it's availible mac side and also availible on my TV now. The service is pretty easy to use, really nice quality on my standard def tv at least and is just another awesome reason why I don't regret my 360 purchase one bit.

So the NXE gets 2 thumbs up from me.

..and they lived! So far anyway. Hopefully they stay living.

Wassy came over last night and instead of going out I wanted to cook something in-house so I made baked Sea Scallops which turned out really well, with only a few minor issues. The scallops turned out really well, but the microwaveable rice ended up being slightly undercooked. Figures that the actual cooking bit would turn out ok and the easy part would get screwed up.

After that there was much rocking as we played Rock Band 2 for a while and hung out in general. Rock Band 2 is a really fun game to play with other people around, and it's definitely worth the investment that it took to get in the door.

Speaking of investments in games though, due to the price of the latest Xbox 360 type games, I'm trying out gamefly. It's basically netflix for video games, but not quite as good. But it's better than paying full price for a game you might play once. And the price is set up so that..basically, if I manage to play more than 1 game every three months, it'll pay for itself in savings since a 360 game is about  $60 and the 1 game at a time thing is around $15/month + tax (2 is $22ish). So we'll see how this goes. My first game should be arriving either today or tomorrow hopefully, which is Fallout 3.

I finished Tales of Vesperia on Tuesday, although there's still a lot of the game I didn't get to do. I'll go back later once the walkthroughs are more solid so I can find all of the hidden items and such. There isn't really a great guide out for it yet since it's so new. But I managed to complete the game without looking at a guide except in trying to find certain locations on the world map. I have a terrible direction sense and I get frustrated if I can't find where I'm supposed to be going next. But other than that, walkthrough free! And it was an excellent game. Similar to other Tales games in it's game mechanics, but that's what you get into the series for. You know what you're getting when you buy one. The story did a very good job of keeping me interested and guessing as to what would happen next.

Most of my leisure time over the past week has been taken up by Rock Band 2. Last weekend I moved into phase 2 of my Xbox 360 purchase and grabbed Rock Band 2 and the wireless drums. I've been having fun all week virtually drumming along to songs in an effort to unlock the song I bought the game for, Panic Attack by Dream Theater. It's one of the harder songs in the game so it's all the way at the end...I am nearing it though. Not too much longer!

Which is a good thing, because I've discovered that my back has become very unhappy with me due to the way I sit while I'm drumming. I really need to find a better way to do this so it's less painful on my back. I'm getting too old for rocking :(

But overall, I'm really enjoying the game. It should be fun once I can play it with my friends as it was meant to be enjoyed.

I've been quiet over the past couple days because of one thing: I bought myself an XBox 360 this Friday. I had intended on waiting a bit before getting it, but...I have no willpower and once I set my mind to getting something, I usually just end up with it no matter what. It got down to where I was (jokingly, might I add) convinced that it was going to help the economy and consumer confidence.

But anyway, I got it, along with Tales of Vesperia, because rock band 2 is so darn expensive and I didn't want to pick that up quite yet. I'm really enjoying it a lot. My next big purchase after Rock Band is going to be a decent yet not terribly expensive HDTV though. This thing really needs HD, I can tell that now. I've still got that new toy fever which means it's hard for me to do work type stuff that I want to do, such as keeping up on my programming practice.

There wasn't any hanging out with the friends this weekend because they had a lot of stuff they needed to take care of on various projects and such. So I stayed in mostly which very nearly drove me crazy by the end of the day Sunday. I've got a tiny little apartment and staying in there nonstop for that long a time made it feel like the walls were closing in on me.

But I spent most of the weekend playing the 360, Tales especially. It took a while to get going but now it's got a good story and I've just encountered my first dungeon with totally inexplicable puzzles which is a trademark of the Tales series. Waiting for the first box pushing puzzle now! The one I encountered involved a tower which you had to spin certain gears to get the staircase to the next area to descend. Which, I would imagine, makes it difficult for the owners of the tower to navigate between it's floors... Anyway, good game, and great graphics. It looks like I'm playing an interactive anime game. I'm going to like this 360.

I'm not going to like the price of the games though. Most of them are like $60. I've been considering signing up for a service like Gamefly which would let me rent a couple games to play at a time. So if it's $22.95 a month for 2 games out...at a time...that's going to save me a crapton of money even if I only play 1 game every 3 months. It seems totally worth it, and especially for games that I'll probably only play for a short period of time. And if I like something I can just buy it from them. So I think I will actually do that once I finish Tales.

For dinner sunday night I made the Chicken Cacciatore that I was shown how to make last weekend and it turned out very awesome. I might be able to cook after all! I need to change a few things around since you always make a few mistakes here and there the first time out. I let it simmer for a tad too long because I underestimated the amount of time it would take to boil the water for the pasta. But overall...mmmm...excellent. This week I'm going to be trying Swordfish and Halibut, two things which I've never had before but we're going to give them a shot anyway. Looking forward to seeing how they turn out. I'll probably have more on that tomorrow, since thats when I'll be trying the swordfish.

So I haven't posted much at all this weekend because I was too darn busy to write something down. So here's a post covering the three days of my weekend.

Friday

I had the day off because I took every Friday off until the end of the year, plus December 26th to use up some vacation time I had before it vanishes at the end of the year. So I basically stayed home and played Suikoden V and hoped that somebody on the internet would get some Wii's in stock because I'm actively trying to find one at this point. Towards the end of the day, target and amazon actually got their bundle in stock, but I held off because I'm not sure if I wanted the contents of the bundle and I was planning on trying to score a Wii Sunday morning at Target anyway.

Saturday

Today I had plans. Lots of plans. However, the first thing I want to mention is an emergency cheese run.

I had a bit of a crisis, since I wanted to make a sandwich and had no cheese. You can't really have a good sandwich without cheese! So I went to the store to get some. I went to check out in the express, 15 items or less lane and there's two people in front of me. The person actually paying was an older woman who pulled out a wad of coupons and double coupon things from the paper. In fact...she might have clipped every coupon in the entire newspaper ad. So we spend roughly 10 minutes sorting through all of her coupons so she could save 50 cents on orange juice. I swear, if she pulled out a checkbook...

The next person in front of me was a little kid buying a stuffed animal of some sort. The cashier asks for his advantage savings card thing and he then proceeds to yell across the store to his mother asking her if he can use her card. At this point, I pull out my card and hand it to the cashier and told her that he can use mine. So FINALLY I get checked out and leave the store. Waited about 15 minutes in the express lane for that.

So later that afternoon, I went to meet up with some friends to play some Wii/XBox 360/PS2 games and just generally hang out. A plan was worked out for the weekend where I would stay overnight at one of my other friends places since they're closer to Target than I am and I was going to be over there Sunday, on call for helping out with a school project that involved some PHP web programming anyway. So that's what happened. Cut to Sunday...

Sunday

Sunday I was awake at 5am, trying to get a Wii from Target, but I decided not to actually get up and going until 6 because I didn't think there would be too much of a line. I get going, get to the store about an hour and 15 minutes before it opens and there's already a line of, apparently 28 people. So I got in line, I'm number 29. The person in front of me turns around and said that we might be out of luck since the word is they only have 27 and the person in front of her is 27...but we waited it out just to make sure. They came out about 20 minutes later and confirmed they only have 27. I met another friend of mine in line behind me, so we took off to best buy to see if they were going to get any in.

We get to best buy around 7:20-ish and there's one guy standing outside. My friend called his girlfriend and got her to check the Sunday paper ad and it wasn't in there, so instead of waiting in line for an hour and 40 minutes in the freezing cold before the manager got there at 9 (the store opened at 10), I decided to just go back to my friends. Which ended up being a smart decision since they ended up not having any.

So I spent the day playing Zelda on my friends Wii, hanging out and not really helping out with the programming project because, as it turns out, I wasn't really needed. But I had fun, as always hanging out and stuff.

The extreme fun of the weekend didn't make coming back into work this morning any easier though. That set of annoyances, however, will be saved for another posting...

I've been a bit busy/too lazy recently to update here, so I'm going to catch up on a couple days worth of activities here.

Thanksgiving was fun. I woke up that morning with dreams of getting myself a $100 XBox 360 from amazon.com due to a promotion they were running. Unfortunately, that wasn't to be. The load crashed amazons servers for about 15-20 minutes and by the time I got in, it was sold out since they were only offering 1000 of them. Oh well, it was worth a try. Both my helpers came up empty too. (I had my dad and a friend of mine madly refreshing as well).

So I went over to my parents house in the morning to do the traditional Christmas decoration setup. We get the argument portion of the holiday over and done with there by arguing about the most efficient method of setting up the tree (as mentioned before, it's a nice artificial one. Looks pretty real until you get close to it). During which, we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and then I somehow convinced my dad to watch a little of the national dog show. Not that I really wanted to watch it myself. I just wanted to see if I could get him to do it.

Dinner was good. It's been a long time since I've had turkey that wasn't in a sandwich. My mom didn't enjoy the cooking quite so much as we enjoyed the eating though. I have a feeling we're going to be going out to eat again next year.

So Black Friday rolls around and I get the stupid idea to go out later in the afternoon to pick up some items, as well as check around and see if there happened to be a Nintendo Wii out there that had been overlooked in the mad rush. Of course there wasn't. And it was still a mad rush out there. According to my sister who works at the Staples across the street from Best Buy, people were lining up there starting at 6PM thanksgiving day and by the time she got into work in the morning, the line had already gone way past several of the other stores in that same section of buildings. That's just...nuts.

So this afternoon I'm going to a little gathering with some friends where we're going to test out the party abilities of the Nintendo Wii. Been looking forward to this for a while. I guess we're going to have 4 controllers and a bunch of game type things. My arm is going to be sooo sore tomorrow.