Category Archives: Xbox

I Wish I Could Drive To Qeynos

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I did a bit more questing and hit level 21 with my illusionist in EQ2 tonight, mainly concentrated around the eastern parts of Antonica, where I discovered a couple new quest hubs.

But I don’t want EQ2 to dominate all of my time, so I also got back to Forza 3 tonight, continuing to work my way through the single-player career. I’ve collected a few more cars from driver levels now (where I’m up to 15), up through B class, but I’m just about to start the A class championship. I’ll have to buy an A class car, and this is the first time I’ve actually needed to buy a car to progress (technically, I could upgrade one of my existing ones, but I’m trying to keep them within their original classes for now).

I Need A Ferrari

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I spent some more time in Forza 3 tonight, but mostly in multiplayer this time, as we had a good little group going. I still need to unlock and buy a lot more cars since I’m currently limited to only a couple each of C class and below, but it was still pretty fun, and everyone was pretty close in skill so the outcomes varied a lot.

Vroom!

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Today was the release of Forza 3, and I picked up my Collector’s Edition of it right after work and spent a few hours in it tonight. It’s a lot like Forza 2, but the big, earth-shattering change is the rewind ability, as seen in a few other games like GRID. A single little mistake on the last lap won’t ruin your race anymore, as you can just rewind to before it happened. The downside to it is that laps set when you use rewind won’t rank as highly as ‘clean’ laps on the leaderboards.

There are also more cars and tracks, and I’ve been pretty happy with the new tracks I’ve seen so far. I’ve done a handful of F-to-D class races and championships and I’ve stuck with the reward cars for now. I’ve got the AI set to easy, but all of the assists turned off, to try and get used to driving that way first.

And speaking of the AI, it’s capable of making its own mistakes. And even pretty big ones…

Edit: Oh, and since I got the Collector’s Edition of it (I’m a big sucker for special editions), it came with a handful of bonuses, including some exclusive cars I haven’t gotten around to buying yet, a VIP flag on my account (can’t remember offhand what the benefits of that are), and a Forza-branded keychain and 2GB USB stick. The keychain is metal and much sturdier than the cheap plastic thing you’d normally expect to get in a package like this, and the USB stick is a bit small compared to what you can get nowadays, but I can move my Ubuntu live disc over to it and free up some space on my regular thumb drive.

Ow, My Coccyx!

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I played a bit more of Trials HD tonight, getting through all of the medium levels. I’m only getting bronzes and the occasional silver on these, though. It’ll take a lot more practice to be able to do these without a lot of mid-level restarts, and I’m just trying to get through all the levels for now.

I did at least get the achievement for destroying my bike and breaking every bone in my body, though.

Oh Yeah, I Own One Of Those

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I haven’t done much with the 360 lately, but today I took a bit of time to catch up with some of the newer XBLA games, at least.

Splosion Man: You play a character who, well, explodes. That’s all he does, run around and explode. But the explosions propel you around, let you trigger various things, etc., and you use that to make your way to the exit. There are of course various obstacles, timed puzzles, enemies, tricky jumps and triggered sequences, etc., along the way. For example, you might have to wall-jump, er, wall-explode up a shaft into an area where spiked walls move inwards and you have to explode up to trigger a barrel drop that you blow up to lift you up enough to trigger a door switch and…etc. I’ve done the first 11 levels so far, and things are getting pretty tricky.

Trials HD: I have the PC version of Trials 2, but word-of-mouth was that the 360 version was an improvement, so I picked it up as well. One of the biggest improvements is that you can see how well you’re doing relative to your friends, which can be motivating or depressing… I’ve done the Beginner and Easy levels so far, usually placing near the bottom but there are a couple of levels where I managed to get to the top of my list of friends.

Shadow Complex: It’s a semi-modern-day version of Metroid, basically, with the same kind of side-scrolling exploration and upgrade-finding, but with an analog aiming stick. I’ve barely started this one, though.

Dammit, I Wanted To See Lotto Numbers

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The PC was busy, so I couldn’t get back to Trine right away, and instead I caught up on the latest Fable II DLC, See The Future.

It started out with entering a cursed snowglobe, where coloured shadows had sucked all of the colour out of the world. I had to fight my way through a few villages and caves, with each shadow being immune to all but one type of damage, depending on its colour. It wasn’t too hard, though it was annoying in parts where I couldn’t use melee to regain health. Next up was a cursed skull, where I had to disguise myself as various monsters to get some wisps to free a cursed knight. Or so he claimed…

The end result was a statue of the spire, which gave me a vision of the future. I also got the ability to compete in a colosseum, though I managed to win the ultimate prize on my first time there anyway.

Miscellanea

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Instead of continuing on in Trine, I wound up doing a grab-bag of different things today.

First I fired up Crackdown for a little bit. I know I swore I wouldn’t bother trying for that last agility orb anymore, but I figured I should at least check the tops of the tallest Shai-Gen buildings, since I’d passed over them before. But it wasn’t there.

I checked out the recent XBLA games and gave Rocket Riot a try, and the trial was fun enough that I wound up buying the full game. It’s fairly simple, you pilot your legless guy around a destructible 2D map trying to accomplish the given goal by firing arcing rockets around, but there’s a decent amount of variety to the goals.

And finally, inspired by a resurrected forum post, I dusted off Test Drive Unlimited and redid the Millionaire’s Challenge once again, since it gives you a good tour of the perimeter of the island. I’m a little rusty, coming in a minute slower than my previous record, but I triggered the police way too much this time.
– test drive unlimited

One Last Shot

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I bought Prototype today, but it was taking forever to download from Steam, so in the meantime I started up Crackdown to get me in the right frame of mind.

I also had another motive for returning to Crackdown: that one last damn agility orb that I’m still missing. I’m up to 498 of 500, I know where one is (and want to make it the very last one I pick up), and now there’s just one left. Damned if I know where it is, though. I’ve considered following guides to all of the orbs, but that gets tedious quickly, so I just ran around listening for the orb-nearby sound.

Alas, by the end of the evening, the agility orb still eluded me. I did pick up a good 15-20 more hidden orbs though, putting me at 283 of 300 of them. I don’t think I’m going to waste any more time on that agility orb, though — congrats orb, you’ve beaten me.

Rock On

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I’m trying to catch up in Rock Band, since for some reason I kept buying a few song downloads here and there but didn’t play them right away, and now I’ve accumulated a bunch of them.

I can’t even remember which ones they were though, so I’m going through the whole list of downloaded songs and playing any that don’t have scores against them. It’s odd though, since I know I’ve played some songs that don’t have scores already, and I’m not sure why it didn’t get recorded, and it just makes it harder to tell which ones are really new.

Oh well, I’ll get through them all eventually, and I’m up to Foo Fighters so far.

Mixed Bag

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Tonight was a variety of things, starting off with Crystal Defenders, a Final Fantasy-themed tower defense game just released on XBLA. It looks fairly simple, but it’s harder than it looks, and I haven’t successfully completed a wave yet. That looks like it’s intentional though, as there’s only 6 maps in total, plus a hard variant of each. I’m not sure if it was really worth the money, but it’s still kinda fun.

Next up I was inspired by a forum post to play another Hinterland session. There have been a couple patches since I last played, but nothing revolutionary. I took an Outlaw on long/hardcore, which starts you off in a fame debt that you have to pay off within four days or lose, but that attempt was cut short by some rather hard-hitting monsters instead. I tried again and managed to win that time, though it took about four hours. I really had to be careful since my equipment and town growth was awful for a long time, but in the end things evened out.

And finally I gave Unreal Tournament 3 a whirl. It was cheap and I was curious about modern shooters, but I only had time to play through the tutorial match. There’s a ‘campaign’ mode to it, but I imagine it’ll just be a series of bot matches, much like previous versions and Quake 3… There’s a fast pace to it that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with yet.