Category Archives: Xbox

I Am The Weather King

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Getting away from WoW for a bit, I hopped back into Fable II tonight in order to go through the Knothole Island DLC released a little while ago. And as if I wasn’t rich enough already, I was treated to an instant gain of over a million gold as soon as I loaded my save.

The island turned out to consist of a series of three quests, each of which led to a temple that changed the weather after completion and that changed the terrain of the island around a bit. The temples were fairly easy, with a bit of an overreliance on timed orb switches, and you had to leave the island and come back between each one in order to start the next one.

There were various island-specific items to gather along the way, but the only ones of any real consequence were some new augments and weapons with a larger number of sockets. With those, I’m even more overpowered than I was before…

There was a crypt that gave me a chance to resurrect my dog, having lost it in the main quest, but I opted not to. The consequences of my choice should remain, and I would have had to sacrifice an innocent villager to do so. That halo over my head isn’t just for show!

And that was about it for the island, and I ended the night in the way all gaming sessions should end, by having sex with my wife. Overall, I’m not sure the DLC was really worth it, though. There wasn’t really any challenge or enough new or interesting to it.

Suck It, Napoleon

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Today I finished off the last two chapters in the single-player campaign of Frontlines: Fuel of War, most of which took place within Moscow. Nothing really new was introduced in these chapters, but the sheer density of enemies and prevalence of things like rocket launchers made it more difficult and slow-going than the previous areas. I took a tank through most of it, but it required a lot of backing off and hiding to allow time for repairs.

Overall, the campaign was pretty good, if short. I haven’t tried the multiplayer part yet though, which will depend on how much time I have, how many other people are around, etc. There are also achievements for completing chapters without dying or within time limits, but I’m not sure if I’ll bother trying for those.

Tank Beats Everything

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I worked through a few more of the Frontlines missions over the last few days. Mission 3 started out like a stealth mission, but it wasn’t too long before the enemies had discovered where I was and most of the rest of the mission was spent trying to coax them out of hiding or sniping them. The second half involved defending a town against a couple waves of enemies, which I barely scraped by on — I’m never very good at timed bits like that.

Mission 4 was mainly a whole lotta tank battling, and then mission 5 took the battle to inside a mountain, where there were all sorts of corridors and boxes and platforms for them to hide on.

I also toyed a bit more with Defense Grid, managing to complete the ‘Grinder’ mode of Waste Disposal. In this one only ‘walker’ enemies appear, but you have to survive through 99 waves of them and the groups of them get bigger and bigger and bigger… It took a whole lot of meteor towers and a couple others I don’t often use, like inferno and concussion, but I made it with only two cores lost.

Watch Your Backlines, Too

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Well, I had intended to start the new game yesterday, but it turned out there were some pretty sizable downloads available for it, and by the time I got them it was fairly late.

So, tonight I started working on Frontlines: Fuel of War, the gift mentioned in previous comments. The impressions on the forums were pretty favourable, and it’s holding up pretty well so far. It’s a squad-based shooter along the lines of CoD4, though the other squad members seem to be there mostly as distractions and all the heavy lifting is up to you, of course.

The weapons are mostly fairly traditional and I didn’t vary from the standard assault rifle and rocket launcher much, but every once in a while you get to pick up a special weapon like flying drones or a controllable robot gun, and they’re always fun. In the second mission I used a little mini-helicopter to take out a tank by circle-strafing around it and pelting it with rockets while it uselessly tried to aim its main cannon at it.

You also get to ride around in vehicles on a fairly regular basis, and they pack a lot of firepower. Controlling them was a bit weird at first, since it varies depending on whether they have a turret or not, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

I’ve only done the first two missions so far though, and it looks like the next one is a stealth/sniping one. Seems like the single-player campaign will be pretty short since there are only seven missions, but the multiplayer is supposed to be pretty meaty. It’s too bad there’s no co-op mode for the single-player campaign, though you should be able to form a squad of friends in the multi at least.

My Insurance Rates Are Horrible

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The only really major news in WoW lately is that I finally bought my flying mount, and can now knock off the rest of the exploration achievements in Outland the next time I’m over there. For now though, I’ve been spending a lot of time finishing off low-level quests in the old world and gaining faction. I have all of the home cities except Silvermoon up to exalted now, and it’s going to be a pain since I’ve done all of the newbie and Ghostland quests for it and I’m still 3500 points short. I guess I’ll have to work on other quests and see how many ‘bonus’ points I can get towards it before I have to resort to farming runecloth.

And Paul and I finally got back to Halo 3 tonight, getting through chapters 6 and 7 of the co-op campaign. I don’t think he’s letting me drive any more, though…

And I Thought I Was Compulsive

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Since I don’t want my free time to be spent entirely in WoW, but the PC is still substituting for my Linux box, I fired up the 360 and figured I’d start something light, like the original Banjo-Kazooie. It came out for XBLA recently, I never played it when it first came out for the N64, and I like platformers, so what the hell.

And it’s your typical platformer, with a lot of jumping around, puzzles to figure out, some enemies to fight, and stuff to collect. And oh boy are there ever a lot of things to collect. Jigsaw puzzle pieces, musical notes, some shaman’s skull tokens, eggs, honeycombs, these little sprite-like guys, 1ups… A lot of them aren’t optional either; you have to collect at least a certain number in order to unlock things you need to progress.

It’s decent enough, though. Comparisons to Mario 64 are obvious, though it seems to take more of a linear approach and each world is fairly large and can be scoured in a single pass, instead of being revisited a bunch of times. I’ve only completed the first world so far (of nine, I think) though, so maybe it opens up later on.

I’m also tempted by the new B-K game, though it’s a fairly different style. I already wrote something about the demo for it before.

Things That Begin With ‘F’

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Picking up where I left off before I was so rudely interrupted by hardware failure…

On Saturday I finished off the remaining sidequests in Fable 2, hunted down the remaining gargoyles and silver keys, and then finished the game. The final boss fight was…well, they definitely went for a different approach to it, and saying anything more would be too big a spoiler.

Unfortunately, because of the ending I chose, I lost my dog and my family. So, of course, I immediately went out and married the bustiest whore I could find. A few other post-game quests opened up, so I did them and picked up a few more achievements along the way.

In the end, Fable 2 took me around 26 hours, and was definitely a lot longer and better than the original. It’s not quite game-of-the-year material, but it wasn’t a waste.

After that, I finally got around to starting Fallout 3. I’m only a couple hours into it so far, but it’s pretty impressive so far. A lot of people thought it was a big risk to resurrect an old series from a different gameplay era with a fanatic fanbase and give it to a company with no connection to the original teams, but Bethesda seems to have pulled it off. It retains a lot of the same atmosphere of the originals while updating the gameplay without making it too much of an Oblivion clone.

I’m going with a high-INT character for dialogue options and focusing on energy weapons, and combat has been challenging so far, with a lot of scrimping for ammo. I’ve gone to the nearby town of Megaton and made a bit of cash though, so hopefully I can upgrade my equipment soon.

I haven’t run across too many quests yet, but one of the ones I have is interesting in that I had to choose to either disarm a bomb in the middle of the town, or set it off myself, depending on whether I wanted to help the sheriff or some shady figure in the bar. But then I went and told the sheriff about the shady guy’s request, he ran off to arrest him, got shot in the back while doing so, and then I wasted the shady guy. I’m not sure if that was the ideal outcome, but hey, free guns and ammo off both their bodies!

Unfortunately my gaming box has been hijacked to take over my server roles temporarily, so I may have to shelve it for a little while longer…

She Won’t Look A Day Over 300

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I resumed doing the pirate’s errand in Fable 2 tonight, and of course it was a trick and I wound up sacrificing a bit of my age. It looks like this is a point of no return before the end though, so I started doing side quests again.

I popped into the Collector’s Edition dungeon, but it wasn’t too special. Just a long trip through it to get a weapon weaker than the one I already had. There was a fun little diversion to beat up an undead pirate and steal his loot. A “priest” from the Temple Of Benevolent Yokels (seriously) tricked me into stealing some stuff, I rescued an adventurer for his overbearing grandmother, took out a fortress of bandits hired to assassinate me, bought Garth’s tower and did the strange “nightmare” quest associated with it, and rescued Max and Sam from yet another escapade of theirs.

And now I’m in the middle of helping some pathetic loner resurrect Lady Gray, from the first Fable, even though she’s been dead for hundreds of years. I can’t remember if I was the one who killed her or not…

Vainest Pirate Ever

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I worked some more on collecting keys and smashing gargoyles in Fable 2 tonight, and I think I’ve got most of them except for the ones in areas I haven’t reached or areas blocked-off until later.

There wasn’t much else to do, so I finally headed off to find the third hero, a pirate in the town of Bloodstone, and I had to go through the new area of Wraithmarsh to get there. I encountered Banshees there for the first time, but they weren’t too tough; their only gimmick is that you have to kill their summoned pets before you can damage the banshee herself. I reached the town, and the hero turned out to be an arrogant ass who wants me to do a suspiciously easy favour for him before he’ll help me.

Some other sidequests back in the previous regions also opened up once I reached there, including areas I’ll be able to find more keys and gargoyles in, but those will wait until after I finish dealing with this guy.

But They Still Won’t Make Me Mayor

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Before heading off to the spire in Fable 2 tonight, I took advantage of a little tip and did some trading in master weapons for a while. You can make a lot of money that way if you can find a good sale and another shop that buys high, and before long I had enough to buy most of the shops in Bowerstone. I now pull in over 7000 gold every 5 minutes, instead of the previous 400-ish.

After that detour it was time for the spire, which actually turned out to be mostly a series of morality tests. I resisted, causing me to lose xp but retain my good standing, and it then ended with a series of fights, hobbled by having a weaker weapon and only a few potions instead of my usual equipment.

Upon returning from the spire, 10 years had passed and a lot of things had changed: my daughter had grown up, some areas had expanded and Westcliff was completely different, and some new quests were available. I did a bunch of the side quests, including one where a cross-dresser tried to get me eaten by Hobbes, and next time I’ll pick up on the main quest again. From what I’ve heard, I’m fairly close to the end now.