Kalamaf Drackonsbane

I’ve been hovering near the mark for a months now but a couple days ago I finally broke the 20,000 point gamer score barrier by finding the Durium smelter in Overlord. Then last night I racked up a few more points in Lego Batman by going around gathering up missing canisters and red bricks. I had finally found the canister & brick detectors so it’s pretty quick to find the ones I was missing. 92% complete, I’ll be done with it soon, pop some appetite suppressants and park my ass on the couch all night, won’t need to get up for anything.

Wireless mouse is the in thing in our store and the wife would love one of this when it comes out in August by Microsoft. The Mobile mouse 6000 was recently released in conjunction with a similar 5000 model. Both use BlueTrack and are comfortably sized without being too bulky to cart around. The 6000 features Microsoft’s first nano transceiver, which extends only 0.8 centimeters from the computer’s USB and stores handily inside the mouse itself. But the Mobile mouse 4000 is quite similar but comes in 5 colors and is powered by a single AA-battery for 10 months, the 2.4GHz wireless ensures connection up to 15-feet. I better do more Clinicallix reviews, so that i can buy one for the wife when it comes out.

It’s not that I didn’t like the game the first time I tried it out, it’s that I had only rented it and only recently did I find a copy to buy at a decent price. In fact I loved the game. It’s fun and it’s a good change of pace from the usual plot of playing the goody two shoes hero guy. The Dungeon Keeper series on PC was similar to this, where you play the evil dudes trying to kill the good dudes.

I’ve managed to find all 4 minion types and progressed through several missions including the slaughter of the half elf half tree Oberon. I found another mistress but decided to keep the one I had, and then blew all my money to fancy of the tower of evil to her liking. I applied for some sales manager jobs in the hopes that my control of an army of evil minions would be enough proof that I can manage a crew of employees. I seem to have run off on a tangent here..

Anyway, back to the Understreets, I need to find my upgraded forge so I can replace this steel armor, it’s getting rusty.

I’m past the 1 week mark, around 10 or 11 days now actually, and the game is still pretty fun. I’ve just started work on my third city, my first one is getting built up quite nicely and the second is a cash cow. After the beginner protection was lifted I started scouting and attacking some of the local players and have become hooked on that part of it. I’ve hauled away as many as 600,000 resources from enemy cities, it would take half a day for my farms and mills to produce that much but it only took a half hour for my army to go steal it!

So while my wife shops around online for wholesale handbags, I rape & pillage the neighbours for their food, wood and precious stones. It’s all in good fun. Today someone sent one of their alliance members after me in retaliation for hitting one of their unprotected but rich towns. His little army was decimated by the raw power of my archer towers. whee.

I’m bored. And since playing a new game sounds like more fun than buying faucets online I figured I’d check out this new game I saw advertised in my own sidebar, Evony. FREE FOREVER! They really like to pimp that free forever feature. As with most free online games these days you can choose to pay for premium features if you want to. I choose not to for now, but so far it’s an interesting little game.

So far I’ve been building and building and building since all new players are under 7 day protection from attacks. Once that 7 days is up I’ll find out how much fun the game still is, I just hope I can get a big enough army by then to save my ass from annihilation. There’s a good bunch of “quests” to follow which keep you cruising quite well as far as resources to. Pay 10k gold to build something and chances are you’ll get a quest reward for 10k gold or more just for building that something. It helps your first city to grow really fast.

The game world is persistent, which so far is a good thing. I go to bed at night and when I get up in he morning I have a crapload of resources which I can use to get started on new buildings and upgrades. The downside to this is that once the 7 day protection is over, I could wake up in the morning to find myself wiped out. I don’t know how the combat part is handled yet, and whether or not you can lose your city or just your soldiers. I’ll be finding that out in a few days too.

So far it’s fun and if I keep playing beyond the weekend I’ll post another update with my ‘progress’.

I’ve been getting quite a collection of little gadgets building up in my store. Digital cameras, Mp3 players, game systems & controllers and so on. It’s pretty normal for this time of year though, June can be a pretty slow month with lots of people looking to sell stuff, but it turns around in July once school is out and the vacationers start roaming around. At the moment I’ve got a good range of mp3 players in, an iPod, a Zune, a Zen and a Sansa. All with between 4gb and 8gb of storage.

After several months of on and off playing this game I think I’m nearing the end. Chapter 7: Heroic and party level 6 are the last progress achievements for the main quest line so I figure a couple more hours will wrap it up. I lost interest in it for quite a while because the combat system was bugging me, it’s not so bad now that my main party has a crapload of HP so I don’t need to keep healing after every fight due to bad timing on the defense button.

As with most RPG’s on the 360 though, if I want to get all the gamer score points I’d have to play through it a couple more times in order to find all the hidden stuff. Score pieces in a barrel here, Liporexall behind a rock over there, and so on. But with over a dozen unplayed games waiting on the shelf I think I’ll just finish it once and move on to something else. Probably Mass Effect next, that’s been sitting there the longest.

I keep seeing advertisements for the beta on my 360 dashboard but I have yet to get a chance to try it. Apparently it’s a game show style game where you pit your wits against hundreds or even thousands of other gamers. The game usually starts at 11pm here and I’m usually busy with other things. I hear that once it goes live you’ll have a chance to win prizes, such as Arcade games and MS points to use for downloads and stuff. It sounds pretty interesting really and I hope to get a crack at it soon. Game shows are something the whole family can enjoy, but keep that AED in case gramps gets a little too excited if you actually become the One.

I’ve become a little addicted to tower defense games lately. Up until about a month ago I never knew there was a whole genre dedicated to this type of game. The first one I played was Crystal Defenders on the XBox 360. Put your dudes along a path, monsters walk along the path and hopefully your dudes kill them. If you planned it out properly.

Then I came across Gemcraft on Kongregate (the game itself is by Armor Games) and played that quite a bit for a few days. It was pretty easy after gaining a few levels though and I figure it was only about a week until I had beaten all the secret levels and finally the big boss at the end of the game. I thought I’d be able to get back to the 360 for a while after that but noooo. I just had to go check out Armor Games and sure enough, there’s a sequel to Gemcraft out now. So I gave it a shot.

It’s a lot harder than the first one. I find myself struggling at times even on these earlier levels. The play mechanics are similar but with a lot of changes/additions. It’s more about strategy than brute force, in some levels I felt I was throwing everything but the bathroom sink at those little monsters and I lose every time. It’s frustrating sometimes but I still feel compelled to try again and again.

I was browsing through Game Stop the other day when a young couple brought in a bag of games and a wireless guitar for PS2. I hung around near the counter to see what they would be offered for their stuff. I know that GS gives decent trade in value for really new games (and then sells them for practically full price), but I didn’t know how their offers were on older stuff.

Looks like these guys were trading in a bunch of PS2 and original XBox games, and after the clerk was done punching them up in the computer and told them straight-faced, “After the refurb charges I can give you 8 bucks for this stuff”. Needless to say they were a little upset when they were told the wireless guitar was only worth $3 and their dozen games were worth $5. They didn’t create a big fuss though, just collected their stuff and left.

$8 for 12 games and a guitar. $8 store credit, not even cash! I could make that much in 5 minutes writing slimming pills reviews! Don’t waste your time bringing old stuff to Game Stop or EB Games, they offer horribly low amounts for it. You could get much more at the smaller mom & pop stores, or selling it on eBay yourself.

Everyone else is talking about this new game from SOE so I figured I might as well too. I started playing today and it was easy to jump into. I didn’t have to create an account since I already have a station account, and it only downloads the parts you need as you need them so there was no big wait time right at the beginning. The game installed fast and I was playing in about 10 minutes.

So far after about an hour I have a couple small gripes and that’s with the controls. Why can’t I re-map from the stupid WASD setup?! I’m a touch typist, I like to keep my fingers on the home row keys. I don’t like having to move my left hand to the left to use the stupid WASD keys for movement when it’s so much more convenient to use ESDF like I do in every other game I play. Also, how do I invert my mouselook, doesn’t seem to be an option for that either. I know they’re aiming this game at kids and casual gamers, but they could at least include an ‘advanced’ tab for those of us who know what we’re doing.

Aside from that it looks to be fun enough. There’s a wide variety of jobs you can do simply by doing the starting quests. Oh, I forgot to mention but it’s pretty obvious from the name alone, Free Realms is free to play. Of course you can pay for premium features if you choose. Extra content, extra character classes/jobs, and so on.

So far I’ve gone fighter mode and beaten up some baddies, then I put on a chef hat and baked some goodies. I haven’t read up on it much but I presume there would be other typical jobs as well, like making engagement rings as a jeweler or some armor/weapons as a blacksmith. Stuff like that. There’s 15 job types in the game and so far I’ve only done 3 of them, although I did unlock destruction derby driver. That seems crazy enough for this type of game so it wouldn’t surprise me to see other interesting stuff crop up the next time I play.

Well damnit, this isn’t much fun. The other night while playing Wheelman my xbox froze up. I shut it off and turned it back on, fearing I’d see the red ring of death. But nope, it started up and all seemed normal until I tried to load up the game and it froze again then went to an error screen; E71. I haven’t seen that one before so I looked it up. Seems like no one really knows much about this one, and as far as I can tell it’s not covered under the 3 year warranty. Only the RRoD and E74 are covered for 3 years.

I let it cool down and tried again later and the game worked, for a while, then it froze up again and gave me the E71 once again. I cleared some space on the hard drive, installed the game and then proceeded to play it for an hour without a hitch. So it looks like the problem might be related to the DVD drive, which sucks since that isn’t under warranty anymore either. I might have to just bake it to induce an RRoD so I can get it fixed for free. Finding a good working xbox 360 is as hard as finding diet pills that work! By the time Micro$oft finally the solves the problem the next generation will be just around the corner and no one will care anymore. As long as the next xbox is as stable as the first one, which I’ve used almost daily for 8 years with no trouble at all.

The rest of my time this past weekend was spent trying to build a slide for the kid. I brought home some old lumber from the store, stuff that used to be for movie shelves, to build a platform out of. The slide part I bought on sale at Kent a couple weeks ago, $50 marked down from $100. It won’t take long to build, but I need to get 2 more longer boards to use as support braces. The platform is about 4 feet high and only a foot and a half wide, not the most stable thing when put on the lawn, so I need to do something to make it a little more solid. It would be done already but we needed to get some grocery shopping done, and pick up a new laundry hamper to replace the old cloth one that’s 6 years old and falling apart.

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun with The Wheelman over the weekend. It’s like mixing the sand box style of GTA IV with the destructive driving style of Burnout Paradise. It works and it’s good and it’s got Vin Diesel on horse supplements (not really). The game borrows heavily from the GTA formula with side missions that include driving a taxi, wrecking stuff with your car, racing, pick up this and bring it there and a few other modes. You get a bunch of these available from the start and if you get rank A or better on each one it unlocks more until you reach a certain point, then you need to complete some of the regular story missions to unlock more of the city.

The Wheelman brings a couple of fresh features along with it though. The first one, Air Jacking, allows you to steal a car without having to leave your current car. You drive up behind the vehicle you want, hold down B until the icon turns green and let it go. Vin proceeds to jump out of his window onto the roof of the car in front of you. He then swings down in through that cars window, knocking the driver out on his ass. Voila! New car. So if you’re getting shot up pretty bad and your car is about to blow, it’s quick and easy to jack a new one. No need to run around looking for a new ride while the bad guys speed away. The game does have some on-foot missions as well, but they’re quite bearable. The gun play is easy to get used to and the targeting system isn’t nearly as frustrating as the GTA series.

The other new feature that I haven’t seen in other games is vehicle melee combat. You drive and steer just like any other game, but you can use the right analog stick to turn your car into a more accurate weapon. Move it left, right or up to have your car ram the enemy car for lots of damage and destruction. There are also a couple of special moves you can do while driving. Aimed shot and The Cyclone, where the game goes into a bullet-time style mode where you can pick off enemy passengers or put a bullet through the engine block causing the cars to blow up with just a couple shots.